PP CS5: space bar delayed response? at DVinfo.net

Drew Mandac · May 11th, 2010, 04:17 PM

Hi,
I've been using Premiere for 6 years, and I'm really enjoying the apparent stability improvements with CS5 (it's still too early to tell). But one annoying thing that I'm experiencing is the delayed response between hitting the space bar and the playback of the sequence. Sometimes, Premiere would even play a split second of the audio and then stop for several seconds before finally playing. I've had CS4 on this same computer for a couple years and have not seen this long delay.

Anyone else seeing this and know of a fix?

Thanks,
Drew

Adam Gold · May 12th, 2010, 11:47 AM

Sounds like a CPU or disk problem. Specs?

Drew Mandac · May 12th, 2010, 12:17 PM

Thanks for the reply Adam.

Core2quad
8Gb RAM
ATI Radeon 4850
2Tb RAID0 (WD caviar black HDs)
Windows 7 64-bit

CS3 and CS4 are also on this computer and they don't exhibit the same space bar lag as CS5, so I don't think it's a hardware issue. I'm just editing plain old widescreen DV .avi (downconverted from my HDV camera).

Adam Gold · May 12th, 2010, 01:27 PM

Yeah, your HW looks pretty good, but remember that even though it has the MPE for better playback, CS5 is likely to be hugely more complicated than the prior releases, so that could have an effect. Also, it's been noted that the WD Caviars tend to go into sleep mode and take a while to wake up (which is why they're not good for RAIDs), and that might be an issue.

Also, maybe something is corrupt or screwy with this project. Try creating a new one and importing this one into it -- sometimes that helps random unidentifiable issues. Although last time I had a similar playback issue in CS3, this remedy did nothing at all.

Todd Clark · May 12th, 2010, 02:18 PM

"it's been noted that the WD Caviars tend to go into sleep mode and take a while to wake up"

Is there a way to turn that off? Keep it from going into sleep mode?

Bo Skelmose · May 12th, 2010, 02:29 PM

Ahh. I had problems with my system after building a raid with WD black caviar disks. If I dont edit for half an hour or so Premiere crashes when I try to use it again - maybe this could be why. I just do not understand that the sleep mode are built in the disks - I have considerd it was in the bios of the Highpoint raid controller or in windows..

Steve Kalle · May 12th, 2010, 03:30 PM

Drew, I am experiencing the same delay with the space bar, but only when I add an avchd 1080 60i and set it to deinterlace because the sequence is 1080 30p. I also have 3 XDCAM EX 1080 30p layers with several effects on each. I noticed that as soon as I set the avchd to deinterlace, my CPU maxes out and I have the space bar delay.

Drew Mandac · May 12th, 2010, 03:57 PM

@ Adam, Todd & Bo - Yup as I'm reading up more and more about the WD Caviar Black HDs I'm seeing that at least one tech review did not recommend them for RAID0 due to lackluster performance (as single drives, they're apparently awesome). Although I doubt in my case it's due to a sleep mode issue, because I'm actively accessing the RAID as I'm scrubbing/editing. It's just the "hit space bar to play" that has this unusual delay. I will try to do a project trim to a single drive and check the trimmed project to see if it has the same delay.

@Steve - Your delay seems more understandable as being CPU intensive. In my case, I have a single 29.97 DV .avi layer and 2 audio tracks...totally plain vanilla, and I'm dumbfounded.

Adam Gold · May 12th, 2010, 05:04 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Todd Clark

Quote:

it's been noted that the WD Caviars tend to go into sleep mode and take a while to wake up

Is there a way to turn that off? Keep it from going into sleep mode?

Nope, and that's what has people going crazy. This is apparently true for all Caviar colors, and for all RAID levels.

Ann Bens · May 12th, 2010, 06:06 PM

Not all, i have WD caviar in RAID0 and no delay in CS5 for all media.

Drew Mandac · May 13th, 2010, 02:09 AM

OK I looked into my issue more and now think it may be RAID/HD related. The newer WD Caviars are NOT suitable for RAID (Google "WDTLER" - Western Digital Time Limit Error Recovery). WD created a utility that allowed the user to enable the TLER setting (which is necessary for RAID operation) on the Caviar HDs. But then pulled the utility and permanently set the newer Caviars to have TLER disabled...basically forcing you to purchase their higher end enterprise drives if you want to do RAID.

Read more here:
Time-Limited Error Recovery - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I tried to run the WDTLER utility to enable my drives, but it failed with an error (meaning, I have one of the newer drives that cannot be TLER enabled). So I'm in the process of copying my files off of the RAID and will use these Caviar Black HDs for archiving only. Lesson learned.

Symptom: Aside from the strange space bar delay, I had a problem where my RAID drive would randomly disappear...gone from My Computer. A reboot would bring it back.

Bo Skelmose · May 13th, 2010, 04:09 AM

Never realized that there was a difference in disks I choose for the RAID system. I thougt that any fast disk could be used. When I find out which disk I can use - my caviar's would go to archiving stuff. To bad as the 12 +8 disks are quite expensive. Just realized that I have put WD disks in another 8 disk raid system too - and it has a great lag in response too. I use Raid 5 on both systems. One with CS4 - Higpoint controller - Axio HD and one with CS5 - 3ware controller - Black Magic HD Extreme.

Steve Kalle · May 13th, 2010, 01:40 PM

Drew, your drive disappearing like that is due to this WD firmware/TLER problem.

Bo, using Raid 5 with 8 disks is really asking for trouble for 2 reasons. 1) when a drive dies in an 8 disk Raid 5 array, it will take a very long time to rebuild, and that is assuming you have a spare on hand. 2) a problem becoming more apparent as drive sizes are now so large is URE, Unrecoverable Read Error. Regular desktop drives have a URE of 1x10^14 bits. Enterprise SATA & SAS 7200rpm drives are 1x10^15 and Enterprise 10k/15k rpm are 1x10^16. URE means that a read error will occur that the drive's various error correcting functions cannot fix. A single bit read error that is part of, lets say, a 1hr long video file can cause that entire video file to be lost. Don't get me wrong, this isn't all doom and gloom because good hardware raid controllers should be able to identify that bad bit and find it among the parity data.

HOWEVER, the major issue with URE is during a Raid rebuild. During a Raid 5 rebuild, there is no extra parity data to recover from. If there is a URE during a Raid 5 rebuild, you would be looking at serious data loss.

With 8 or more drives, Raid 6 should be a minimum (or 5EE which is Areca or Adaptec)

After reading all of these articles, I switched from regular Seagate 7200.12 drives to their Constellation ES.

Here are some rather technical articles on URE. The first article is by Adapec's tech writres; so, they have no means to benefit from people buying expensive drives (URE nay-sayers claim drive manufacturers use URE to sell higher priced drives)
Storage Advisors Blog Archive Real-life RAID reliability
How to protect yourself from RAID-related Unrecoverable Read Errors (UREs) | Servers and Storage | TechRepublic.com

Bo Skelmose · May 13th, 2010, 01:54 PM

But can the lag and the crashing of Premiere be due to running Raid 5 ?
The speed of the raid system seems to be okay - would the problem with the WD Black Kaviar disks maybe be larger using Raid 5 instead of Raid 0 - or Raid 6 ?
I just checked - my WD Black Caviar disks are in the compability list of the Highpoint Raid controller. I am backing up right now but first I will try to disable the : "staggered spin up" in the bios to see if it helps. After that I will try Raid 6 and if it do not work Raid 0 - last try: buy new WD Raid edition disks....

Steve Kalle · May 14th, 2010, 11:35 AM

The lag and crashing is most likely due to the WD drives, or it could be a setting in the Highpoint controller. Staggerd spin up only deals with the computer booting up from having no power. I am not familiar with Highpoint's settings but look for something that "spins down" the drives to save power. Also look for any setting that is supposed to save power because these settings tend to spin the drives down or put them in a low power state. When I first got my Areca, I tried these power saving settings only to find that they caused problems.

May 11th, 2010, 04:17 PM	#1
Drew Mandac Regular Crew Join Date: Mar 2005 Location: Los Angeles, CA Posts: 28	PP CS5: space bar delayed response? Hi, I've been using Premiere for 6 years, and I'm really enjoying the apparent stability improvements with CS5 (it's still too early to tell). But one annoying thing that I'm experiencing is the delayed response between hitting the space bar and the playback of the sequence. Sometimes, Premiere would even play a split second of the audio and then stop for several seconds before finally playing. I've had CS4 on this same computer for a couple years and have not seen this long delay. Anyone else seeing this and know of a fix? Thanks, Drew

May 12th, 2010, 11:47 AM	#2
Adam Gold Inner Circle Join Date: Jan 2007 Location: Woodinville, WA USA Posts: 3,467	Sounds like a CPU or disk problem. Specs? __________________ "It can only be attributable to human error... This sort of thing has cropped up before, and it has always been due to human error."

May 12th, 2010, 01:27 PM	#4
Adam Gold Inner Circle Join Date: Jan 2007 Location: Woodinville, WA USA Posts: 3,467	Yeah, your HW looks pretty good, but remember that even though it has the MPE for better playback, CS5 is likely to be hugely more complicated than the prior releases, so that could have an effect. Also, it's been noted that the WD Caviars tend to go into sleep mode and take a while to wake up (which is why they're not good for RAIDs), and that might be an issue. Also, maybe something is corrupt or screwy with this project. Try creating a new one and importing this one into it -- sometimes that helps random unidentifiable issues. Although last time I had a similar playback issue in CS3, this remedy did nothing at all. __________________ "It can only be attributable to human error... This sort of thing has cropped up before, and it has always been due to human error."

May 13th, 2010, 01:54 PM	#14
Bo Skelmose Major Player Join Date: Apr 2008 Location: Denmark Posts: 495	But can the lag and the crashing of Premiere be due to running Raid 5 ? The speed of the raid system seems to be okay - would the problem with the WD Black Kaviar disks maybe be larger using Raid 5 instead of Raid 0 - or Raid 6 ? I just checked - my WD Black Caviar disks are in the compability list of the Highpoint Raid controller. I am backing up right now but first I will try to disable the : "staggered spin up" in the bios to see if it helps. After that I will try Raid 6 and if it do not work Raid 0 - last try: buy new WD Raid edition disks.... Last edited by Bo Skelmose; May 13th, 2010 at 03:01 PM.

May 12th, 2010, 12:17 PM	#3
Drew Mandac Regular Crew Join Date: Mar 2005 Location: Los Angeles, CA Posts: 28	Thanks for the reply Adam. Core2quad 8Gb RAM ATI Radeon 4850 2Tb RAID0 (WD caviar black HDs) Windows 7 64-bit CS3 and CS4 are also on this computer and they don't exhibit the same space bar lag as CS5, so I don't think it's a hardware issue. I'm just editing plain old widescreen DV .avi (downconverted from my HDV camera).

May 12th, 2010, 02:18 PM	#5
Todd Clark Regular Crew Join Date: Feb 2007 Location: Parma, Oh Posts: 172	"it's been noted that the WD Caviars tend to go into sleep mode and take a while to wake up" Is there a way to turn that off? Keep it from going into sleep mode?

May 12th, 2010, 02:29 PM	#6
Bo Skelmose Major Player Join Date: Apr 2008 Location: Denmark Posts: 495	Ahh. I had problems with my system after building a raid with WD black caviar disks. If I dont edit for half an hour or so Premiere crashes when I try to use it again - maybe this could be why. I just do not understand that the sleep mode are built in the disks - I have considerd it was in the bios of the Highpoint raid controller or in windows..

May 12th, 2010, 03:30 PM	#7
Steve Kalle Trustee Join Date: Aug 2009 Location: Chicago, IL Posts: 1,554	Drew, I am experiencing the same delay with the space bar, but only when I add an avchd 1080 60i and set it to deinterlace because the sequence is 1080 30p. I also have 3 XDCAM EX 1080 30p layers with several effects on each. I noticed that as soon as I set the avchd to deinterlace, my CPU maxes out and I have the space bar delay.

May 12th, 2010, 03:57 PM	#8
Drew Mandac Regular Crew Join Date: Mar 2005 Location: Los Angeles, CA Posts: 28	@ Adam, Todd & Bo - Yup as I'm reading up more and more about the WD Caviar Black HDs I'm seeing that at least one tech review did not recommend them for RAID0 due to lackluster performance (as single drives, they're apparently awesome). Although I doubt in my case it's due to a sleep mode issue, because I'm actively accessing the RAID as I'm scrubbing/editing. It's just the "hit space bar to play" that has this unusual delay. I will try to do a project trim to a single drive and check the trimmed project to see if it has the same delay. @Steve - Your delay seems more understandable as being CPU intensive. In my case, I have a single 29.97 DV .avi layer and 2 audio tracks...totally plain vanilla, and I'm dumbfounded.

May 12th, 2010, 06:06 PM	#10
Ann Bens Major Player Join Date: Jun 2007 Location: The Netherlands Posts: 710	Not all, i have WD caviar in RAID0 and no delay in CS5 for all media.

May 13th, 2010, 02:09 AM	#11
Drew Mandac Regular Crew Join Date: Mar 2005 Location: Los Angeles, CA Posts: 28	OK I looked into my issue more and now think it may be RAID/HD related. The newer WD Caviars are NOT suitable for RAID (Google "WDTLER" - Western Digital Time Limit Error Recovery). WD created a utility that allowed the user to enable the TLER setting (which is necessary for RAID operation) on the Caviar HDs. But then pulled the utility and permanently set the newer Caviars to have TLER disabled...basically forcing you to purchase their higher end enterprise drives if you want to do RAID. Read more here: Time-Limited Error Recovery - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia I tried to run the WDTLER utility to enable my drives, but it failed with an error (meaning, I have one of the newer drives that cannot be TLER enabled). So I'm in the process of copying my files off of the RAID and will use these Caviar Black HDs for archiving only. Lesson learned. Symptom: Aside from the strange space bar delay, I had a problem where my RAID drive would randomly disappear...gone from My Computer. A reboot would bring it back.

May 13th, 2010, 04:09 AM	#12
Bo Skelmose Major Player Join Date: Apr 2008 Location: Denmark Posts: 495	Never realized that there was a difference in disks I choose for the RAID system. I thougt that any fast disk could be used. When I find out which disk I can use - my caviar's would go to archiving stuff. To bad as the 12 +8 disks are quite expensive. Just realized that I have put WD disks in another 8 disk raid system too - and it has a great lag in response too. I use Raid 5 on both systems. One with CS4 - Higpoint controller - Axio HD and one with CS5 - 3ware controller - Black Magic HD Extreme.

May 13th, 2010, 01:40 PM	#13
Steve Kalle Trustee Join Date: Aug 2009 Location: Chicago, IL Posts: 1,554	Drew, your drive disappearing like that is due to this WD firmware/TLER problem. Bo, using Raid 5 with 8 disks is really asking for trouble for 2 reasons. 1) when a drive dies in an 8 disk Raid 5 array, it will take a very long time to rebuild, and that is assuming you have a spare on hand. 2) a problem becoming more apparent as drive sizes are now so large is URE, Unrecoverable Read Error. Regular desktop drives have a URE of 1x10^14 bits. Enterprise SATA & SAS 7200rpm drives are 1x10^15 and Enterprise 10k/15k rpm are 1x10^16. URE means that a read error will occur that the drive's various error correcting functions cannot fix. A single bit read error that is part of, lets say, a 1hr long video file can cause that entire video file to be lost. Don't get me wrong, this isn't all doom and gloom because good hardware raid controllers should be able to identify that bad bit and find it among the parity data. HOWEVER, the major issue with URE is during a Raid rebuild. During a Raid 5 rebuild, there is no extra parity data to recover from. If there is a URE during a Raid 5 rebuild, you would be looking at serious data loss. With 8 or more drives, Raid 6 should be a minimum (or 5EE which is Areca or Adaptec) After reading all of these articles, I switched from regular Seagate 7200.12 drives to their Constellation ES. Here are some rather technical articles on URE. The first article is by Adapec's tech writres; so, they have no means to benefit from people buying expensive drives (URE nay-sayers claim drive manufacturers use URE to sell higher priced drives) Storage Advisors Blog Archive Real-life RAID reliability How to protect yourself from RAID-related Unrecoverable Read Errors (UREs) \| Servers and Storage \| TechRepublic.com

May 14th, 2010, 11:35 AM	#15
Steve Kalle Trustee Join Date: Aug 2009 Location: Chicago, IL Posts: 1,554	The lag and crashing is most likely due to the WD drives, or it could be a setting in the Highpoint controller. Staggerd spin up only deals with the computer booting up from having no power. I am not familiar with Highpoint's settings but look for something that "spins down" the drives to save power. Also look for any setting that is supposed to save power because these settings tend to spin the drives down or put them in a low power state. When I first got my Areca, I tried these power saving settings only to find that they caused problems.