XF300 & Premiere CS5

[Matthew Petersen]

We're just about to move to XF300's from our XLH1's that are nearing end of life.

I've been reading some issues people are having over on the Adobe Premiere CS5 forum and I just wanted to work out if these issues are being experienced by all Premiere users or just some. The issue seems to be that when you have a number of clips on the timeline, the RAM gets used up by the project till the machine needs to swap out, causing a massive slowdown in all editing operations including scrubbing.

I'd like to hear from anyone who is a) having these problems or b) not having any problems at all.

A trascoding work-around has been suggested on the Adobe forum, but I'd rather not go there unless I have to.

kindest regards

Matthew P
Brisbane, Australia

[Vincent Oliver]

I have been using the XF305 with CS5 and have not noticed any slow down. I have a nVidia 470 card installed which employs the Mercury Playback Engine using Cuda, this really speeds up a work flow.

[Syeed Ali]

I've got the RAM problem.

Inported a load of MXF files and all of my 12GB ram gets used up. Wasted the whole morning trying to sort it out.

Some links:

Adobe Forums: canon XF300, Premiere CS5 use a huge...

Adobe Forums: Canon MXF files and Adobe Premiere Pro...

[Vincent Oliver]

I am working with 8gb of RAM, the nVidia card has 1.2gb on-board.

I shot a one hour production using the XF305 as my B camera and a Sony EX3 as my A camera. Both sets of clips were loaded into the timeline and a Multi Camera setup was used from within Premiere. The whole process of editing two cameras footage worked in real time, no hangs ups or out of memory messages.

I presume you have all the latest updates installed and are using the 64bit version.

As a side note, I have a dual boot system with a separate hard drive for my video editing applications, this does not have anything else on it, i.e. no Anti Virus or Firewall software, just Windows 7 64bit and Adobe video applications, Encore, After Effects etc. I do not use this to connect to the internet, other than updating the software.

[Syeed Ali]

64bit and Premiere ver 5.0.3. but running it from the C drive.

Also have Nvidia GeForce GTX 470 with 1.2GB ram.

Going to convert all the MXF files to cineform avi files and do it that way. Didn't expect so much aggravation.

[Vincent Oliver]

Do you have your Temp files on the same drive as your MXF files. I use a dedicated drive for all my scratch data

[Syeed Ali]

No, they are on different drives.

Converted everything to cineform avi and it's all working fine in CS5. Looks like I'm stuck with cineform for the time being.

[Matthew Petersen]

This is interesting that some people are seeing the bug and some are not.

Syeed, are you using Mercury Hardware playback?

Also, is there a "threshold" where this bug arises, or do you see the issue as soon as you put one clip on the timeline?

Matthew

[Syeed Ali]

Hi Matthew,

Just did a few tests.

Created a new project in HDV format.

Merfcury playback GPU

Sequence preset = Canon XF MPEG2 1080i 25 (50i)

Below is the amount of ram (GB) used for various tasks.

Computer idling with CS5 not started: 2.10 GB

CS5 opened: 2.34GB

-----------------------------

Import an 85.9mb MXF file: 2.50 GB

Play file in timeline: 3.43 GB and then stable at same figure

---------------------------

Import folder containg 25.7 GB MXF and associated files: 7.65 GB

Closed CS5 : goes down to 2.17 GB

Open CS5 again: 2.37 GB

Open project contaning the importede files and once all media loaded: 6.25GB

In comparison....

Project with over 50GB cineform AVI files used only 3.07 GB of ram, plus loaded all media files a lot faster than the MXF one.

-------------------------------------------------

Load 20 minutes of footage on timeline

- MXF files = 8.92 GB
- Avi files = 4.17 GB


Load 1 hour16 minutes of footage on timeline

- MXF files = 9.97 GB
- Avi files = 4.52 GB

---------------------------------------------------

Close and reopne MXF project with 1 hour 16 minutes footage = 8.75GB

---------------------------------------------------


In summary, the MXF files are basically unusable on my machine. The more media I load up, the higher the ram usage and with only 12GB of ram I'm not going to get much done.

In comparison, the cineform avi files are considerably faster to load up and uses significantly less ram.

If I've done something wrong along the way, then please tell em what it is. As it stands, I'm using Cineform NeoHD to convert everything.

Hope the above helps.

PS. I should be receiving a PNY NVIDIA QUADRO 4000 tomorrow. At the moment I have a GeForce GTX 470.

[Matthew Petersen]

Syeed, thanks for going to so much trouble to do that testing. It seems you may have a found a good compromise workflow for now. Others on the Adobe forum are suggesting using Adobe Media Encoder to convert the files to a P2 format for editing.

It certainly seems there's a memory leak in there somewhere, either in Premiere or in the codec that I presume Canon has supplied to Adobe for bundling in.

Lets hope it gets sorted in the next release. From what I've read and seen, the XF300/305 is going to be a popular camera, especially if Canon don't replace the XLH1's at NAB this year.

Thanks again.

Matthew P

[Andy Solaini]

I'm getting performance issues with CS5 like those the OP mentioned.

Is there anything other than Cineform that I can convert the MXF files to to speed things up for the time being? I can't justify $500 for Neo HD just to convert some files!

[Charles W. Hull]

I see the same results as Syeed. I usually use Cineform in my workflow so I hadn't noticed this until now. Andy, you might try converting to avi with Lagarith; it is free and has a good reputation.

[Matthew Petersen]

Andy, another option is to use the Adobe Media Encoder to convert to P2. You can find some help on that over on the Adobe premiere forum. Look further up this thread to the links that Syeed has posted and read those threads. You might find the workflow right for you in there.

MP

[Syeed Ali]

I woke up this morning and thought perhap I should have used the Canon XF Utility software to transfer the files rather than just drag and drop.

Unfortunatly, that doesn't work either.

However, I did find that the Canon utility just imports the MXF files so I don't have to manually drag/drop each MXF files. It's speeded up my work quite a bit.

[Brett Delmage]

Originally Posted by Matthew Petersen

We're just about to move to XF300's from our XLH1's that are nearing end of life.

I've been reading some issues people are having over on the Adobe Premiere CS5 forum and I just wanted to work out if these issues are being experienced by all Premiere users or just some. The issue seems to be that when you have a number of clips on the timeline, the RAM gets used up by the project till the machine needs to swap out, causing a massive slowdown in all editing operations including scrubbing.

I'd like to hear from anyone who is a) having these problems or b) not having any problems at all."

Hi Matthew,

Heh, I would be one of those posters in Adobe forums. I tend to hang in this forum more than there, though.

It seems not to have been a problem lately. I wonder if Adobe made a minor tweak in one of the point-releases of CS5. Or if something I cannot put my finger on changed?

Or maybe there was something in my computer HW as well, although I can't imagine what. My system became more and more unreliable and crashy in January and I had to replace it quickly.

I'm using CS5 with an Nvidia 470 video card and MPE. I've been running CS5 on an ASUS P8P67 motherboard with Sandy Bridge i7-2600K CPU with 16GB RAM since then (I had 12 GB when I reported the problem). Now, it just works, quickly and reliably. I enjoy editing again. :-)

(too bad Intel declared a bug on the SATA chip on that motherboard a week after I bought it, but ASUS is being really decent with their customers about a hassle-free exchange)

Brett