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

Sounds like a CPU or disk problem. Specs?

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).

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'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?

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..

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.

@ 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.

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.

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

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 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-Limited_Error_Recovery)

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.

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.

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 (http://storageadvisors.adaptec.com/2005/11/02/actual-reliability-calculations-for-raid/)
How to protect yourself from RAID-related Unrecoverable Read Errors (UREs) | Servers and Storage | TechRepublic.com (http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/datacenter/?p=1752)

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....

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.

In regards to your space bar delay - is it doing it on unrendered footage? Or is it doing on any footage, with or without effects added?

Steve,

I completely agree, staggered spin-up is great to implement, it will put less burden on the PSU, but anything after that related to power saving should be turned off on an editing machine, just like screen savers or sleep/ hibernation modes.

Ha- finaly found the settings in WIN7 for the harddisks - The power saving options only let me choose between "Turn of Screen" and "turn into sllep mode". Advanced setting let me choose the Sleep Hardisk setting - it was set to 20 min. just about the time where I have problems if I let my computer be untouched. Editing now, but I let you know it it was the problem for me...

Yes - it was just the harddisks going to windows sleep.............................. My problem solved...

In regards to your space bar delay - is it doing it on unrendered footage? Or is it doing on any footage, with or without effects added?

It was doing it on a single layer of .AVI with no effects. But for me it seems to be random. Sometimes it plays immediately when I hit the space bar, sometimes there's a delay. I can't figure it out.

I swapped out the WD caviar drives for my old Seagates (my previous RAID 0), and the random delay is still there, although my drive disappearing seems to be fixed.

Drew, try 2 things:

1) Do what Bo did and turn off the power saving features. easiest way to find it is going thru the screen saver settings - there is a 'change power savings' button.

2) Open up Task Manager, then hit the space bar in Premiere and see how high the CPU usage goes. I have noticed with CS5 that the CPU always spikes upon initial playback and then settles down.

3) Is there any delay when you click the "Play" button in the Program window?

have the same problems myself...
anyone found any solutions?

I have suffered with this too from when I installed cs5.5.

i7960
24GB
Win7 64x

O\S: Intel 160gb SSD
Cache & Previews & Page File: 3TB (1.5x2) RAID 0 7200rpm
Media & Project: WD Black 2tb

I have the same issue when my Media & Project was on a Segate RAID 0 too.