HDV still choppy in Pro 2.0 with new processor
 

Okay. So I mostly edit using Cineform. However I recently shot a wedding in HDV and decided that the quality was good enough without going to cineform. I had a P4 3 GHZ HT with 2 gig of ram and no raid. just IDE drives. After capturing I could edit but the playback was very choppy and not smooth with no effects.

So I build a new PC. New 2.8 GHZ CORE2 Duo with 2 gigs of ram and 4 raided SATA II drives. This system is off the charts.

Yet HDV playback from the PPRO 2.0 is only marginally better. PReview out of the component connections to an HDTV is still way too choppy. Is PPRO that big of a dog? I have virtually the fastest PC on the market and it still cannot play HDV smoothly? This is with no effects applied. Straight m2t file on the timeline?

WTF? Anyone else seeing this? Any advice? Cineform is smooth but I don't want to have have to convert everything all the time when the projects don't necessarily call for that quality.

Thanks!

Hey Marty, I know very little about how your computer should be performing with those specs, however, I would recommend just rendering any unrendered parts of your timeline and with your machine, you should have absolutely no trouble getting a realtime playback of any HDV content. Let us know how it works.

I really don't intend to insult anyone with this reply, but, it seems to me PP2 is just as problemmatic as premiere ever was. That's the reason I switched to vegas, years ago. Vegas is reliable and dependable. It's never let me down. Seems like this website is chock full of people with problems with PP2.

Premiere Pro has native support for HDV 1080i. When I drop clips on the timeline they do not need to render....so I cannot force it to render. These are clips that are pure 1080i .m2t files with no effects applied thus premiere should not touch them. The concept here is that if I am not applying effects or transitions it should not "need" to re-render anything, thus ensuring no degradation in the quality due to multiple mpg compression passes. If I need to do a lot of color correction and effects I would obviously use cineform for this whic by the way, will play smooth. I am aware that HDV is a processor hog and requires a fast machine to play smooth.....but I have one of the fastest PC processors available and it is still choppy.

Is anyone getting smooth playback to external monitor? I am using a Geforce 7600 and the component out is connected to an HDTV. Premiere Pro 2.0 has the ability to display the output to a secondary monitor full screen. This is what I am doing.

Thanks!

What is your quality set on?

2 gb really isn't that over the top on RAM...what speed is it?

How are the SATA drives raided together?

And Wade, unless you're using a 64 bit version of Windows like Vista, nothing over 3 gigs will be recognized anyway.

I have virtually the same system you do and Ppro doesn't run that much faster. I had issues with a lot of things originally when I raided them together using a raid 5. They should be Raid 0.

Ahhh..thanks Ben :-)

Raid 0. 2 250GB WD SATA II drives with 16MB cache each. FWIW the performance is the same when streaming from my single IDE drive also. So I don't think it is a hard drive throughput issue.

The CPU is a Core2 Duo running at 2.8 GHZ. When streaming in Premiere I checked task manager and it is only at or below 50% utilization. So the CPU is not the bottle neck.

I have tried the quality setting both ways and it makes no difference. The choppiness is there either way.

Any other ideas?

800 MHZ dual Channel DDR2

Vegas does no better at rendering or previewing full quality HDV. In fact, I think it may be worse. I have both editors full blown, and the only thing I can say about a blanket statement you are making here is that you are trying to create a problem. And if you switched to Vegas years ago, how would you know what was happening with Premiere 2.0 now.

Fact is that Vegas appears to me in my Dual Processor setup, to render HDV slower than Premiere. Both will work with intermediate file systems like Cineform, for improved speed and editing capabilities.

I have been working with Vegas more, recently, but I still like the user interface in Premiere, as it is something I have been accustomed to as a long time user.

Check your virtual memory pagefile settings. Premiere uses a ton of VM compared to hardware memory (of which it uses considerably less, arrgh!) so make sure there's only one large pagefile on your RAID.

I can honestly say something is amiss with your system and that it is certainly not PP2.0 that is causing the shaky playback. I have a much lesser system that when loading an mpeg or .m2t file into a timeline for the first time and played back in entirety, has absolutely NO hiccups and the playback is flawless. Now add some color correction and you will then need to re-render. But like you said, the untouched HDV placed in the timeline should playback silky smooth, especially on your machine. I wish I could give you some help on what is causing your problem... but I can assure you it is not Premiere Pro. My guess would be a virus/spyware. I have a rather deep understanding of spyware (used to work in the biz) and I always tell people that 95% of spyware goes undetected by even the top spyware/virus scanners. So just because your virus scan may not detect anything... by all means does not mean you are clean. If all your other apps are acting snappy... then you probably don't have any infections.

Just built this system. Clean install. Haven't been on the net much other than to get a few updates and drivers.

Are you previeweing your HD clips out to an HDTV via a component feed? Maybe that is the difference here.....I don't know. But I was expecting something more smooth than this.

What kind of graphics card do you have?

Perhaps it is a problem that stems from showing the video full screen on a second monitor. My system runs native HDV at full speed with no chop at all. I have a shot of the Dumbo ride at Disney's Magic Kingdom in Florida, so I would notice chop.

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