Mac Conversion for CS5 Nightmare

[John Richard]

After FCP Supermeet announcement got tired of waiting and decided to make the switch to CS5.5.
Took the following spec'ed Mac and made changes to use CS5.5:

Intel Mac 3,1 Quad Core
3Ghz
Up'ed Ram to 32Gb DDR2
Clean Install (reformat/erase) Operating System Drive (320Gb 7200RPM) of 64bit Snow Leopard
Updated Snow Leopard to 10.6.7
Installed base driver for Quadro 4000 for the Mac (you have to use another graphics card to install the first driver because of Apple)
Physically installed Quadro 4000 for the Mac graphics card
Installed Cuda driver for the Quadro
Used the Cuda app to update to latest Cuda driver
Install CS5.5 Production Premium from DVD's

Have a separate 750Gb 7200 Media Drive
Have an external PCIe dual channel 600Mbps read/write 8Tb 0Raid array for media

Nightmare!
Can barely play 1 track of h.264 video/audio with a DSLR preset timeline
Can barely play 1 track of Sony XDCAM EX 720p24fps that comes for training media in Adobe Classroom in a Book for CS5
The video stutters - dropping frames - audio glitching - even dropping Playback Resolution from Full - 1/2 - 1/4 - same results
Setup graphical Activity Monitor to view 8 core's usage - at 1/2 and 1/4 playback there appears to be plenty of headroom

I have tried both Mercury with GPU acceleration and Mercury with software only - same results

I have also lost the ability to playback NanoFlash and XDR recorded files which CS5.5 is supposed to do - error message upon importing "file format not supported"

The only out of spec item I can find for this rig is possibly the "Core audio sound card" spec is not there. But I have repeatedly seen CS5.5 running multiple tracks and effects on Mac laptops like butter. And I can find no info on "Core Audio" available sound cards.

Is this 2008 Intel Quad Core Mac too close to the edge for CS5.5? It seems to meet the spec though - and with 32Gb of Ram and a Quadro 4000 for the Mac graphics card with a super fast raid to draw from, it would seem like a decent setup.

Any ideas?
Help!

[Bart Walczak]

Weird. I have Mac Pro 1,1, Dual Xeon 3.0 GHz (effectively 4 cores), 12 gigs of RAM, Radeon X1700 and I have no problem playing back and editing XDCAM EX footage with decent responsiveness (rendering time is a different matter though). AVCHD stutters a lot though, and it's not possible to work with it on this machine, need to convert it to something less CPU intensive, like DVCPRO or ProRes.

Check out your PCIe setup, if your cards are running at top speed. BTW, did you perhaps mean 600 MB/s transfer rate? 600 Mbps is about 80 MB/s, and it's not that much...

Check if your quicktime and system is updated.

As for audio, we use both BlackMagic Decklink SP and onboard sound card for monitoring.

[Steve Kalle]

Are the nanoFlash files .MOV or MXF? Premiere can read only one and FCP can only read the other. Convergent Design has a program that takes the MOV and wraps in MXF for Premiere and other Windows-based NLEs.

I am confused when you say 32GB of "DDR2" ram and a Quad-core and then 8 cores in the activity monitor. Are there 2 CPUs with 4 cores each? The Intel CPUs with HyperThreading came back with Nehalem a few years ago which makes a Quad-core appear to have 8 cores BUT it only uses DDR3 ram. Also, there have not been any 3GHz Nehalem CPUs. The last 3GHz Intel chip was right before Nehalem. So, if you have that CPU model and its only 4 cores, then I can understand playback issues with DSLR footage.

About the XDCAM EX footage: can you provide more details such as whether it came in a BPAV folder, how did you import it into Premiere, is it .MOV, MXF or MP4?

Explain how your drives are setup:
1) where is the source video
2) where is the Media Cache located
3) where are the Scratch Disks located

[John Richard]

Thanks for trying to help and asking these questions.

From the About this Mac screen:

Model: MacPro3,1
Processor Name: Quad-Core Intel Xeon
Processor Speed: 3 GHz
# of Processors: 2
Total # of Cores: 8


As to the memory - we originally had 8 Gb of DDR2 ram - 4 sticks of 2Gb each
We now have 32 Gb of DDR2 ram - 8 sticks of 4Gb each

The video files are from 2 sources - Sony XDCAM EX files at 720p 24fps - the come with the media for Adobe Classroom in a Book

The h.264 files come from the Workflow lesson on AdobeTV
I have tried h.264 from one of our Canon 7D's and same result

The nanoFlash and XDR files are .mov files that play fine in Final Cut Pro projects with multiple effects on them. Try to import them into Premiere CS5.5 and they will not import.

Have Premiere CS5.5 on 7200Rpm operating system drive with over 200 Gb of free space on a 320Gb drive.
Have tried numerous combo's of media source and scratch drive assignment. Currently have the source media noted above on an 8 drive 0Raid Dulce Dual Channel ProDQ 8tb Raid Array - no way can this speed demon be a source of slow read/write. And scratch drive for video and audio on another internal drive with over 400 Gb of free space and it is 7200Rpm.

I am suspecting either something wrong with the Clean Install of Snow Leopard or the Quadro 4000 for the Mac graphics driver because sometimes even from a fresh boot-up I have wierd mouse - keyboard - window scroll bar loss of control right from the get-go.

Hope you can help. Thank you so much for trying.

[Steve Kalle]

Premiere can only read MXF files from the nanoFlash & XDR so download the converter from Convergent Design's website which will re-wrap the MOV files into MXF. It is quick and no transcoding occurs.

[John Richard]

Thanks Steve:

But I am sorry for the confusion. This issue is on a Mac on a Mac Platform and thus I am using .mov QT files from the nanoFlash (actually our XDR).
MXF files are for a Windows platform.

And I have resolved that issue yesterday late by installing Final Cut Pro back onto the Mac and it gave us back the codec for importing XDCAMHD 422 files into Premiere CS5.5.

It is starting to look more and more like something went wrong either with the Clean Install of Snow Leopard or the Quadro 4000 for the Mac card or it's 2 drivers.

I really appreciate the help and effort trying to get me past this disaster.

[Steve Kalle]

Ah ha, thanks for the clarification on the MOV with FCP installed. I wasn't aware that is all it took. But for future reference, without FCP or a 3rd party codec installed, Premiere on either platform can only read MXF. Calibrated XD provides software for both Mac & Windows providing extra codec support. On Windows, their software adds support for nanoFlash MOV files and on Mac, it adds several codecs to FCP for native editing of XDCAM EX and others. Last I checked, all of their programs/codecs were $40-80; so, they are fairly priced.

As far as the Quadro's drivers, if there is a problem with them, it should be as easy as reinstalling them. Which driver did you use: from a CD or downloaded from nvidia? A benefit to Quadro cards is special drivers from nvidia. I learned the hard way that you must choose the correct version from nvidia or odd problems will result. If you look at nvidia's driver download page, there are 5 different drivers available under "Download Type" (excluding the Mosaic utility).

Also, another even better benefit is nvidia's Pro support for Quadro owners. If, after reinstalling the driver, you still have the same problems, call Nvidia to see if they can assist you.

About the SL install: it is very possible that one of the programs you installed is causing these problems. It is also possible that the CS5 install did not go perfectly. I just installed CS5.5 and it caused so many problems that I am about to do a clean install of Win 7. Software corrupting software does happen on all platforms.

Good Luck :)

[John Richard]

Thanks much Steve for the effort to help.

I have reinstalled the base driver and the 2 different versions of Cuda driver for this specific card many times.
I have installed them off the CD that came with the card last week and also from their website.
There is a newer Cuda driver suggested by the Cuda panel and I have tried it and then rolled back to 3.1 that came on the CD with the card.

Right now this graphics card install is goofy for the Mac - you have to install the base driver WITHOUT the Quadro 4000 for the Mac card. You use another graphics card to install the base driver (so you can boot up). Then you physically install the new Quadro and reboot. You then install the Cuda driver. This odd sequence is necessary because Apple broke something regarding the install of this card when they did the Snow Leopard 10.6.7 upgrade.

Thank you for letting me know there is some other sad sack with problems with a CS5.5 install - I don't think my issue is related ... but I am there - 2nd Clean Install - what a huge usurper of time.

Good luck with your issues and hope it goes well - thanks again for helping!

[John Richard]

Time to Eat Some Crow!

Problem was created by installing wrong ram right from the start!!!!

Had 800Mhz ram originally in this early 2008 Mac Pro 3,1 model.

Installed 32 Gb of 667Mhz ram.

Doh!

Installed original 8Gb of 800Mhz ram and Adoble CS5.5 runs sweet!!!
Mixed XDCAMHD422 clip with an h.264 Canon clip - added Fast Color Correction, added Gaussian Blur, stacked 2ea XDCAMHD422 clips overlapping picture in picture on top of an Artbeats HD MJPEG clip for backround and directionally blurred it.
It all runs smooth as a hot knife through butter at Full Res Playback. CPU's - all 8 just churn along at about 15% to 50%.

Really stupid mistake. Sorry for the trouble and thanks to all who tried to help me solve what was clearly not a CS5.5 problem nor an nVidia Quadro 4000 for the Mac problem. Both look to be a fine system in an Intel Mac starting at 3,1 and later.

[Kevin Monahan]

Glad you fixed the issue!

[Brian Parker]

Good to hear.

I wonder how you find the actual Premiere interface on the mac? On the adobe forums I and others are posting that we find it to be very stuttery/jerky. Files playback fine of course, but dragging them around on the timeline and dragging transitions over them etc, feels very touch and go, as the interface lags so far behind.

[Bart Walczak]

CS3 interface was very unresponsive. CS5 and CS5.5 are much, much better in my opinion. Almost seamless experience.