I have a 2 x 2.26 Ghz Quad Core Intel Xeon with 16GB 1066 Mhz DDR ram and 4TB raid which is made up of 2 x Western Digital 2TB black drives. I also have a Radeon ATI HD 4870 512MB Graphics card.


My Sequence is set to Editing Mode : DSLR 25fps 1920 x 1080.
When I drop a clip which is 1920 x 1080p into the sequence and try to play it back it struggles and jumps/hangs from frame to frame. I tried changing the playback quality of the clip to 1/4 but it still struggles and simply fails to play smoothly.

Am I missing a setting?

Thanks

What version of Premiere ?

ATI card &Premiere = bad idea.

Only Nvida Cuda cards are supporting the Mercury engine.

Here is some in deep information: Premiere Pro Benchmark for CS5 (http://ppbm5.com/)

Frank

If its version 5 or 5.5 here is a pretty comprehensive list of recommended graphics cards, plus detailed info of other cards that can be used to enable the Mercury playback engine.
Adobe Premiere CS5 and Premiere CS5.5 Video Cards with CUDA Acceleration Mercury Playback Unlock Enable MPE Hack Mod Tip (http://www.studio1productions.com/Articles/PremiereCS5.htm)

ATI card &Premiere = bad idea.

Only Nvida Cuda cards are supporting the Mercury engine.

Here is some in deep information: Premiere Pro Benchmark for CS5 (http://ppbm5.com/)

Frank
I have an Nvidia Cuda card and CS5.5 still pops and farts! Adobe, this is not good enough!

I know this won't help, but my video card isn't on the list, so I edited the file to allow premiere to use it and it's nice and smooth - so I'd look at checking you have the latest drivers, and also have no strange processes running?

Because this is Adobe Premiere Pro, it is a power hungry beast;
open your Task Manager and take a look at the resources usage before and after starting application, i run PP and AE on blazing fast PC with quadro FX and RAID 0 on SSDs, and it still "pops and farts" for the luck of a better word.
that's why i edit on Vegas

I am using 5.5 on a Mac Pro. My applications all run off a SSD.

Final Cut X has no issues but Premier is poor for me. I heard so many great things but on a system like mine it should be flying

your bottlenecks appear to be

A) non-CUDA enabled graphics card (ATI)
B) non-optimized hard drive setup

Sell/Trade that ATI card for a 1GB Nvidia GTX2xx or higher card (no more than $150)
Get some more HDD's and perhaps a RAID controller card with its own RAM and processor (ARECA etc)

what type of RAID array do you have? maybe look into an SSD as a boot/install drive, a 2 disc RAID array (i assume RAID 1, as RAID 0 would be suicidal) is pretty ineffective.

Your stuttering playback is mostly due to non-CUDA graphics card. I would bet my (ancient, circa 2007) quad core 2.4Ghz with 8GB of RAM, 9800GTX and SSD/4 Disk RAID0 Scratch/2 Disk RAID 0 Delivery would play back and export faster than your 8 core with more RAM, due to CUDA enabled graphics and a better hard drive setup.