Premiere CS3 on Apple Mac. Is it stable? Good idea?
 

I did a search here but not much on the subject. Was wondering what the opinions/experinces with Premiere CS3 on Mac were now that its been out for some time...

Is it as reliable and stable as Final cut is? I know 5 years back i tried to run Premiere 6.5 on Mac and it would crash left right and upside down. So i am hoping things are different now.

Is it stable? Yes, mostly. I think it is more stable than the PC version. Is it reliable? As much as PPro can be with a few quirks of its own.

Is it efficient? Hell, it's so much slower than PC version that I really am wondering where did all this work at Adobe go into. To say it's sluggish is an understatement. The only good part is the multi-threaded rendering. Otherwise it is extremely unresponsive. Opening a project can last up to 15 minutes. Thank god I can use "Sleep" instead of just turning my Mac off...

I run Premiere on both my iMac with Leopard and my XP PC. They are similarly configured (2,14 GHz C2Duo). iMac has only 1 GB RAM but Premiere runs very similar on both these systems. Opening projects for 15 minutes indicates something else is probably wrong with Bart`s computer - Premiere is really picky about computer`s cleanliness.

Using it on a Macbook Pro 17", it's stable and responsive. Opening HD-based projects takes a few seconds.

Guys, if you could help me make this program work faster, then it would be awesome. Any idea what could be wrong? I've got all the latest updates, OS.x 10.4.11, I do the maintenance tasks routinely, and the comp is pretty new - MacPro Quad, 4 Gigs of RAM, Radeon X1900, HDD: 250gb system plus 1,5TB RAID (3x500) internal, 1TB firewire 800 external drive. I also have Decklink SP, but the problems date back before we bought the card.

I thought it could have been the firewire drive, but when I copied the files on RAID and started working from there, no luck either.

If any of you has any idea, please share it.

Bart, please post the details of you project:

Format of the clips, project settings, configuration for the scratch disk. Have you tried cleaning Premiere's cache and cache database?

Also, is this happening with all projects, or just ones containing dynamic linked AE comps? I've experienced slowdown on opening projects with AE comps in them on the PC side.

I've just got a new mac pro with cs3 at home. Havent had the chance to play with it yet though.

I don't have AE here at work, just Premiere. So no dynamic link here.

Projects are Quicktime DV PAL 50i, 4:3 or widescreen. Renderer is either DV or blackmagic uncompressed.

Footage used is either DV movs or Cineform 576p50 movs from HD-101.

Cineform files perform much, much slower than DV ones, but DV is still sluggish as well.

Scratch disks - at first it was the removable drive but I switched them all to RAID, once we upgraded, and the difference of performance is null.

I will try cleaning media cache, but I think I've already tried that.

I am really at a loss here. Sometimes even switching to a different sequence takes 4-5 minutes. Not mentioning opening footage in source window...

I think the footage files are in some way to blame, but I have no idea how or why.

Bart, try to open your footage files in another NLE, you might have at least iMovie on your Mac... does this happen (the general slowness) even with another footage?

Cleaning media cache helped a little bit with the responsiveness. Thanks for the good idea. The projects still open for a very long time though.

And it is behaviour specific only to Premiere. No such lags in FCP with the same footage.

Any new ideas?

Do you have any font manager programs running? I found that disabling them will help the response times.

No, and I removed most of the fonts to speed up the system.