Problem editing .mov files in CS6

Question

Hi Adobe folk,
I've uploaded .mov files from my Canon 7D camera onto Adobe Premiere CS6, but after doing some editing the footage in the playback screen is very jerky/slow. I'm working on a brand new iMac OSX and have a RAM of 4GB, so I have no idea why the playback would be so slow.
It's an urgent project that I'm working on, so any solutions would be much appreciated.
Thanks :-)

Answer 1

All .mov files aren't the same thing though. Quicktime/.mov files are just the "container" for the actual "codec" the codec is what determines basically everything other than the file extension itself anyways. Basically the type of .mov file you're attempting to edit is using the h.264 codec, which is a codec that puts a TON of strain on your CPU. Converting the files to ProRes would make playback better, but will produce huge files, and if you start stacking several layers of video on top of each other it will start to playback in a choppy manor, because you're not using a RAID array.  In this case I don't think the RAM will help that much, although it should make your overall experince much better.
Although how many layers of video are you attempting to edit on the same track and what effects are you using? Because your system should be able to at least playback a single video clip inside Premiere without issue.
Although once you post what the resolution is I'll be able to recommend what codec to use, because for certain resolutions some codecs tend to become more efficient than others. But basically unless you have FCP on your machine you can't convert to ProRes, however if you don't have final cut no worries because you can use the Cineform codec which is just as good as ProRes. The cineform codec is also free now days which is great.  But honestly I think that most likely you're going to need to transcode the footage to a ligher codec, basically you don't need to worry about files being too big because, even though it seems like a smaller file would be easier for your machine to handle it's actually quite the opposite unless you start hitting a HDD bottleneck. Which won't happen in most cases, (depending on resolution etc though or unelss the video is totally uncompressed HD).
Here is the basic reason why the less compressed a video clip is the easier you can edit the file without strain on the CPU. Video clips that use "GOP's" or Group of Pictures use
I - frames
B - frames
P - frames        (With mpeg-1 there is also D-frames but it's not used anymore to my knowledge)
Anyways though when your CPU plays back a h.264 clip it has to decode the video which the longer the GOP is the harder your CPU has to work, and in general H.264 footage is almost always GOP because it's so heavily compressed. Unless it's I-frame only. Because basically the further the I-frames are from each other the harder your cpu must work to decode it. When dealing with footage that is much less compressed though you're CPU is basically free to process other stuff such as heavy CC or other effects.