Why is Premiere CS3 running slowly?
 

Any ideas why Premiere CS3 is running incredibly slowly? Ever since I've started using it, it's run much more slowly than I thought it should. For example, right now I'm working with a 12 second video clip shot on a Canon XHA1 at 1080i60. Premiere is also running with Cineform, though I've used Premiere's GUI to capture the footage, not HDLink.

I put two instances of the same 12 second track on my timeline (one over top of the other) and used RGB curves to darken one and lighten the other. Then I used a blurred oval in the titler to create a matte to go over top of those two tracks (creating a third track) which the head shot portion of the lighter track to show through the darkened track, giving a halo effect around a character's head.

Total length is 375 frames, but when I go to render it out, it's taking close to 20 minutes... just for 12 seconds of HDV footage.

I'm running an Intel Q6600, 4GB of Ram with the 3GB switch enabled, and a 2TB SATA Raid-0 array for my video data and scratch drive. Running WinXP 32-bit. This should be a really fast system, I thought, but it's taking it forever.

Average encode time for a 45 second HDV video clip with only transitions and titles (no color correcting or fancy stuff) into flash using On2VP6 is about 8 minutes. Sure seems to me like it should be faster than that. Any suggestions for system tweaks I can do to make this run faster?

I've been doing basically the same thing on the same processor and memory but without Cineform and with CC to both video layers. I haven't output the footage yet, but I have rendered the timeline so I can see everything in RT. It doesn't take nearly the amount of time you're seeing. I suspect something's wrong with your setup, but I cannot hazard a guess as to what. The big variable in this comparison is Cineform.

I personally do not like Cineform. In my view it's rubbish. It stole a week of my life from me and I don't have that many left.

As you probably know, the compositing is the time-intensive component of the output process. Perhaps Cineform doesn't handle this well. It doesn't make sense since a key goal of CF is to make editing faster. I just cannot find anything else to point to.

David, I was about to post and say something was definitely wrong with your set-up, as I had replicated your 12sec project as per your description using 1080i60 FX7 footage, with Cineform, a Quad6600, 4GB RAM, /3GB switch, Windows XP32 ......and was able to render it in about 50 seconds.

BUT .... then I noticed I had used 'adjust levels' rather than 'RGB curves' to lighten/darken the two tracks. So to be consistent I replaced the levels filter with the RGB curves filter. And the render time immediately shot up to 17 minutes!

Then I tried again with Fast Color Corrector...and it when back down to 3:17min to render.

So that pinpoints where you slow-down is occurring .... but why the heck curves is so slow is kinda puzzling.