Tips for increasing performance with Premiere Pro CS3

[Tim Bickford]

I just upgraded my PC to Vista 64bit Ultra. I have a ASUS P6T Deluxe mother board with Core i7-920 2.66GHz Intel processor. I am also running 12 Gig of DDR3 ram, four 250GB Serial ATA II 7200RPM hard drives configured for RAID 10 and a ATI FireGl V7100 PCI Express 256MD DDR3 Video Card .

I'm editing 1440x1080 Cineform HD avi files (originally shot with Canon XL H1).

My question is..... How can I increase the performace of Premiere Pro CS3? I would like to see faster render times and encoding (i.e. H.264). Does anyone have any recomendations?

Thanks in advance.

[Rich Perry]

Hi Tim,

I saw your other post - It sounds like you have a pretty fast system already. How is your pagefile set and what drive is it on? I have mine on a raid 0 mirror (seperate logical drive for video). I also only have it set for 512 MB, fixed, weather or not that actually works any better or encourages the system to use more RAM I don't know. For me Premier does not use more than about 2 GB of Ram even though I have 8 GB, the system all together runs at about 4 GB for the most part. I disabled my pagefile completly as a test and it seems to run fine, but from what I have read it's better to have a small one allocated as some app's need one. If your system is already tweaked out I am not sure you can get any faster speed, perhaps fast fiber drives?

I am actually editing video from 2 external E-SATA enclosures (BlacX) with 7.5k drives and in speed test comparisons I found that write speeds were almost as fast to them as they were to my internal raid 0 volume, which was a suprise. Read speeds are 30 mb/s slower however.


E-SATA DRIVE (non raid)
(Write) 80.3 MB/S
(Read) 73.8 MB/S
(seek) 3.1 ms

INTERNAL RAID 0
(Write) 87.9 MB/S
(Read) 102.4 MB/S
(seek) 7.5 ms


I would be interested to know if anyone out there knows how to force Premier or Vista 64 to use more memory, I have tried many pagefile tweeks and none really seem to make a difference?

Anyone else wuth any ground breaking tweaks?

[Tim Bickford]

Rich,

I'm not really a systems guy. I built my PC on very limited PC knowledge.

Vista is presently managing my virtual memory. I have 12 gig of ram. I have four 250 Gig hard drives set up in Raid 10. Therefore, call it 500 Gig of total hard drive space. I partitioned 100 gig for OS and software (C:Drive) and the balance is for data (H:Drive). I'm really unsure what I should set the virtual memory to. Should I set it up for both drives??? What do I set them too?>

I'm surprised about the ESATA speed. What RPM internal drives are you using? 7200??

The only issue that I am having so far with P-Pro CS3 and Vista 64 is with a plug in from NEAT VIDEO called "Reduce Noise". I've been working with tech support on it.

Thanks for responding.

Tim

[Rich Perry]

Tim,

You could try some tests, render a file with the page file as it is now, ie. managed by Vista. Then try with a small pagefile 512 MB on your H: drive (set no page file on c) make the max and min the same (512 MB), save and reboot the system. Also perhaps try with no page file at all, you have 12 GB, you might not even need a pagefile unless an app is screaming for one in which case it will crash.

I read abou the new "Readyboost" feature in Vista but have not had a chance to try it yet, it involves using a fast flash drive as an intermediate paging device for I/O from memory, stuff that would normally get paged to disk - that I have read can be 10x faster for i/o on smaller files. However might be a mute point with the amount of RAM you have and if you turn off the pagefile. Here is information on Readyboost:

Tom Archer's Blog : ReadyBoost Q&A

I also really reccomend running CCcleaner every once in a while:
CCleaner - Builds

It will clean out old tmp files and bad registry keys that are left over from old installs. I have been using it and had no issues, it should free some system resources. Also delete all programs you don't need, set your startup programs to be minimal - type msconfig, in start / run. Go to startup and uncheck anything does not need to run at start up.

LAst of all degrag your drives often. I don't use any other software other than editing related. I have no firewall / security center or anti virus running - just bare bones O/S and edit tools. I use a second boot drive for an XP installation that I can use for all my office and email stuff. Hope that helps!

If anyone has tried or more information on Vista "readyboost", please let us know -

[Tripp Woelfel]

Originally Posted by Tim Bickford

I have four 250 Gig hard drives set up in Raid 10. Therefore, call it 500 Gig of total hard drive space. I partitioned 100 gig for OS and software (C:Drive) and the balance is for data (H:Drive).

You will get better performance if you split up your RAID. You should use two spindles for one RAID volume and the other two for a second. The reason for this is that you could end up going to the same physical drive at the same time for both a system function and a data function. This will slow you down. How much depends upon how smart your RAID is. A good one will take scenarios like this into account and split the reads or writes, but that takes resources and is a configuration best left to non-mobo RAID systems.

If yours is a mobo RAID, you could get out from under this by upgrading two of the drives to .5TB and have the same usable space for data when configured RAID 1.

This advice comes from many years of working for disk and RAID (both software and hardware) companies. All of them would recommend against configuring multiple logical drives (like your C: and H: drives) on the same physical spindles.

[Tim Bickford]

Boy... now you guys are way over my head.

Tripp, are you suggesting that I could partition my drives into 4 different partitions (i.e. C: D: E: F:)? Then perhaps configure my premiere scratch disk assignments to these drives?

I have my OS set up on my C: Partition (100 Gig) and my Data on my H: Partition (379 Gig) In your opinion, if I were to leave things as is, would there be any benefit redefining my P-Pro project scratch disks? If so... do you have any suggestions? Presently all scratch disks are set for my project drive (i.e. H: drive).

I'm worried that re-partitioning the drives into smaller segments may start to infringe on my data storage space.

Again... thanks to both of you for your comments.

Tim B.

[Harm Millaard]

Tripp is saying that one should never use partitioning. That is a practice from the last century when storage was extremely expensive, but makes no sense at all with current storage prices. Partitioning will only deteriorate performance without any gain. It is much better to add a couple of disks to your system.

Best performance is achieved when you have different physical disks for different tasks, so one for OS and programs, one for media, one for page file and miscellaneous, one for audio, one for renders, one for projects, one for exports, etc.

A second point for improvement is using a dedicated raid controller instead of the one on the mobo with its limited capabilities.

Finally, a remark about Perry's page file. It makes no sense in defining your page file too small, like the 512 MB Perry uses. Better set it to what is generally accepted as best practice, being 1.5 times available RAM, so on a 8 GB machine, define a 12 GB page file, or at least to 8 GB. With large storage capacities it makes no sense to behave as penny wise, pound foolish. With editing it is no big deal to exceed 512 MB and then you will suffer greatly in performance.

[Roger Wilson]

Please keep in mind that Premier Pro CS3/CS4 are 32-bit applications, not 64-bit. Therefore, the most amount of memory Windows (Vista or XP) will give them is about 3 GB, regardless of the amount of memory installed in your PC.

The additional memory would help with running multiple applications at the same time, since each application will get its own memory space.

Hope this helps,
Roger

[Adam Gold]

Tripp and Harm are both right. Adobe specifically says not to partition a drive into virtual disks because not only will it not help, it will degrade performance for exactly the reasons Tripp listed.

Roger is partly right. While this is true for CS3, apparently the latest update of CS4 (4.0.1), while still a 32-bit app, can spawn multiple processes, each of which could use a full 4GB on a 64-bit system with a 64-bit OS, up to the system's maximum. At least according to Adobe. Don't know how well it works.

[Steve Oakley]

thats correct. also AE dynamic link clips will run what is basically the AE render engine to render those clips. in CS4 with multiprocessor support, you could easily max your machine out.

now if you built your own machine, did you tweak out the ram timing in bios ? this can make a big difference in performance. most mobo's will run ram below its rated speed for safety. go and check that your mobo is using the speed your ram is set to run at. this isn't OC'ing per se, just making the parts run at their rated speed. sometimes you need to also tweak up the RAM voltage .1 or .2 volts... which is fine. don't be jacking it up beyond .5V to keep the machine stable and running

I also would not be messing around the the VM settings. there is little if anything to be gained, but much to be lost if you get it wrong and destabilzed your system. better to see your hardware is running full tilt first.

[Rich Perry]

It might be and idea to split the raid 10. I am have 2 drives for my O/S in a raid 0 and 2 additional drives for my main video edit drive as raid 0 also. It's fast but the danger of course is losing data when a drive fails, it's a risk but works for me (I have the O/S drive ghosted for quick recovery). As far as the page file goes, I have not had any issues with 512 MB setting. In testing the system seems more responsive when under heavy load, perhaps because more system processes are being placed in RAM. There are several schools of thought on this. I may try and conduct some testing with different pagefile configurations and report back. I never seem to get CS3 to use any more than about 2 GB of memory.

[Tripp Woelfel]

Originally Posted by Rich Perry

I never seem to get CS3 to use any more than about 2 GB of memory.

You won't. It's all CS3 is designed to use. I've read of some tweaks that can be made but I've never tried them. I'm not sure if CS4 changes that, even though it's only 32 bit for most or all of the apps. One or more might have been rewritten for 64 bit, but I have no definitive support for that contention.