24p, aero, tearing and choppy playback...
 

After a lot of careful experimentation, trial and error and some interesting findings; I've finally decided to post this for the adobe people to figure out...

Ever since I migrated to premiere (from cs5 on), I've battled to get reliable, smooth, skip free fullscreen monitoring on my second monitor. It's not that my system can't keep up with the load, but something rather puzzling. It becomes particularly obvious with a 23.976 timeline. Here's what happens...

With adobe premiere pro configured to use the adobe player, and the playback settings setup to use my second monitor as fullscreen output device, I then proceed to create a new 23.976 fps timeline and add a few 23.976 clips to it. Since both my monitors (HP Dreamcolor LP2480ZX) run at 59.94 Hz, I see a motion cadence similar to ntsc's 3:2 pulldown when I play the timeline, which is perfectly ok. After a while though, sometimes after rapidly moving the playhead around, the video cadence will get messed up. It looks as if inseatd of displaying the frames in a 3:2:3:2:3:2 fashion, it instead goes into a 2:2:1:1:2:2:1:1 where the single frames actally jump back and forth very briefly. Kinda like when you try placing a 30p clip in a 24p timeline, but even worse.

If at this point I quit and restart premiere, everything goes back to normal and I can watch my timeline in a nice 3:2:3:2 frame cadence for a while. Even weirder, I've found out, is that once the cadence gets messed up, it gets back to normal if I disable the second screen output device option from the playback menu and just watch the video in the program monitor window, but if I enable it again it gets messed up again until an application restart is performed. And what boggles the mind is that if I leave the timeline playing, watching the messed up cadence video on my second screen, and I take the whole premiere application window and start moving it around with my mouse rapidly, a normal cadence returns for as long as the application window remains in motion. Last, if I disable aero (windows 7), I get constant nice normal cadence video playback, but now with some tearing going on, like when you play videogames with vsync disabled.

I hope I was able to explain myself.

Re: 24p, aero, tearing and choppy playback...
 

Okay, no responses.

I did some more research and it's a windows 7 dual monitor issue.
It not only affects premiere, but almost any video playback on windows 7 multiple monitor desktop configurations.

Here's a thread I've found with all the details and even a registry fix that finally worked for me...

Dual Monitors Windows 7 Problems

I now get dual monitor full screen 100% stutter free playback with aero enabled. Lovely!

Hope this helps someone out there.

Re: 24p, aero, tearing and choppy playback...
 

Just saw this. Awesome, thanks for the fix!

Re: 24p, aero, tearing and choppy playback...
 

Before this thread fades away into oblivion, I'd like to hear from the adobe people if this issue is something that adobe can fix so users don't need to mess around with their registries. And if it is, should I file a bug report?

If the problem is strictly microsoft's to fix, there should be a sticky with the fix somewhere for users to find easily.