Canon 7D video clips in CS5 to SLOW ??

[George D. Dodge]

When editing video clips from the Canon 7D in Adobe CS5, I have noticed that when trying to speed through the clip it will sometimes skip or stall to the point where you cannot see the progression of the scene.

Am I doing something wrong? Is the data too big for CS5 to handle at that rate?

It did not do this when I was practicing with low-res video from a little camcorder. But, some of these 7D clips are rather long, and watching them in normal time is way to time consuming, etc.

It is not the computer, because it is a custom built, brand new PC with more than enough power and RAM.

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks.

[Harm Millaard]

This is a i7-980X overclocked to around 4.0 GHz or higher with 24 GB DDR3-1600 memory and at least a separate Velociraptor or SSD for OS & programs plus at least two separate 2 disk raid0 arrays or better and includes a GTX 480 video card?

You know that a new custom built PC means nothing. It can be a dual core AMD with 4 GB memory with a single partitioned hard disk at 5400 RPM, That kind of system is best used as a doorstop.

[Adam Gold]

George, without knowing your system specs we cannot possibly know if you are correct in assuming you don't have a hardware problem. As Harm very accurately points out, that a system is new and custom built does not mean it has sufficient horsepower to do what you want it to, especially when you are dealing with Premiere and unconventional formats.

If you provide more info we can help more. From the symptoms you describe, it really sounds like it is in fact a hardware problem because unless your system is identical to or better than the first one Harm described above, you will have a hard time with DSLR and AVCHD footage in Premiere, which isn't really designed for it.

[George D. Dodge]

Thank you Adam,

These are the specs:

The motherboard is an Intel S5620, with 1 Xeon 5620 processor, 12 GB of memory, two 1TB drives, and an Nvidia FX380 video card.

That's all I know.

[Harm Millaard]

That motherboard is a pretty decent phone, according to Google. It is not an Intel mobo.

Anyway, with that phone, CPU, lousy video card and disk setup it is below realistic requirements for the material you are using, so it is no wonder you have hiccups.

[George D. Dodge]

Phone ?? What phone?

[Harm Millaard]

The S5620.

[George D. Dodge]

Ya know, this computer was originally built to handle video from the RED-One according to the specs I was given by them and other RED users, "in the know". Even if I have to down-res the clips to do the editing, this system is supposed to work fine.

If you feel that it will NOT be able to handle video like that, please let me know, and tell me EXACTLY why, and EXACTLY what it would need to allow me to do that kind of work. I would then pass the info on to my PC expert and he can do the required additions to my PC.

May I also, respectfully, ask how you "know", and what experience you've had?

Thanks for your help.

[Harm Millaard]

Consider me the 'New Kid on the Block'. I'm pretty new to this all and still trying to get to grips with all this stuff. I mean, I wans't even around when the ENIAC was spurring along and things appear to move along so fast, it is pretty daunting to even try to keep up.

In the old days of the IBM-370 and DEC-2060, or even Prime and the PDP-11, things were pretty straightforward. You had a bunch of punch cards and heaven forbid that you dropped them.

Most of the time I'm just blabbering without really knowing what I'm talking about. What can you expect without any reasonable experience, what is 40 years in computers, a severely limited experience in programming with only RPG, Cobol, Fortran, Basic, APL, Pascal, J, C, Delphi and assembly worth today? To make matters even worse, my experience with LE and NLE is even worse, less than 30 years.

To top it off, the number of beta programs I'm invited to participate in, is extremely small, actually less than 20, but that probably has to be caused by my lack of experience.

The moral of the story, don't take me too seriously. I may just be an impostor. Maybe with more experience and expertise, I can offer more.

For the moment, your systems performance is not likely to score better than around 700+ seconds on this PPBM5 Benchmark

[Adam Gold]

To get back on track a little, I think your issues are a combination of your hardware, your software and your cam. I'm not a DSLR expert but it appears that the 7D shoots H.264 MOV video, which Premiere isn't really designed to do well, and even if it was, it's hard on any PC, and while yours isn't bad, it's not up to the task of decoding this on the fly, at least not well.

My experience with Premiere is that if you give it the right hardware it does a pretty good job with the more conventional formats, that is, DV AVI and HDV. AVCHD, not so much: it still struggles to keep up on all but the highest horsepower systems.

You will get somewhat smoother playback if you go to your source and preview windows and adjust playback resolution to 1/2 or even 1/4. You would also see some benefit by upgrading to a CUDA enabled card and doing the "hack" to enable MPE realtime hardware acceleration (see many related threads on this forum). You could also consider Cineform to transcode your footage into larger files that are less compressed and easier for your CPU to handle. They have a forum right below this one where you can learn all you ever wanted to know about Cineform products and what they do.

I have two systems that could be considered rocket ships (or at least jet fighters) and they both struggle with AVCHD real time playback, although rendering and output are stunning.

The apparent paradox -- that your system was ostensibly designed to handle RED footage but chokes on simple MOV stuff from a 7D -- is probably because RED files are huge and suffer from less compression and are therefore less processor intensive in terms of trying to decode on the fly, while AVCHD/MOV files are just the opposite -- hugely compressed and very taxing on even the best CPUs.

And George, just as a sidenote: I know you're new here, but Harm is probably the single most knowledgeable guy about these issues anywhere on these forums, even though his sense of humor may not be for everyone. I'd take his advice seriously.

[Steve Kalle]

I find it amusing that Harm considers his PC 'slow' and essentially 'crap' when its only 266MHz slower than an i7 920 and yet, he tells everyone to get an i7 920 (now 930). Plus, the GPU does not decode so that does not make a difference.

FYI, R3D 4k is very taxing because it requires Debayering in addition to being 8 megapixels.

George, sorry to say, but your PC guy didn't help if what you typed is correct. The FX380 is anemic and needs to be swapped with a GTX 460 ($200) so you can use the hack and enable hardware acceleration.

[Harm Millaard]

Steve,

Keep in mind 2.4 GHz versus 3.8+ GHz. Keep in mind DDR3-1066 versus 1600+.

I find it amusing that you disregard those essential issues, but it explains a lot.

[Steve Kalle]

Keep in mind that most people do NOT overclock their i7 computers (PC & Mac) and have no problem editing video.

The ram speed has NOTHING to do with playback or scrubbing through the timeline.

My testing of various video cards was done on a stock i7 920 with NO overclocking and I had no problem with 3 layers of AVCHD running at full resolution. And this was with DDR3-1600 ram running at 1066.