Tim,

The technical help was no help at all. Assuming 7200 RPM disks, USB2 attains around 20 MB/s, fire wire around 30 MB/s and eSATA around 60 MB/s in average transfer rates, all depending on fill rate of the disk.

What is the 7200RPM equivalent to in terms of MB/s?

7200 Min.
 

Its ok to store on that USB drive regardless if it is 7200, 5400, 10,000 BUT I personally don't feel that the USB interface is fast enough to handle multiple streams in an NLE without a slowdown which you would NOT see on an internal SATA or eSATA drive. I have a 500GB MyBook and while I store many Gigs of footage on it, I push footage I need to an internal "project" drive (200GB 7200). 7200RPM is the minimum I would use speed-wise for a drive.


Here's my setup currently:

80GB SATA - OS and Editor
220GB SATA - Project Drive (houses footage to be cut)
60GB SATA - Capture Drive, audio and video captured to this drive
80GB SATA - Preview Files drive (scratch) audio and video
80GB IDE - Everything else for a project
500GB USB - Storage

My editing is glacier-slow even with internal 7200 SATA hard drives. We're talking a couple of minutes every little change. I can't imagine working through USB or indeed anything less.

I would check your hardware first. Defrag and organize your file structures a little better. Are you doing a lot intensive cuts or effects? Something just seems wrong if it is that slow...


MemTest+ 1.70
chkdsk /f /r on all drives
check your motherboard for blown capacitors or buldging ones.

I defragged the drives, and the file structure is very simple. 99% on one video and one audio track of the timeline with minimal effects. But the project does involve clips from about 500gb worth of footage and runs about 2.5 hours. Could that be it?

Hmmmm. Okay.... Make a COPY of your project file. Open the COPY and try chopping half off of the timeline. If your slowdown issues go away, then you know. OR you could systematically delete or "make offline" clips until you find the one or bunch that are causing the bottleneck. If this is the case the solution is pretty simple.


Let me ask you this - are all the clips the same format? or do you have some avi, some mpg, some mpegs, some m2ts?

I will try that. I recall I was having similar issues when the project was in thirds, so I'm not sure that that it the whole problem. Sometimes it was like that, and sometimes it wasn't. But at this point, it's always like that, which is annoying when I'm trying to whip a large project into shape some time this year.

Oh, and the clips are all the same: avi captured from my DVX100.

Err, if it has to render dv footage after just a clip adjustment, then i dont think that the hard disks are your problem.

Are your Project settings set to be the same as the video files that are in it? Is the frame size, the frame rate etc exactly the same? Right click on one of your video files and click properties to check the resolution etc.

Bear in mind that if you have changed the transparency on any of your clips, or added any effects, such as color correction, or transitions, then those clips will need to be rendered for smooth playback.

That's kind of strange, actually: I set the camera and captured the footage as 24p advanced for every shoot and every clip, yet some of the clips are listed as 29.97fps, though most are still 23.97.

I have very few effects in the timeline as yet, and the cuts I'm making are for the most part effect-free. I know effects cause slow rendering; I'm used to that. But these are just plain clips.

Ok, I tried cutting half of it out, and it sped up considerably, so that seems to be the problem. Now, what's the best way of dealing with this issue? Surely people have produced 2-hour-plus projects with Premiere before without having to wait three minutes for every little cut? What am I lacking? Should I get a more updated version of Premiere than pro 1.5? Upgrade my 3.2ghz processor/2gb RAM setup? Will this project be transferable to new things like that?

I suppose I need to split the project up again, into more manageable pieces, because Premiere Pro 1.5 has become unstable and crashes occasionally while trying to handle this 2+ hour project, creating copies of failed saves and complicating everything.

But eventually I'm going to have to put it together again, and I don't know how I'm going to do that. Sure my PC isn't that behind the times? Maybe I'll try a Mac for the next project...

So, to split it up again, as I've made too many changes to go back to the original three parts, can I just create three new sequences, cut and paste it into three parts, and then edit each sequence seperately? Or would that be essentially the same as having it all in one sequence? If so, then maybe I will have to create three separate new projects, right?

One thing to try is nesting sequences. Try putting the three parts into their own sequences. Then make a "final" sequence using only the three other sequences nested thereon. That should allow you to work with the smaller parts and still be able to have them all together on a timeline where changes you make in the smaller sequnces are seen on the "final". Hope that made sense.

Marco, thanks for your reply; what I did originally was import all three projects into three sequences, create a 4th, cut and pasted all the contents from the first three into the fourth, and then deleted the first three sequences, leaving the 4th as a 2.5-hour timeline but all the projects in the bin still as three subcategories. How do I go about creating three 50-minute parts to edit individually and then "nest" into one entity? Forgive my ignorance, I'm not very technically minded, I'm afraid.