Premiere Pro CS 5.5 can't do a simple cross dissolve with MPE enabled?

Question

When adding cross dissolves to a project that I'm working on, I've come across an odd problem. I say odd because this should be dirt simple, but Adobe seems to have messed this up. Please advise on any solution or work around, or perhaps simply see if you can recreate the issue so we can get Adobe to fix this.
Problem:
Cross dissolves transitions don't seem to work consistently in cs 5.5. Note: I know how transitions work, and I'm not doing something stupid like trying to apply a transition to a cut without actually removing any video between the two clips (assuming the clips came from the same source video.). I'm able to recreate this issue on two different systems with premiere pro cs 5.5 by doing the follwing:
Create a new project and and sequence with the default settings.
Enable the Mercury Playback Engine if it isn't already enabled.
I import the Wildlife.wmv video that comes default with Windows 7 systems.
Drop it the video into the sequence.
Ripple delete about a 2 second section of the video. be sure to do this in the first half of the video, and make sure the the video changes the scene during this period so that you will notice the cross dissolve transition when it is applied.
Apply the default cross dissolve transition to the edit.
Review the edit. For my test, this edit always seems to work fine.
This is a screen capture of the working cross dissolve transition.
Now let me show you what happens when I do a similar edit somewhere in the second half of the video clip.
As you can see, for the duration of the transition, only the clip to the left is shown. At the end of the transition effect the program out preview jumps to displaying the clip to the right. There is no transition.
Additional notes:
This second transition works fine with MPE disabled, but because if of my other problem http://forums.adobe.com/message/3725642 that I have with MPE disable it is not a viable work around.
Help?
-Ted

Answer 1

I too am experiencing this issue.  AVCHD footage, GPU Acceleration, trying to apply a cross dissolve, and instead it randomly seems to see it as a simple cut.  The Cross Dissolve is simply ignored... Adjusting the footage length, removing the CDissolve, re-rendering, etc. have no effect.  For whatever reason, in that specific location on the timeline, a cross dissolve with GPU acceleration is impossible.  Yet, in other sections of the timeline, it is just fine.
(The Fast Blur trick mentioned above worked (Thank you!) however, when I changed my playback resolution on the screen display, that broke the fix.  Deleting the fast blur, and applying it to the clip on the other side of the cross dissolve, re-enabled the work around)
I also see an issue when a clip changes in the timeline, (cut from one piece of footage, to another) the video will begin to studder, dropping frames.  Framerate seems to drop to about 2fps.  To get smooth playback back, I have to pause and resume the playback.  Even if this is done very very rapidly, it still fixes the playback issue.  it's just really annoying to have to constantly stop and resume playback everytime a video clip changes in the timeline.
I have a dedicated hard drive for video, and a dedicated mirrored array for the OS.  the video drive is a 7200rpm SATAII drive, and I'm using AVCHD footage.  I really don't think it's a disk speed issue... particularly as pausing and resuming (even if you do it as fast as you can possibly hit the keys) fixes it.  I'd rather not spend the $ to set up a RAID 10 for video, if I can avoid it and particularly if it's not needed.
-Jason