Scrubbing through footage is terribly slow!!!???

Question

Ive just recently bought the adobe cloud, and was wanting to switch from FCP to premiere cs6. But...... first thing ive notices is how terribly slow it is scrubbing through footage on the timeline. Playback is fine, but scrubbing through footage and trying to find an inpoint is painful.  Also, one of the biggest draw cards was the ability to edit native files from the Canon 5D mk2. This is even worse! Once again, playback is fine, but scrubbing through the timeline is just terrible.  I didn't have this problem in FCP... is there something i'm doing wrong?

Answer 1

The short answer: spend hundreds or over a thousand dollars on one of the few outdated Nvidia cards with CUDA that work in a Mac.
The long answer: ditch the Mac and assemble a PC with top of the line components. I was a Mac devotee until I realized that I could have a computer faster than any Mac if I bought high quality components and put it together myself. You don't need to have a degree in computer science, just some knowledge that you can easily acquire online. The three Macs I had all had different problems and were no better than brand PCs that sold for about 3/4s of the price. They were of course better than the piece of junk Dells or Compaqs that sold at Walmart for $400, or even the $1,200 models, but I got fed up with paying top dollar for a product that didn't deserve it.
The graphics and video industry has this very erroneous notion that if you want to do anything serious in those fields you need a Mac. At one point many years ago that was true, but it hasn't been for several years now. Apple is making the bulk of their money with the iPhones, iPads and iEverything else but Mac towers, so that line has been almost abandoned completely. The exterior is still a design from 2002, and the interior from 2010. The "renewed" 2012 models are a joke, a tiny speed bump and you have to pay $5,000 if you want one that is barely decent. Even worse, even though in recent years Adobe Premiere and many plugins started making extensive use of CUDA technology, Mac Pros still come with only choices of outdated Radeon cards, which are only good for games and maybe some stuff in After Effects but that's it. If you want any sort of an Nvidia card in a Mac, you have to spend thousands on one of the few Quadros that are compatible with Macs, all of them outdated cards, unless you download a hacked driver to make any Nvidia card work, but I wouldn't trust my editing workstation to a hacked driver.
On the PC side, you have several more choices. You can put together a system that will be equal or faster or to any MacPro. To give you an idea, my current system, which has an Intel i7 3930k CPU (six cores at 3.2 GHz but that go up to 4 Ghz each with Turbo), 32 GB of Corsair RAM, and an Nvidia GTX570 graphics card, gives me a Cinebench R11.5 score of 52.91 fps for Open GL and 11.28 pts for CPU render. I was just reading a forum in which a guy that ran the same version of Cinebench on his MacPro with the dual 2.40 Ghz 6 core CPUs(that's 12 physical cores) and what I assume is the stock Radeon graphics card gets 30.75 fps OpenGL and 12.5 CPU. The MacPro may be marginally faster for CPU render than my machine, but much slower for GPU, which is almost as important these days. And checking the current prices at the Apple store, he paid at least $3,800 for that computer, while I paid less than $2,000 for mine.
Five years ago I started assembling my computers, and they have been the fastest and most reliable computers I've ever had. Better than any Mac or brand PC I've ever had, and with the advantage that every two or three years I can upgrade it and still use some components, instead of having to buy a whole new computer like you would do with a Mac.
The only downside to self assembled PCs currently is that as long as Microsoft keeps selling Windows 7 Pro, you're fine, but if they stop and you have to install that abomination of technology that is Windows 8, then the choice is not so clear. But, Windows XP was released in 2001 and millions of computers around the world still use it just fine, so I don't see MS ending sales of Windows 7 anytime soon, because Windows 8 is a toy for tablets, but as a professional desktop OS is a joke, and I'm sure that the hundreds of articles and angry forum posts online about it must have reached them. But at least for now, the choice is very clear, stay away from Apple and go with self assembled PCs, and if you don't know how to assemble one, there are small businesses that do it for you. Believe me, anybody who has the intelligence to edit video can assemble a PC, it's no more complicated than it was to assemble a Lego kit when you were 7.