CS4 sucks at playing back my EX1 footage.
 

Recently upgraded to CS4. I shoot on an EX1 (normally in 1920x1080p 35mbs mode).
For well over a year I have edited in CS3 with NO problems.

My issue is this... playback SUCKS... it's choppy, laggy and sometimes the video just drops and the sound starts to get choppy. ANNNNY clue on why this would happen?

I am running a vista premium 64-bit with EIGHT! (8) gigs of ram. Core 2 duo e6600 and a decent graphics card. But should this even matter considering everything was fine on CS3?

While a project is open only 40min of footage. nothing else, the task manager says its using 365MB of ram... why not more? I have a strong feeling that is what the issue is but dont know how to fix it.

Thank you very much for any help.

Define decent graphics card.

geforce 8800... which i just replaced a 7series before... when everything ran smooth in CS3

This is happening to a lot of people and nobody can seem to figure out why. I think it comes down to one or a combination of 4 things.

1. Type of motherboard and the chipset used.
2. Type of video card and/or the drivers for it.
3. Sound card/device and/or the drivers for it.
4. Any small piece of software that could be causing the conflict.

I am in the same exact boat you are in right now. CS3 works great and I can even play within certain FX limits three layers of SONY EX1 video in realtime. On CS4 I can't even get one layer of video on the exact same hardware.

I kind of ruled out option 4 since I tried a fresh setup of Windows XP Pro 32bit and Vista 64bit. No extra software was installed on the system so there is nothing there to conflict with CS4. CS4 performed exactly the same on my 6 GB of ram under a 32bit OS or the 64bit OS.

I figure it may be 1, 2 or 3 but you have an opposite video card from what I have and you are having the same issues. I have a ATI 4670 video card. I was going to get an Nvidia card to see if that would help but now I see it may not. I have heard from a few people that Nvidia cards could turn down the performance tab one notch in the video card drivers and that seemed to help a lot.

I think seeing it use 300MB of RAM (maybe more, but under 500 for sure) is VERY disapointing. I have looked around to see if it could take a boost... but have not found a solution. I have EIGHT gigs waiting to be used. :/

This is really disapointing.

Just to let people know, I did the 'render timeline' option (cannot remember the exact phrase, but the thing where you can render transissions and such) and that did not help at all.

Well a program shouldn't use more ram then it needs until it actually needs it. Unless you are loading a very large edit with a lot of segments you should never see your Ram go up a lot. It would be very bad if you loaded CS4 with only a few video clips and it was using a large chunk of ram.

Did you try what I mentioned above? In the Nvidia properties try turning down the 3D settings by moving the slider one notch to the left. A lot of people have said this really helped out.

But Premiere is notoriously bad at managing RAM. It definitely SHOULD take more RAM than 300 megs, if there is a lot of RAM to spare. Premiere is known to swap and thrash disk drive, reloading clip thumbnails (if you have more than fits one page and need to scroll) over and over again, not taking all the ram it evidently needs. This was the case with CS3 and in CS4, nothing's been fixed as well.

No problems here
 

Hello. It is curious, in my studio CS4 playback EX1 files is OK, no problems: Asus P5Q Pro, Intel Q9550, Nvidia 9600GT (more recent drivers), 1 WD 500GB, Vista64.
Regards