Choppy Editing in Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0

[Aron Yert]

I received this as a gift several months ago and have had trouble running this software on my computer. I can edit and output, but it's slow, choppy to view and edit on the small monitor, and only outputs to tape without dropped frames about 40% of the time. Here are my current system specs:

Sony Vaio Laptop (Aug. 2003)
Pentium 4 CPU 2.66 GHz
1024 MB RAM
Windows XP Home Edition
Drive C: 5.36 GB free space out of 13.9 (main drive)
Drive D: 15.7 GB free space out of 18.6 (Adobe Premiere 2.0 loaded)

I recently did a cleaning on my computer, wiped off the whole hard drive, and reinstalled everything from scratch. The only software on my computer is what came with Windows XP and Adobe Premiere 2. I downloaded the program 'End it All 2' and run it before starting Premiere. I also loaded Premiere's files onto my extra D: drive so it would free up more space on my main C: drive.

Now, both main hard drives on my computer are in the laptop and are four years old, so they run at 5400 rpm. Slower than recommended, but I use a 500 GB firewire drive that runs at 7200 rpm and it captures perfectly, no glitches. It is only when I edit in my timeline that it lags on the monitor. Occasionally it surprises me by running smoothly, but most of the time it's choppy.

I originally had 512 MB of RAM but doubled it a few months ago in the hopes it would make a difference. It didn't.

I could probably use a video card upgrade, but can't since it's a laptop. My resolution only tops out at 1024 X 768 and the highest color quality is 32 bits.

Any suggestions? Should this be happening with what I have? Let me know if I need to provide further information.

[Chris Soucy]

This could take a while.......

1. Why have you got Premiere loaded on the D drive ( I presume you mean the programs?). All your programs ( read only) need to be on your C drive and out of the way of the chaos.

2. What is "End it all 2"?

3. Can I take it that you capture to your external and read from that to place your "work" files on your D drive? If not, how, exactly, are you doing it?

4. Are you killing everything in both your "Startup" and "Services" groups in the MSconfig setup before attempting to edit? (Watch out for that "Services" thing, it can get dangerous). Oh, and kill your network connection (if you have one) as well.

5. Considering the hardware available, I think you're doing pretty damn good to get what you've got.

Get back to us with an update and we'll take it from there.

CS

[Chris Soucy]

If your external drive is Firewire connect, and your final data is streaming from that to your camera (also on Firewire) that could well be the reason for the dropped frames.

If the drive has dual connnect capabilities (Firewire/ USB), shift it over to the USB connect port instead - Firewire has limited bandwidth on multi - connects.

If that is not possible, shift your data to the D drive so nothing else is competing with the Firewire bandwidth.

CS

[Chris Soucy]

Consider disableing "write behind cacheing" on your external drive

AND

increasing your disk memory cache to 2 or even 4 gig.

CS

[Aron Yert]

Originally Posted by Chris Soucy

This could take a while.......

1. Why have you got Premiere loaded on the D drive ( I presume you mean the programs?). All your programs ( read only) need to be on your C drive and out of the way of the chaos.

2. What is "End it all 2"?

3. Can I take it that you capture to your external and read from that to place your "work" files on your D drive? If not, how, exactly, are you doing it?

4. Are you killing everything in both your "Startup" and "Services" groups in the MSconfig setup before attempting to edit? (Watch out for that "Services" thing, it can get dangerous). Oh, and kill your network connection (if you have one) as well.

5. Considering the hardware available, I think you're doing pretty damn good to get what you've got.

Get back to us with an update and we'll take it from there.

CS

Thanks for answering. Sorry I've taken a while to respond. I wanted to try out a few of your later suggestions.

To answer your above questions:

1) After cleaning and reinstalling everything on my PC, I chose to load Premiere on the D: drive which had much more free space. This also limits the space taken up on the C: drive.

2) End It All 2 is a program that does as you suggest in question #4 - it clears the OS of any unnecessary programs running in the background.

3) Yes, I capture to the external drive and then run Premiere off drive D:

4) End It All 2

5) I know. I should have enough hardware to run Adobe smoothly. That's what baffles me.

[Aron Yert]

Originally Posted by Chris Soucy

If your external drive is Firewire connect, and your final data is streaming from that to your camera (also on Firewire) that could well be the reason for the dropped frames.

If the drive has dual connnect capabilities (Firewire/ USB), shift it over to the USB connect port instead - Firewire has limited bandwidth on multi - connects.

If that is not possible, shift your data to the D drive so nothing else is competing with the Firewire bandwidth.

CS

Sorry, this was a mistake on my part saying it was a Firewire. The Seagate drive uses a USB 2.0 which should be fast enough.

I use large imported video files (several GBs) and thought this may be what is causing the problem, but I uploaded 30 sec to 4 min clips and cut them together and it was still choppy to watch on my preview edit monitor.

[Aron Yert]

Originally Posted by Chris Soucy

Consider disableing "write behind cacheing" on your external drive

AND

increasing your disk memory cache to 2 or even 4 gig.

CS

I tried disabling write behind caching, though I've also seen on other pages that it is useful for programs like this. No difference, either way.

Is increasing disk memory cache the same as increasing Virtual Memory?

[Kevin Amundson]

Have you tried defragmenting your drive? I had a problem with choppy video and after I defragmented everything played smoothly.

[Aron Yert]

Originally Posted by Kevin Amundson

Have you tried defragmenting your drive? I had a problem with choppy video and after I defragmented everything played smoothly.

Well, I ran the analysis last night to defrag and it said it wasn't necessary. There wasn't much for it to do (not unsurprising, since I just wiped my hard drive clean and started over from scratch with reinstalls and such).

[Chris Soucy]

Aron,

I really would suggest you un - install Premier from your D drive and put it back on the C drive. I'm talking about the programs here. The software is read only and is only competing with your data by being on the D drive. With such slow drives it really pays to have nothing competing for drive access that doesn't need to. I realise this may leave you pretty tight on the C drive but there really should be nothing there but software (ie programs) that in the main are read only.

If "End it all" does as you say then there seems little to be gained by persuing that avenue of thought, although, it would still be worth checking your "Services" and "Startup" tabs after running it to see what it has left still running (if anything).

Going back to point 5 in my original post - you will find people (on DVinfo)in similar situations to yourself with choppy playback, with far more powerful systems than yours, why? I have no idea but even my monster can have "bad hair days" and throw an occasional "chop".

I do think that if you can get your system to be bouncing your data back and forth between your D and, er, "F?" drive with nothing else in the way is your best chance, tho' it may well be that your 5400 drive just cannot cut the mustard with this application.

CS

[Noa Put]

I think the problem is your laptop which can't keep up, premiere can be quite demanding for your system, I have cs3 and a desktop pc which was high end 2 years ago, in "normal speed " editing everything runs fine, only if I fast forward through the time line the image in the preview monitor skips a few frames and it looks like it can't keep up. It can't be the c drive because I have a 10k raptor drive and the videodrive is a dedicated 7200rpm drive and I'm editing sd footage. My best guess is that it's, or the processor, or the memory which is not sufficient. I have a P4 3,2 and 1 gig of memory but plan to add an additional 1gig stick soon to see if that makes any difference.

[Chris Soucy]

forgot this in my last post (and my first, second....) as well!

Check out the following :

http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/333161.html

AND

http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/333204.html

If you can't sort it from those, I don't think you will.

CS

[Denny Bryant]

So is that 2.66 a hyperthreading processor? If so, do you have hyperthreading enabled or disabled in the bios? I noticed that once I went from Premiere 6.5 to Premiere Pro 2.0 if I do NOT have hyperthreading enabled Adobe runs like pure poop ... as soon as I enabled it, no more choppy video. Keep in mind that when I was running 6.5 it wouldn't make any difference (that I could tell) whether or not I had it enabled or disabled. This is all SD video ... it will be a decade before I make the swap to HD :-)
Below you will find my specs:

P4 3.0 GHz proc (HT enabled)
ECS mobo
2 Gigs of RAM
C: 74 gig Raptor HD (10K rpm) -- all programs & OS are installed on this drive
D: 250 Gig 7200 rpm Seagate -- video capture drive, project files, pagefile is on this drive
Cheap video card that I had laying around

[Denny Bryant]

Originally Posted by Aron Yert

Well, I ran the analysis last night to defrag and it said it wasn't necessary. There wasn't much for it to do (not unsurprising, since I just wiped my hard drive clean and started over from scratch with reinstalls and such).

I never trust the analysis ... I would defrag anyway .. just my $.02 ..

[Aron Yert]

Originally Posted by Denny Bryant

So is that 2.66 a hyperthreading processor? If so, do you have hyperthreading enabled or disabled in the bios? I noticed that once I went from Premiere 6.5 to Premiere Pro 2.0 if I do NOT have hyperthreading enabled Adobe runs like pure poop ... as soon as I enabled it, no more choppy video. Keep in mind that when I was running 6.5 it wouldn't make any difference (that I could tell) whether or not I had it enabled or disabled. This is all SD video ... it will be a decade before I make the swap to HD :-)
Below you will find my specs:

P4 3.0 GHz proc (HT enabled)
ECS mobo
2 Gigs of RAM
C: 74 gig Raptor HD (10K rpm) -- all programs & OS are installed on this drive
D: 250 Gig 7200 rpm Seagate -- video capture drive, project files, pagefile is on this drive
Cheap video card that I had laying around

Unfortunately, it's not a hyperthreading processor. I had hope there for a second, anyways.

Looking it up, HT-enabled processors had just come out about a year before, so it probably just missed out.