Problems with creating a 1080p video - Choppy

Question

Hey guys,
I am new to this forum and video editing so please be patient and bare with me as I try and explain what the issue is. First and foremost I would like to say thank you for taking the time to read my question.
I have a gopro HD recorder which I used on my trip and recorded a bunch of movies. They were recorded in 1080P/30FPS.
I am able to play these on my MAC in any player, (I use VLC) and work fine - no lag what so ever.
I opening up Adobe Premiere Pro CS 5.5 and creating a new project as follows with following sequence settings (I've tried multiple ones)
AVCHD 1080P25 Anamorphic or AVCHD 1080P30 or AVCHD 1080P25
Once this is complete I add my video in with an MP3 as audio and a picture saved as JPEG to the first 20 seconds (Video is about 3 minutes long). So far everything is good. Also between the picture and the video I add a video transition.
When I export the video as H.264 1080P25 or H.264 1080P30 (PAL) I notice that after movie transitions from the JPEG to the actual video it becomes laggy and very choppy on all media players, including VLC, Quicktime.
This is were the problem is frustrating - If I remove the JPEG and video transition effect and just have the video with audio track and export with same settings above the video is absolutely fine. No lag what so ever.
So it seems that the JPEG is causing me issues. Has anyone experienced this and could point me in the right direction?
To be absolutely clear, the picture is about 500KB and size is 1280 * 960 JPEG.
The system I am using is
Macbook Pro
2.3Ghz I7 Quad
8gb ram
1gb dedicated video card
I don't think its my computer as I tested both video's (with and without the jpeg) on other machines and get the same results. The Video with the JPEG is choppy while the others play fine.
I would very much appreciate any assistance as I am trying to create a Video to send to all our supports for a rally we participated in.
Thanks so much again for taking the time to read my question.
Kind regards,
Milan

Answer 1

Ok, so now we know that what we were dealing with trully was a user error and I am sure that the part of it is you being new to PPro. The other part of it is general annoyance that one has to deal with, whenever complex output pipelines are involved. When you are using a professional application suh as PPro you are alowed a lot of flexibility. Unfortunately with this flexibility the possibility of error rockets skyhigh. This complexity is in no way helped by the fact that the output is handled by codecs from many different vendors all of which have different UIs and different ways they talk to the host app. QuickTime is terrible in this aspect as well. So you have to be very methodical.
Now that we know that there is really no bug with PPro concerning your issue, you may go ahead and chose any one of the codecs for output that are available and suitable. PPro even gives you presets. For example you can chose a Youtube preset as an option for H264 export. But you have to pay attention to the settings as it is very often so that even if you have correct settings in your Media Export window the framerate and the image dimensions might be different inside a codec settings that are accessible for some of them via the codec settings button, like in the picture below. You can see that even though settings are all matching inside the media export dialog they are not the same in the codec setting pop-up
At any rate look at the summary field and see that those settings match. Including both of them having the same field order (ie none as it is progressive footage in my example. Like below:
Anyway, as I said there are many things to go wrong. I feel that a lot of Operation Manual reading is in your future, meanwhile it will be better, perhaps, if you use iMovie which is pretty good for simple editing - the kind you seem to be doing - without to steep of a learning curve. I use it myself for some quick edits on the go.
Hope it helps. Good luck.