Are lots of drops in CS5 without GPU normal?

Question

Hi!
I have just installed Windows7 and the Premiere Pro CS5 trial version. The Mercury Playback Engine made me really curious. So I had a _lot_ of expectations. Yet so far I am very disappointed and I hope I did something wrong.
What I need: Dropfree, native playback of Canon 5D2 files with primary color correction.
What I have: Core i7, 2.6 GHz, 12GB RAM, HDDs in excess of 60 MB/s, _ATI_ graphics card.
What I get:
Playback in source viewer with output on 2nd monitor drops at least every other frame.
Playback from timeline not better but output on 2nd monitor fills only half the width.
I didn't even try color correction yet
I know I do not get GPU support. But as it is possible to decode and display the 5D2 MOVs single threaded with a 32 bit application, I expected the 64 bit CS5 with advertised native DSLR support to do at least as good.
Maybe I configured it wrong. I have never worked with Premiere so I am not used to the user interface. However, despite all the talk about native DSLR support I found nothing of that in the software. There seems to be "native" support only for formats with pixel aspect ratios _other_ than 1:1. So I selected "Desktop" in "Editing mode" and entered resolution, frame rate and aspect ratio manually. Was that wrong?
Next, what do I have to enter in "Video Preview"? What does AVI have to do with preview? Nothing I tried made any difference at best.
So far I have the impression that it isn't possible to even play back native 5D2 material without GPU support in CS5. Is that true?
Thanks in advance...
   ...Mike

Answer 1

> Player performance and editing  performance are
> incomparable things. Especially with heavily
> compressed  material.
Yes and no. Of course players are optimized for playback only and don't need to be able to jump to exact locations like editing systems do. But that wasn't what I was complaining about. I was complaining about playback performance. And every editing software should have optimized playback routines that process the file sequentially and don't have to work their way from the nearest I-frame to the current location every time.
During scrubbing or when changing effect settings I would be content with 10fps. Yet I get only about 3fps (with RGB parade enabled and 1080p output on 2nd monitor). And especially when I'm only changing effect settings I'd expect higher frame rates because the timeline position doesn't change and caching could avoid loading and decoding the same data all over again. That's what 64 bit is for (according to the ads).
> Drop  outs are usually caused by some system
> components not being fast  enough. The fact
> that the CPU load in nor extremely high,
> may point to  disk performance lacking.
That is unlikely. With fragmented data and randomish access (video is never truly random) I get 60 MB/s. In best case I can play 1080p25 RGB 8 bit uncompressed. Should be enough for a 6 MB/s video stream. No, the bottleneck is the CPU, or rather the algorithm, as theoretical computational power and memory bandwidth in a Core i7 system are sufficient for decoding the stream as well as upsampling and color space conversion if the graphics card API requires it.
When I overclock the CPU from 2.5 GHz to 4 GHz and the RAM from 1066 MHz to 1600 MHz, playback of 5D2 files works fine in all other software (haven't tried that with CS5 yet). CPU load in both cases leads to the conclusion that playback using the QuickTime API is single threaded. This single-threadedness, possible code that can still be optimized, a clunky QuickTime API and 32 bit code (register trashing) of current software led me to the assumption that the MPE could really be as good as the ads say.
But unfortunately all signs indicate what has been said before in this thread: There's no MPE in the Premiere CS5 trial version.
   ...Mike