Adobe Pro 1.5 system Question

[Thomas Fraser]

I will be getting Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5.
My system is: P4 1.9 G CPU, 778 Meg ram, XP Home, 120 GIG 7200 rpm HD.
Do I have to upgrade my system to get good performance from Pro 1.5 or is this system good enough?

[Pete Bauer]

Hi Thomas,

Here are the official system requirements:

http://www.adobe.com/products/premiere/systemreqs.html

Based on those, you should be able to use the program, albeit with not quite the snappiness of a top-end machine. PPro is very memory-intensive; also, render speed will be fairly well proportional to processor speed. So I'd guess that you'll find that when you start adding multiple effects, you'll see some stuttering in the monitor window unless you reduce the preview rez significantly, especially for long clips. And renders will take longer. Also, I don't think XP Home supports hyperthreading...although that may have changed with SP2? If your system can't hyperthread, you'll be missing a small performance gain. (BTW, for anyone with a Hyperthreading machine, there is a work-around for an SP2-induced problem with the Adobe Media Encoder that's built into PPro: http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/330380.html. Changing the filename as described worked for me).

I've used PPro on a 2.6GHz P4 + 1GB DDR system with the scratch disks set to the C Drive and noticed a definite decrease in performance compared to my main editing box which is a 3.0GHz P4 + 2GB DDR with dedicated physical scratch disks for audio, video, and capture. It was definitely ok, though -- would not at all say it was unusable. I also used older versions of Premiere on a 1.5GHz machine with reasonable performance.

Top upgrades, IMHO: (1) RAM (2) additional fast HDD (3) faster processor. All easily done in the comfort of your own home.

Let's see what others who have machines closer to your specs have to say, but I think you can run it. Just realize it might have to work hard now and then.

[Glenn Chan]

XP Home does support hyperthreading, but not dual processors as far as I know.

If you have XP Home, hit crtl alt del and click on the performance tab. If there are two CPU usage boxes there, then you have hyperthreading working.

Regardless, I don't think a 1.9ghz processor would have hyperthreading anyways.

[Pete Bauer]

Thomas,

In case you're still thinking about whether to get PPro or other software, here's a thread with comments about using PPro on a 1.7GHz system, which is a little closer to your system specs than my systems are:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...threadid=37393

Less than an overwhelming endorsement regarding performance.

Also, if you're thinking of going to HDV anytime soon, at least according to a web page that was briefly posted, then removed, yesterday at the Adobe web site, realtime HDV in PPro will demand at least a 3GHz processor.

I don't know for sure since I've been an Adobe user for some time, but many have claimed that other editing packages such as Vegas put a little less demand on your system...something to consider.