Any recommended performance tweaks?
 

Hi Folks,

Relative noob here. I'm editing a music video using PPCS3.1.1 + AHD, XP sp 2 on a pc with 2GB RAM, CPU is a P4 3.2GHZ HT, 300GB 7200rpm data only drive, 160GB system drive. Now I know my CPU may be letting me down but I can't upgrade it much further as the mainboard will not support core 2 duo chips and I'm on a deadline.

Basically I have 2 HDV CF video tracks with quite a lot of short, fast cuts and my audio master file. I am experiencing a lot of audio and video drop outs a good deal of the time and I'm wondering do any of you have any suggestions to tweak my system for better perforance? At the moment I have adjusted cineform for faster playback via the batch file on the start menu and have also increased the memory allocation for CF in the playback settings in PP.

Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated

Cheers

Just to clarify ... these are "drop outs" as you preview your edits by playing your CS3 timeline? Rather than in renders of your edited footage?

As far as I was aware, the reg settings for 'Speed' vs 'Quality' only work for external applications (ie. when you're playing CFHD avi files outside of PP).

#1 problem I see is having a defragmented hard drive. It's worth defragging even if it says you don't have to.

If you're getting choppy playback in PP, then you might have to live with it - I've got a AMD Dual Core 4000+ (pretty middle of the road these days), and it's still VERY choppy and doesn't preview smoothly in PP.

PP (even with AHD) doesn't handle large projects very well, multiple video tracks overlapping each other etc...

But hey, even if you're having problems in PP, your rendered video (especially if you're delivering in standard def) should be fine.

Yeah, I defragmented as well. It's not impossible to work with by any means but can get a little annoying. Although I like Cineform it didn't give the performance increase I was looking for unfortunately. Maybe with a higher spec machine I'll see more of a difference

With just two video tracks and 1 audio track to deal with, the machine you have should have no problems at all with smooth playback. Something's not right.

Thanks for your input Graham,

Yes the drop outs are while playing the timeline in PP. It's a very fast song and has a lot of cuts that move with the beat. I've used the CF force render and that has helped things a little. I find that when I open the project it's really bad and gradually as time goes by it gets better. There is a lot of disk activity at the beginning. Sometimes the audio will drop out for a few seconds and the video continues fine and others the whole lot just jerks and jumps. I have tried using different audio devices, increasing ASIO buffer sizes as well and the problem is the same. The reason I bought AHD was because my old HDV project was doing this and I'd hope it would improve things without upgrading my hardware. When I look in the task manager my CPU is rarely above 60% with maybe the odd spike and it seems to be using around 1GB of my RAM. The disk I'm using is pretty full, I've about 18GB left out of 300 - I defragmented about a week ago.

I don't have any antivirus software as I keep the machine off the net as much as possible and I have a separate partition and OS for video only

My guess is the nearly-full disk is the problem. Here's another question - did you defragment before or after you added the 2 video tracks and the audio track to that drive? I have found that defragmenting after the footage is already on the drive can actually make things worse....

Ideally what you want is to create a nice open defragmented area into which the footage can THEN be saved into. (To test this without risking your existing project, your could make a duplicate Premiere project and a duplicate copy of the files on a less full, defragged drive, and then relink the clips in the duplicate project to the second set of files).

Does your system try to regenerate temp files when you open the project? That would explain why it improves as time goes on. Look in the lower right corner right after you open the project, to see if there are any progress bars running.

If you continue to have this problem, open a support ticket at www.cineform.com/support and we'll try to offer some other suggestions (although most everything I can think of has already been suggested here). But we'll try to come up with something.

Declan try this, go to bottom right task bar, right click for Task Manager > Processes > your NLE > Set Priority to High. Processor Affinity will show you your active CPUs.
Cheers.

Thanks Guys, tried taking the project off the disk, defraging and then copying back with no real improvement. I could work ok but I had to use the CF Force render all the time. Now my problems are worse - all clips are showing as unrendered (red) when I open the project. Some colour correction on certain clips is also not working unless I tweak it. I think this may be a PP problem. Will let you know.

PP issue
 

Declan,

You're right.. It's a PP CS3 issue not cineform. It happened to me in my last project which was a standart dv pal (no cineform). A couple of times my renders was gone, after I opened Premiere. Several times I had to tweak some effects and files in order to see the right view... You'd better check adobe forums.
Wish you good luck..

5D MOV to Cineform AVIs Choppy Playback
 

took it to another thread.