HDV lag in Premiere

[Dustin Alcock]

I shot a music video but finding out quickly I'm not able to work on it.

Standard video projects work great, perfect playback and everything however...I've started a new HDV project and have massive lag and frame skipping.

After I capture the video, I've played it back in VLC Player and Media Player with out any problems. Once it's imported into Premiere CS4 that's when it starts to lag, small files (20MB) and large files (12GB).

Footage Information:
-Shot in HDV 30p

Sequence Information:
-HDV 1080p preset (go to general and tried to switch it to 1080i as well for the Canon HV30 format)

Computer Specs:
-XP Pro SP2 32bit (just reinstalled a month ago, clean system)
-AMD 64 X2 Dual Core 3800+
-2GB Ram
-Video project on separate hard drive
-All background applications closed.
-No Wireless
-M-Audio Delta 44 audio card
-NVidia 8600GTS

Thanks guys.

[Tripp Woelfel]

It sounds like you might have a mismatch between the clips and the project you have them in. Do you have a red bar near the top of the timeline window? If you do, that means Premier needs to render the video in the timeline and that the video clips and the project settings do not match.

Keep in mind that you cannot change many of the project settings after it's been created.

There's a lot more overhead running Premier than VLC which needs to do nothing more than play back video. Your system seems to be a bit borderline for HDV, although I have been able to play HDV in Premier on a laptop with similar specs without issue. Have you implemented all of the system optimization techniques outlined in Adobe's knowledgebase articles? They do work and will make a difference.

[Dustin Alcock]

I've spent the last couple of hours cleaning and optimizing my system with no improvements. Also updated my Nvidia drivers. I've created new projects with different settings but with the same end result. If I create a 720 project though it will play almost completely smooth BUT I have to render each clip. Also the video was shot at 1920x1080 so that also causes the issue of the video being to big for the 720 project and having to scale things down...and pre render a crap load of video.

Any other suggestions?

As far as the hardware goes, what's boarderline? Just RAM? I would like to think a 3800 would be a fast enough processor.

Thanks.

Originally Posted by Tripp Woelfel

It sounds like you might have a mismatch between the clips and the project you have them in. Do you have a red bar near the top of the timeline window? If you do, that means Premier needs to render the video in the timeline and that the video clips and the project settings do not match.

Keep in mind that you cannot change many of the project settings after it's been created.

There's a lot more overhead running Premier than VLC which needs to do nothing more than play back video. Your system seems to be a bit borderline for HDV, although I have been able to play HDV in Premier on a laptop with similar specs without issue. Have you implemented all of the system optimization techniques outlined in Adobe's knowledgebase articles? They do work and will make a difference.

[Tripp Woelfel]

Originally Posted by Dustin Alcock

If I create a 720 project though it will play almost completely smooth BUT I have to render each clip.

To me, that indicated a performance problem. It can play smoother because it only has to deal with half the data. The issue could be anywhere from processor to memory to drive speed and any number of smaller issues. If you did all the Adobe perf tweaks then it might be time for some beefier hardware.

[Steve Oakley]

2G of ram is the bare minimum. 4G reccomended for HD, espeically 1080. fix should be $50

[J.J. Kim]

Without HDV projects, I almost always have either audio drop out or broken pixel line for a frame or two. Also it has massive exporting error. I have been staying all night for 2 days now to export 45 minutes play to MPEG2-DVD and it keeps crashing at similar spot toward end. I tried to re-capture, bath-capture, creating a new project and import them...
still same error. src\videoframemanipulator,cpp-563
I am now exporting 2 minutes each starting from the end. Piece by piece and I am going to put together in Encore, I guess...
Never had this kind of problem with DV widescreen projects so far.
My computer is HP d5000t with vista home prem. 64bit, interl core 2 quar @ 2.66 Ghz and 4GB Ram and 750 GB hard drive.
I am trying to avoid HDV project unless client request it to be HD size.

JJ

[Dustin Alcock]

Originally Posted by Steve Oakley

2G of ram is the bare minimum. 4G reccomended for HD, espeically 1080. fix should be $50

Actually $150 since I'm going to buy all new OCZ ram, 4GB. I'm also going to slap in my dads 8800 GT and see if that makes a difference, if so I'm going to pick up a 9800 (maybe 2 for SLI) as well. Also maybe a couple new drives for RAID 0. Goodbye tax return haha.

One thing to note though, I right clicked on the video preview and changed the video quality to automatic and it made a massive difference. I think I'm on the right track. Thanks guys.

[Dustin Alcock]

EDIT: Site gave me an error, went back and resent and it posted twice. So....ignore this one haha.

[Brian Brown]

Native HDV editing makes massive demands upon your system, due to the amount of decoding on playback. I've found that it's mostly CPU-intensive, so I doubt that extra RAM will help very much. PPro, even on my 8GB Visa 64-bit OS seldom uses more than 1GB. Open up a Task Mgr. window and check CPU usage upon playback. It's pretty intense.

To a certain degree, hard drive access can improve playback (like a striped RAID 0 setup). But truly, a quad-core Intel or i7 CPU would make HDV playback more "like buttah". Cineform will also help... but it's expen$ive.

Another thing I've found is setting the playback auto-scroll to "no scroll" seems to help a lot, since the waveform doesn't have to be continuously redrawn. YMMV, but try that first and see if it helps. Also, make your program monitor zoom more like 25% and your playback to draft quality. That should help a LOT.

EDIT: Video card specs. make very little appreciable difference to editing most things in PPro. There's a precious few GPU-enabled effects... so your tax return would be better-spent upgrading your CPU, IMHO.

HTH,
Brian Brown
BrownCow Productions

[Dustin Alcock]

Well for the price of the i7 it better play "like buttah"!!! haha. Indeed playback is taking 100% CPU. Automatic seemed to do better then draft for me though.

I'm still looking into video cards though to find one that will take some of the pressure off the CPU with the whole application acceleration. Adobe's support on a good list of cards is pathetic. The only list a few cards and of course promote the one their in on with Nvidia.

Originally Posted by Brian Brown

Native HDV editing makes massive demands upon your system, due to the amount of decoding on playback. I've found that it's mostly CPU-intensive, so I doubt that extra RAM will help very much. PPro, even on my 8GB Visa 64-bit OS seldom uses more than 1GB. Open up a Task Mgr. window and check CPU usage upon playback. It's pretty intense.

To a certain degree, hard drive access can improve playback (like a striped RAID 0 setup). But truly, a quad-core Intel or i7 CPU would make HDV playback more "like buttah". Cineform will also help... but it's expen$ive.

Another thing I've found is setting the playback auto-scroll to "no scroll" seems to help a lot, since the waveform doesn't have to be continuously redrawn. YMMV, but try that first and see if it helps. Also, make your program monitor zoom more like 25% and your playback to draft quality. That should help a LOT.

EDIT: Video card specs. make very little appreciable difference to editing most things in PPro. There's a precious few GPU-enabled effects... so your tax return would be better-spent upgrading your CPU, IMHO.

HTH,
Brian Brown
BrownCow Productions