HD footage is jumpy...on a DUAL 64
 

Hi,

I have an AMD 64 Dual core 3800+, 2gig RAM, 3 250G 7200rpm hard drives, Geforce 6600 LE, and whenever I playback HD footage on the premiere pro 2.0 timeline it is jumpy! I play it with VLC or Media Player Classic and there's no problem. But it gets weirder! Even after I render the footage on premiere, it is still jumpy. And I'm not even using any effects at all. I checked the adobe website and I seem to fullfil all the system requirement for realtime playback (even with magic bullet effects being applied!). It MUST have something to do with my settings. I really don't know what's the deal here. It's a pain in the ass to edit like this. Any advice will be apreciated.

cheers

Have you defragged your hard drive/s? Fragmented drives causes the issue you are describing.

Defrag them and test the playback in PPro 2.0 again.

/Roger

Yes, I defrag them constantly

O.k!

Check your Project Settings in PPro and make sure that they match the source footage.

/Roger

Yes, they do match. It's really strange, because there's some parts where the footage goes smoth and then it gets jumpy again.

I tried it and it didn't work. I don't know what could it be. I pondered that I might have an hard drive issue and that 7200rpm (maybe I need 10000rpm) would not be enough, but if this was the case, then I think the video would play jumpy when I played it outside of the premiere environment too. And this is not the case, since it plays beautifuly on media player classic and any other video player. It is only jumpy when I play it on premiere. This is making me edit in very very hard and upseting way.

Do you think my graphic card settings might influence this issue? Should I get a 10000rpm hard drive?

I know nVidia recently released drivers that better support HD video. Have you upgraded vid drivers lately? Does that card even offer 100% for HD?

I'll try to update the drivers for better support. I truly hope you're right on this one. The weird part is that the problem only happens on premiere.

Rafael

If it's any consolation this type of jumpy playback is somewhat common. Plenty of posts about it. My laptop does it but my desktop doesn't when using Elements.

I too have tried all of the simple solutions: more RAM, faster defragged drives, separate data drives, and new video drivers. So far nothing I've tried has "fixed" my laptop. The laptop is a Dell 8200 with a 1.8 GHz M processor and 1.25 GB of Ram. Seems like that should be fast enough............ but it aint. :(

Hope you get yours working!
JohnG

What's the speed of that laptop HD? Probably 5400, if so, that would be the reason. Had the same problem on my laptop with similar specs and a 5400. Switched to a 7200 and all is better.

The HD is a brand new 7200 RPM 8 MB buffer beast.

Wish I could figure this problem out. Usability of the SW is really compromised right now. I want to upgrade to Pro 2 but I'm afraid I'll have the same 'problem'.

JohnG

Nice drive! Hmmmm, tough one. Swap file? What is it set to and where on the drive is it located (if you know)? Do you have a lot of services still running? i.e. the huge amount that windows unnecessarily comes defaulted Auto with ....

Rafael:

When you say HD footage playback, are you talking about HDV on the timeline, or an intermediate file like Cineform, or what ? Are you saying even if you render to a new file, and then stick it on a new time line that the video will not preview properly ?

On other threads, I gotten some inkling that the Premiere Pro timeline Monitor does not give full resolution when play HD or HDV back off a rendered timeline. That appears to be the same with Vegas too, if I am not mistaken. Thus problems you are having may be related to down converstion processing for the monitor.... just a thought.

You are right, I believe. If you right click on the preview window you can adjust the quality of playback, as well as the size of the footage in the preview window.

Marco

Argh............... I'm such a tard! I just checked and my big new drive is actually only a 5400 RPM model. I really thought I had researched it out properly but obviously NOT.

Thanks again for mentioning this........... now, off to order another drive.

edit: Just ordered a 100 GB Hitachi 7200 RPM drive. :-)

sorry for the thread hijak
JohnG

Right on, glad it was mechanical limitation and not software. Very nice, way to stay open and double check yourself. I've spent the last 6 years upgrading constantly (cheaply)for the sole purpose of being able to run the NLE as fast as possible, oh yeah, games too -tee hee. Every problem I have ever come across related to performance I have been able to t-shoot and solve..usually with faster parts LOL>....

In one of the other threads http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=67111 We talk about organizing footage, if you read some of my posts you'll see I go to great lengths to have my NLEs running smooth on all fronts. It might be overkill to some but there's nothing like having more time to experiment and produce and less time watching the "rendering" dialog box.

I'm not using any intermediate codec like cineform or anything like it. I'm capturing HDV footage from my FX1 with Premieres' own preset. I tried changing the quality to draft and then to automatic, but the problem persists. Then, instead of "fit to window" I changed the viewing window to 50%. No go! I tried to change the output to none on the playback settings, and also changed the external device settings. Nothing works. Do you guys think this might have to do with my pcs' virtual memory? Should I increase it? I know it's a long shot but I'm running out of options here. I'm also going to check and see if the DMA is enabled (it should be, according to adobes' tech support).

I think I might have found out what the problem is. I visited http://www.johnrofrano.com/hdv.htm and read that only one of the cores is used durring previews (which is weird because when premiere is loading a msg apears saying that a dual core has been detected). So, since I have a AMD 64 Dual core 3800+, only one core might not be enough. I don't know if there is a way to "force" my pc to use both cores durring preview?

Try setting priority to HIGH or REALTIME, see if that helps...

Yes, I was wondering about that, but whenever I was about to change it on the task manager a msg poped up saying that this could "change existence as I know it" or some other jibberish like that ;-) I'm gonna give it a go when I get home.

I don't have many tasks running in my editor OS, the ones I do have running I set the affinity for those to ONE processor. The for Premiere I set the tmp file and Adobe...exe to HIGH or sometimes REALTIME.

The tmp too? Do you know the name of the tmp process on the task manager? I'm gonna set it to High too. Btw, thanks for all the tips!

Darn, I'm at work, but it is like a letter and a few numbers then .tmp. It only comes up with premiere running.

No worries. As soon as I get home I'm going to try all this stuff. I have the feeling that today I'm finaly going to tame the beast ;-)

Darn it! I can't belive it. There's not a freaking way to make it work! Each core has 2.01 GHZ. Do you guys think if I increased it to at 3 GHZ it could solve my problem? Any ideas of how much would that cost? How about RAM? Should I bump it up form 2 gig to 4 gig?

Rafael:

I have virtually the same set up as you do- except for the video card. Now, you and I may have different standards as to what we want out of preview, but if I had to guess, I'd say that the video card may be the issue. I am running a PCI Express 256 megabyte memory card. It ran me arount $179.00 USD. The LE designation on your card tells me it has some concessions, in other words that it is a stripped down version, and I am guessing that is the problem. I preview footage all the time with Premiere Pro 2.0 and on my dual monitor set up, and I have a fine result. Again, this may be a difference in our standards, but I am not seeing jittery or skipping stuff at all.

You could try usings RivaTuner, overclock the card a bit and see if that helps. What I do with every video card is toss the stock HS&F, buy a bad @ss one as well as copper heatsinks for the memory. My current card is stock at 325MHz GPU and 600MHz Mem. With the added cooling I get 419MHz GPU and 845MHz Mem, the temp barely goes up. BF2 gets another 20FPS!!!!

Surprise surprise. I found out that SD footage is jittery too. There's something REALLY wrong with this picture and I don't know why. I have to pin point what it is because I can't afford right now to buy a new graphic card, 3 ghz of dual memory, 2 gig of aditional ram. I just bought a mic and a Brevis35 and that kind of blew my budget a little bit. I HAVE to pin point what's wrong so that I can buy ONLY what I need (even though I wouldn't mind at all doing a massive upgrade).

I think it all just boils down, utimately, to the OS. Just MHO

I had this problem before. I think this is the problem:
Uninstall the IDE channels in Device Manager, reboot. Solved it for me.

Very Nice! Hope that works for him.

Really? Uninstall the IDE ATA/ATAPI CRONTROLER? I have 3 devices there:
1 - Nvidia nforce4 parallel ATA controller. Here I have a 250 gig Maxtor ( as slave) and a dvd burner (as master)
2 - Nvidia nforce4 serial ATA controller
3 - Nvidia nforce4 serial ATA controller

Should I do it to them all? Won't that make the system crash? Won't I lose information? Can anything bad happen? I really hope it works though. BTW, when I open the 250 gig Maxtor properties the following options are marked:
- Let bios select the transfer mode (multi-word DMA2)
- Enable read caching
- Enable write caching

When I unlick the "Let bios select the transfer mode", the place where it says "multi-word DMA2" allows me to choose a bunch of other options. And when I did a speed test the results were:
- Theoretical limit 16.6
- Burst speed 3.2
- Sustained speed 3.2

I really don't know if this is bad or good, but I'm guessing it's bad and I'm guessing THIS is where the problem is, because the other Maxtor speed test resulted in:
- Theoretical limit 150.0
- Burst speed 120.5.
- Sustained speed 61.7

Any thoughts?

Oh yes! Finaly! Sweet! I changed the Tranfer mode to "Ultra DMA 6 - Ultra 133". I don't even know if this is the best options that'll make the HD go faster. All I know is that now I can preview HDV real time, baby!!! Thank you, guys! Thank you!!! You saved me a lot of money in RAM, GHZ, new graphic card. Thank you!

Joy
 

and that's the kind of response we love to see here... another happy ending. :-)