Premiere CS5 + Big Project = SNAIL SPEEDS?

[Lloyd Ubshura]

Maybe you all can shed some light on my problem. I hope!

I have a Premiere CS5 project with 500-600 clips (MP4s from Sony EX1Rs and MOVs from 7D). I'm half way through the project and will be adding another 600 clips soon. Things are at a CRAWL now!

I'm running a blowtorch of a computer:

* liquid cooled, 6-core i7 X980 PC
* 3.8GHz overclocked
* 24GB ram
* Nvidia, GTX 480 with "hack" enabled for CS5 Mercury Playback Engine.

When I have less than 100 clips/files in the project panel, things run as expected. But the more clips I've been adding to my project the more it seems to boggle down the computer even without any of the actual files open in any sequences.

It almost seems that the mere PRESENCE of the files residing in the project seems to make it crumble to a crawl. But I have a hard time believing it could be that!

Any suggestions?

Things REALLY go south when I try to mutli-cam edit with 4 XDCAM (MP4) clips. Same when the videos are first brought in and "conforming" (whatever that is).

[Harm Millaard]

What is your disk setup?

[Lloyd Ubshura]

The main video files are sitting on a 12TB NAS (file server on a network) that gets 90-120 MBps read speeds. Write speeds seem to fluctuate between 60-90 MBps.

The scratch disks are set to local, non RAIDed drives as follows:

(1) 7200 RPM 1TB for captured video
(1) 7200 RPM 1TB for captured audio
(1) 7200 RPM 1TB for video previews
(1) 7200 RPM 500GB for audio previews. This disk also contains the OS (Windows 7).

All media cache is going onto the last drive also (the one with the OS).

[Lloyd Ubshura]

I should ask also if it is a known issue to boggle Premiere down with many files sitting in the project? If Premiere is able to handle hundreds of files (which is should), then I can rule out Premiere itself as the problem source.

[Adam Gold]

This issue has been much-discussed in this forum with prior versions of Premiere. Guess it pertains to the current version as well, although in the past it's typically manifested itself with very long project loading/opening times.

The usual advice is to break the project down into smaller chunks (i.e. one project per "reel" for a feature). This is obviously not always practical.

Multiple streams of HD video over a network connection also sounds like it could be problematic. And you should really never try to work while the files are conforming or indexing. Premiere hates that and will punish you if you try.

Can you try storing everything locally as a test?

[Lloyd Ubshura]

Grrr!!! Thanks Adam. I knew it was an issue in the past but supposedly CS5 was able to handle all this better.

I'm curious if anyone else is having this problem.

At what point do you suppose PP CS5 starts choking out? 100 clips, 50? 500? I'm surprised that it even does at this stage of the game.

[Adam Gold]

I'm surprised too, as I haven't heard this recently. I'd guess 100 or 200 is about as much as you should reasonably risk, but I suppose you could experiment a little to see...

[Robert Young]

I have a project open in CS5 right now with close to 1,000 clips, all on local drives (RAID 0) and am having no issues. These are all Cineform 1920x1080 60i .avi clips.
Project loading is brisk, and editing/previewing is quite ordinary. Seems to be a huge improvement over CS3/4. I've only got about 30 minutes of edit on the timeline so far. We'll see if things slow down as I get further out, as this was the big problem with earlier versions of Premiere.
But, so far, so good.
P.S.
Did you install the recent Pro 5.0.2 update?
Check the actual size of your project file- if it's like 15MB, no problem, if it's like 150MB, then you have the "project bloat" bug that v. 5.0.2 is supposed to fix. The "bloat" apparently causes massive slowdown like you describe.
I believe, if you do have the bloated project file, importing it into a new project is supposed to reset it properly. Might want to do a search for the detailed info on that.

[Lloyd Ubshura]

Thanks Robert! Hmm... Must be something strange on my end because it seems buggier than any other previous CS version to me.

Not quite sure what it is because we are having the issues on all 3 PCs that we have in service here.

Some of our clips are quite a bit longer than 30 minutes. When you say 30 minutes, do you mean what your final output will be or the total length of all your clips sitting in your project?

I probably have a couple hundred hours of clips sitting in the project now as most of the clips tend to be between 15-45 minutes for this particular project.

(Thanks again for the camera BTW! Loving it! I need to contact you one of these days since your settings you left in the camera are so much nicer than what I have in the other cameras.... I thought I copied yours exactly, but every time we look at them in post (side by side), your old camera seems so much sharper!... Some time when I get time... )

[Lloyd Ubshura]

Something else to throw out there. When I have very few files in the project, things are snappy. Mercury Playback is smoking fast.

But throw in another 30 clips and things STILL work great UNTIL I click outside of Premiere to anything else (Firefox, desktop, Windows calculator). When I try to come back I get the hourglass-equivalent in W7. The more files I have, the longer the wait time is to get Premiere to "wake up" or whatever it's doing.

While I'm in the program and don't wander off, things stay great as long as I'm under 100 clips...

Then over 100 clips things crawl as if I was on an old 386 computer.

This happens on local drives as well as networked NAS drive.

I've got plenty of ram (24 GB)... It almost is acting as if Premiere frees up the RAM that's allocated to it for use elsewhere when I click outside of the program. And then when I come back it acts as if it is loading all the files back into ram all over again....

[Lloyd Ubshura]

Originally Posted by Robert Young

Did you install the recent Pro 5.0.2 update?
Check the actual size of your project file- if it's like 15MB, no problem, if it's like 150MB, then you have the "project bloat" bug that v. 5.0.2 is supposed to fix. The "bloat" apparently causes massive slowdown like you describe.
I believe, if you do have the bloated project file, importing it into a new project is supposed to reset it properly. Might want to do a search for the detailed info on that.

Yes, I have 5.0.2.

And my project file size is at about 6 MB... hmm... No bloat it looks like.

[Robert Young]

Everything you describe sounds seriously wrong.
When I say I have 30 min on the timeline I mean fully edited product- the first 30 min of my final movie.
This bears no relationship to the clip length or sum total of stuff I have in the project bins that hasn't been used yet. RE the 1,000 clips- they range each from 10 sec to several minutes in length. I'm guessing 3-4 hrs total.
You replied to my post so quickly that you may have missed the P.S. that I was editing in at the bottom.
Check your project file size. Everything you describe sounds like what I've read occurs with the "project bloat" bug.

[Robert Young]

That's too bad.
That would have been easy to fix.
Suffice it to say, your CS5 behavior is very uncharacteristic.

[Robert Young]

One other thing, when just editing/previewing, I run around 4GB RAM; rendering pushes it up to 6-7GB.
I can minimize Pro, go to any other software, browser, email, whatever, and on return to the pro project it's instantly up and running.

[Lloyd Ubshura]

Now that I'm watching this closer, every time I come back to the program from ANYWHERE (even the desktop), PP starts to conform my files.

For example, I have a very simple test project open with four 5-minute clips in it. All the files have done their "conforming." But I click outside of PP and then immediately click back inside and it starts conforming one or more of the files that it had already previously conformed.

Shouldn't a file that has already been conformed need to go through that just one time in a project?

I'm thinking that my bug has something to do with this now since things go crazy slow while conforming. It has always done this, but I thought it was clips that hadn't been conformed before. Now that I only have a few clips to keep my eye on, I see it is conforming and reconforming the same clips over and over again every time I come back to PP.

I will post this on the Adobe site also, but if someone else has any additional insight you'd make this week go much better!

Here's a boring screencast video I did of it where you can see it conforming and reconforming the same clips every other time. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFrXk4nTpwo