Getting more from PPRO and Dual-Cores.
 

Here's a great setup that I use, I thought I'd share. In my case I have a separate Windows install soley for editing, but you can use this setup either way.

Before you open PPRO -

1. Open Taskmanager
2. End the process of anything not needed.
3. After that right-click on all processes and choose Set Affinity.
4. Uncheck CPU 0 and hit ok - do this for every process you are able to.
5. Then right-click on Explorer.exe and give that one back its CPU 0.
6. Start Premiere - It should now auto-start using both processors. (check it)

From there :

A. You can go back and kill explorer.exe completely or take away its 2nd CPU.

B. You can give Premiere a much higher priority.
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Results: I have noticed render times increase enough to warrant these extra steps.

You mean Premiere doesn't "just do it". Shame on Adobe. What kind of multithreaded app sets itself to have a single CPU affinity by default?!!!

Re setting the priority higher - that's a very foolhardy thing to do and, if you have killed off just about every other task, pointless. The *right* thing to do (if you must do anything) is to lower the priority of those things you think are getting in your way.

Tinkering with the Windows' task scheduler on a multiple CPU platform can create a most unwelcome situation known as a race condition. Such a thing also tends to happen out of the blue. One moment, everything is flying along, the next, the whole OS has ground to a halt.

NO! It does open in multi-thread by default but NOT after you have told a bunch of other processes to only use one, sometimes it'll start up with one CPU after doing that. :-)

So far I have not had ANY negative issues and a nice boost in performance. KEEP IN MIND, though, that I have a whole windows install dedicated just for PPRO, so I have only a few processes in my task manager to begin with.

I don't get it. My ppro is utilising 2 cores perfectly.

Apparently the idea is to single out the use of both cores solely for Premiere, and leave all other processes to be handled by one core. ...Right? Sounds like an idea that could work, but I don't know about stability issues. Plus the majority of processes in my task manager are system processes whose affinity cannot be changed manually.

I don't see the fuss is about? PPro/AspectHD uses all four cores of my QX6700 system without doing anything special, just as one would expect. I can watch their utilization rise and fall in unison as I play and stop the timeline. I don't manually kill any processes but don't run any other processor-intensive applications in the background, either.

pete how's the QX6700 treating you with rendering times on aspect projects?

Sorry to say that between my day job, being sick all last week, and the Honey Do list, I haven't had a chance to really do a head-to-head vs my "old" editing box, which is an Athlon X2 4800+. For now, I can say that although the X2 is no slouch, the QX is noticeably faster at things like AE Timewarp RAM previews (one of the more processor-demanding effects).

Did I confuse everyone? What I was saying is that Premiere can get another x% boost if you put all the other processes you can onto just one CPU. That way Premiere will get more cycles. I know Premiere uses multi-core off the bat, that is a given. I was just trying to point out that if you take away a core from other processes, Premiere runs even faster.