Premiere CS3 - the big loading wait (with progress bar...)
 

Does anybody know, why when I load an HDV720P25 project on my PC (XP Pro 4GB ram, Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 @ 2.2GHz) do I have to wait so long for the damn thing to load.

On average I can wait 5-10 minutes for the main editor interface to come up. My files are on an external USB2 RAID1 drive.

Please see screenshot for an example of what I have to look at. It goes straight up to 95%ish and stays just like that...

I experience the same thing. Usually only when working on projects with lots of HD footage loaded into the project.

It must have something to do with the amount of media in the project, because when I start a new project it loads up almost instantly.

That is your problem. The USB2 interface is NOT fast enough (regardless of drive speed or RAID) and not recommended by 99% of users here for active project editing.

You may find additional useful information in this thread which contains almost the exact same question.

I have the exact same issue frequently, and I find it does get slower as the list of assets and the complexity of the edit grows. I have a pretty fast RAID array, internal, and it still pauses for a while at the 95% mark. But nothing like 5 minutes. More like 30 or 40 seconds with a big project.

Thanks Marco,

Do you think it is better to use the drive in Firewire (400) mode? If that won't make much difference maybe I should copy the current project onto the internal 7200rpm drive. I am on a laptop so my options are a little limited.

The only sensible solution is to use an eSATA disk.

I was just (literally) looking at these. It seems I can get a PCMCIA eSATA card for about £20 and then it all depends on if I want to use a small single (current project only) drive. Or change/add to my current Buffalo RAID1 (sadly USB/FW only) storage solution.

Does anybody recommend any eSATA drives?

As a rough rule of thumb, the average transfer rate is:

eSATA: 80 MB/s
Firewire: 30 MB/s
USB: 20 MB/s or less, depending on the number of USB devices connected.

Just avoid USB disks for editing altogether. They use spare CPU cycles, so the more strain you put onto your CPU, the slower transfer speeds you get. You can get as low as 500 kBps which is next to useless.

Back to the original poster's question. If drive throughput is fast, is it still normal to have to wait some time for a large project to load? I am using internal SATA drives, some RAID 5 and some stand alone. As my projects get larger it is not unusual for me to wait 2-10 minutes for some projects to load. It seems that the number of clips has more to do with the wait time than the size of the clips. A project that has 4 hours of footage in 4 one hour clips will load very fast, but a project with 4 hours of footage broken into several hundred clips, music, voice over, pictures, multiple timelines, etc may take 10 minutes.

I always thought this was normal, but after seeing the responses only dealing with drive speed made me think my wait times are unusual.

Even with fast drives, do you have to wait a while for large complicated projects to load?

Unfortunately, yes. Loading a project will take far more time if you have many clips than when you have a few (but longer) clips. In your example 4 one hour clips will load significantly faster than 1500 clips from the same 4 hour source material. However, the OP has an added disadvantage of slow disks in a Raid1 configuration. So that makes it even worse.

I use a Norco DS-500, 5-bay eSATA enclosure. It works wonderfully. It's hot-swappable, so I can pop a new drive in for each project if I so chose. It comes with a 4-port eSTATA card too.

You can get More info here.

I now have an eSata drive - it is faster but still takes a while to load.

This seems really quite annoying as it means that 'popping' into Premiere to make some adjustments really does take some planning.

Also if the software crashes or you accidentally shut it down it can really hamper your progress and stem your creative flow......

I have been working with premiere 1.5 before upgrading to cs3 and with 1.5 I never had long loading times but with cs3, especially with more complex projects it's about a minute. I just use a separate 750gig drive for my videofiles.