Premiere Pro and Adobe Media Encoder running slow

Question

Hello everyone,
I'm having trouble with CS4, which is running significantly slower than CS3 did on a older machine. The CS4 suite is installed on a Dell Precision M6400:
Windows Vista 64-Bit
Intel Core 2 Duo CPU T9400 @ 2.53 GHz
8 GB RAM
NVIDIA Quadro FX 2700M Graphics with 512MB dedicated memory
The OS is running on a 57.5 GB HD (C:) and the Adobe suite is installed on a 298 GB Solid State HD (D:), except for Adobe Media Encoder, which is installed on the C: drive.
My project has 4 15-16 minute sequences. The sequences are in DV NTSC, 29.97 fps,  My scratch disks are set to a folder on the C: drive. Media Cache Files and the Media Cache Database points to a folder on the D: drive.
These are some of the problems I'm having:
- Premiere Pro CS4 generates peak files every time I open a project
- It then takes 3-5 minutes to render before I can preview a 16-minute sequence
- Adobe Media Encoder takes 5 hours to render a 16-minute sequence (as flv) that has been previously rendered
- AME takes 1 hour to render every 15 minute sequence that has never been rendered before
Are my settings affecting their performance? Is there any way to improve it? Thanks.
(Premiere Pro is the only app that is slow)

Answer 1

The data rate for replay is one thing, the data rate from disk to memory then from memory to CPU and back the other way are different matters and ought not to be confused. It is well-established that for a computer to edit AVCHD you need top end components, and note that I said there were three tasks to distinquish with increasing hardware requirements, namely merely replaying the video, specifying edits in the editor and then the rendering. It is commonly accepted by all the industry vendors that to do remotely commercial AVCHD rendering you need a minimum Quadcore CPU then that eats data fast, in order to not let it go to waste you need a fast motherboard bus fast memory and in order for none of those to go to waste you need the fastest disk set-up you can manage. I in fact have a 4-disk RAID0 volume using SATA (I think the disk model is SATAII but I have to await return from the repair center before I can confirm). For this RAID0 volume I have run speed test software from BlackMagic because I have one of their HDTV capture cards. It recorded that this volume which remember is doing parallelised IO is just fast enough to receive a encoded HDTV stream from the BlackMagic card but too slow to receive an uncompressed HDTV stream, indeed when I tried both I found the volume did keep up with compressed but fell behind with uncompressed. Remember that with a RAID0 volume of 4 SATAII disks a given file gets spread over the four disks and hence IO is spread over those 4 3G/s data lanes. Also remember with these disks 3G/s is just a burst speed, for AVCHD we are interested in sustained serial IO which is much less.
Before my machine broke down, I found that it took 5 hours to render 33 minutes of HDTV albeit as it went along it transcoded from AVCHD to a Microsoft HD format for Vista-only. Another interesting thing is that I found that the longer this render ran the slower it became, the estimated time started at 3 hours but the actual was five and the last one third took maybe 3 hours. Because the machine broke after that run I couldn't figure the bottleneck. For my machine bear in mind that at the repair shop we found that the Quadcore had only half the necessary electrical power plugged in, the monitor software showed however that it constantly ran around 90% of whatever capacity that reduced power supply permitted. Now then we can puzzle over why it got slower and slower and yet CPU consumption remained consistent and near to full capacity, memory was not the bottleneck because that was constant at 6.4G. But you can say that this was maybe performing like a Dualcore and was hitting some sort of wall, if you had a 1 hour render with that rate of degeneration of performance factored in what would happen to the render time, and for 3 hours you could be running indefinitely. I hope when the machine comes back the correct power supply will make it behave like a Quadcore should for this type of application. Anyway I have two theories for the degradation. First is just that PrProCS4 was getting its knickers in a twist and thereby just doing more computation per minute of video to be rendered as time went by, maybe internal resource management related to OO-type programming maybe, or related to disk IO falling behind, both these theories have problems, for the latter the CPU usage should then have dropped also.
Anyways, you need really a Quadcore system and blazing fast disk to work fully with AVCHD commercially, we found an external SATAII disk so if I were you I would just go get one and move on with your life.
Message du 03/06/09 16:08
De : "Jim Simon"
A : "JONES Peter"
Copie à :
Objet : Premiere Pro and Adobe Media Encoder running slow
For AVCHD you MUST have FAST disks.
AVCHD actually has a lower data date than DV. You need lots of CPU muscle, but disk speed is really not a factor specific to AVCHD. Anything that works for DV will work just as well for AVCHD (and HDV as well).
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