"Rendering Required Files"
 

I'm working with Premiere Pro 1.5 with a 3.2 ghz processor and 2gb RAM, all alloted to scratch discs, but every single edit takes forever to process, and then when I want to play the timeline I have to watch almost a minute of "Rendering Required Files". Is there any way I can make this work faster? Editing is taking forever this way, with every little adjustment dragging on and on.

Each little change, even just a cut or quick ripple edit, takes a minute and a half to process, and then preview the resulting edit requires close to another minute of "rendering required files", resulting in each little thing taking about three minutes in all. It's maddening. I know it used to take much longer; I learned to edit on a Steenbeck table, but in today's environment, it seems like there's something wrong and I'd like to be able to do something about it.

You definitely have a problem somewhere, but I'm not the expert on this.

In order for the more knowledgeable to assist you, you need to give more information on your set up. You mentioned scratch disks, but not how you have them allocated. What footage are you editing and what are you adding to it. When did this first start........etc..

Best of luck---Mike

My scratch discs, all listed at a maximum of 70.1gb, which is the available space, are all pointed at my 400Gb F: drive, and the footage, all mini-Dv captured at 720:480 from a Panasonic DVX100, is spread through three different drives, including some on the F: drive. Premier is installed on my OS C: drive. I am not adding any new footage, just editing the existing project. The problem started intermittently not long ago, but has become more serious after I combined my three sub-projects into one 2.5-hour timeline.

Also, don't know if it's related, but when I tried to render a small section, exporting as DV-AVI, it gave me an export error "Error compiling movie, unknown error".

Like I said, I'm no expert, but I would not put my video for the same project on three different drives. I could also be that your drives are very fragmented and you might want to defrag them. That might help your speed.

I put video on one drive, audio on another and my OS on another. I do not understand your statement about pointing the other drives at your F drive.

Mike

None of the footage is on my OS drive. I have about 400gb of footage, and it didn't fit on one drive when I was capturing it. Perhaps I should switch out all my old drives for larger ones?

As for the scratch disks, as I understand it those are virtual disks Adobe creates to let you edit and preview more quickly, and it takes memory from your empty space on your drives. I have the most empty space on my F: drive, 70gb, so Adobe uses that space for my scratch disks.

NO no! The scratch disks are not virtual! They are separate physical disks and that is probably why you are having the problems you are. When you assign your scratch disks, place your footage on one physical disk and your audio on another for example.

If you have your footage on several disks, you need to divide it up so that you are working off of only one drive at a time I think!?!? That may make it run smoother!?!?!

If you just made partitions on your F drive for the scratch disks, that will not work. They need to be actual physical drives, or you would be much better off just putting it all on the single drive.

Mike

Ok, if that's the problem should I buy at least a 500gb drive and put all the footage on there then? Or should I get a 750gb or 1tb drive to leave room for project saves and the like? Is 2gb of RAM enough? I'm not sure my board will accommodate any more than that.

Get an external USB type drive, the biggest you can afford. 1tb's are not that expensive here now, about $350.00 for a Western Digital.

Keep all of your footage on it, I would say.

How many drives do you actually have on your computer? Three should be very good. One for OS, one for captured audio and one for captured video. That is what is recommended usually.

Good Luck!

I will look into it. Hopefully that will help with the problem. Thanks for your advice.

FWIW, I prefer the eSATA drives, since the throughput is a lot faster than USB. Sometimes, all that's needed on a PC is a bracket that takes a regular SATA connection on the motherboard and turns it into the eSATA variant. They also sell PCI and PCI express add-on cards for the same purpose if you don't have a free SATA port on the mobo.

You can find external drives that have eSATA, or you can purchase an eSATA enclosure for less than US$50 that will take any 3.5" SATA drive. I have a 500GB SATA drive in my eSATA enclosure. I also have a PATA and SATA internal rack in my PC (fits a std. 5.25" bay) for internal storage. These are not hot-swappable like the eSATA enclosure, but are pretty quick to pop in new storage (or bring in an old project stored on the shelf).

HTH,
Brian Brown
BrownCow Productions

So I reduced the quality of the preview window, which had no effect on the rendering time. If I get, say, a 750gb or 1tb drive to put all of my video clips and projects on, will that get rid of the delay whenever I edit? It's the fact that the footage is spread over multiple drives that's causing this problem? Would trying to get more RAM or a faster processor help? I just want to be sure before I take my computer in.

How many actual drives do you have? Not partitions, drives?

Mike

I have 4: two 400's, a 120 and a 60. The 60 is my OS drive and has 35gb free. The 120 has some footage and other stuff, one 400 is full of footage and the other 400 has some footage and other stuff as well as about 140gb free. The footage itself is about 500gb worth.

Pardon me for stepping in. This post has caught my attention. Mostly the external USB and eSATA drive discussion.

I suppose the technology has passed me. I recently saw some eSATA external hard drives at the local BestBuy. I was told by the technical help that the drives would not be good for editing video. I presently have a USB2 400 GB external drive. I've always assumed that it would not be good to use for editing video.

In other words... I've always believed that I can store video to an external drive. However, since the drive was not 7200 RPM that it would not be suitable to edit and capture directly with p-pro.

Am I wrong in assuming this?

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.

Well with your footage divided amongst three separate sequences you can simply drag each of the three sequences onto the fourth timeline from panel that houses your bins, it will act just like a solid piece of footage.

Actually, I deleted the original three sequences after pasting all of the contents into one big fourth sequence, which I've been editing since. Now I need to break that one big sequence into three 50-minute sequences that will nest into a single sequence so I can edit each individually with the changes showing up in the big one, which I will eventually use for exporting the final cut.