editing long features
 

I was completing a project for my English Honors class last night with Premiere Pro. The movie was only about 15 minutes long, yet my computer could barely handle it. How do you guys go about editing long features? If I tried to edit a feature length project, my processor would probably slow to a crawl and nothing could be done. For this project, I used different "sequences" for some of the big scenes, then made a final sequence where I put them all together. However, this still caused immense slowdown. I was thinking that it would be probably best to split a movie into multiple projects, and then string them together for a final output. What do you guys do?

For big features the raw footage is usually digitized in low-quality, then once the editing is complete an EDL is made of the shot order, duration etc and sent to the negative cutter who makes the film from the original negative.. or in the case of digital, hi-res footage is brought in but only the parts you need.

What's your system specs?

2- What is the format you are working with? I believe Alex is talking about 35mm film, which is probably not the format you were shooting on.

3- In Final Cut Pro you can make it go faster by working on sections of the movie and then assembling them at the end. This should work with PP.

I don't understand why you are seeing slowdown with larger projects. I don't see any difference in system performance if I'm working on a 30 second clip or a 20 minute short. I'm using Vegas 4, but I would expect other apps to be similar. Rendering time is dependent on length, of course.

Are you saying your system is always slow, or is it only slow for this 15 minute project, but smaller projects are OK? If it's always slow, maybe your system needs more memory.

I have an AMD Athlon XP 2000+ processor (1.67 ghz), Geforce Ti-4400, and 768 MB of DDR ram. Smaller projects definitely seem to work more efficiently for me then bigger ones. It makes sense to me though. I would think that the more video you lay down onto your timeline, the more your computer has to keep track of, and the more processing power is taken up. Is my computer just too slow to keep up?

You could try some of the tweaks at http://www.slashcam.de/artikel/Tips/...g__v_1_0_.html

Unfortunately I have little experience with Premiere Pro so I can't help you out too much there other than suggesting that you break up your project into chunks.

I don't see a slowdown at all when I do long or short pieces using Premiere on my system. I do however, get occasional exporting problems with Premiere.

I regularly do 120 to 180 minute pieces. I break the project down into sections, not because my system is slow when everything is loaded but it does take longer to load and if I have a problem, I'd rather screw up a smaller portion of the whole.

My system runs real time so I don't see slowups unless I do some fairly serious bit-twiddling.

Even if my projects were in fact feature films, I'd still break them at an appropriate point and work over several scenes, breaking at boundaries.

In most of my long projects, exhibitions, I shoot fairly close to a 1:1 ratio so I bring in all the video and then order the clips. Then I bring in an appropriate number of clips to work over.

I rarely have to log footage and build a capture list.

Sounds like your CPU, memory, etc. are in good shape. Make sure your hard drives are in DMA mode rather than PIO mode (there's a thread somewhere on this site for how to do this) - that's the only obvious thing I can think of that would cause a slowdown.

You should definitley have hard-drives that run in U-DMA mode. This one makes a big difference!