Lousy Preview Quality in Ppro 2.0 - Ssssttutters
 

Hello,

I'm really a Vegas guy, but since I do have PPro 2.0 aswell (recently updated my old bundled premiere) I thought I'd give it a go!

I have a brand new machine - AMD 64 X2 4600+ with 2gb RAM and a Nvidia Geforce 7800 + SB XFI audio card. A machine well over the specs for PPro.

When I play video in PPro - either in monitor or in Sequence window, it kind of "shakes" and "stutters". When I play the same video from Explorer through Windows Media Player 10 it looks perfect. The project is new, no effects, no edits - no nothing. Just imported the clips and added them to the time line.

I didn't have this kind of probs using Premiere 6.5 or Pro 1.0.

I have tested quality settings from draft, automatic to high - no difference. I've disabled all other output devices. I have turned on "use accelerated GPU".

What have I missed?

Just one more question when I'm at it: Coming from Vegas I'm used to scripting and .NET control - do I have ANY scripting in PPro?

TIA!

Best regards,

Lars Siden

Need more details
 

Just read your profile and wonder: is your footage SD/DV or HDV. Are your discs speedy SCSIu160 or SATA or RAID0. You certainly should have smooth performance on SD, HDV is tougher but still doable, especially with Cineform Access.

it is standard 720x576i PAL DV, nothing fancy.

If I add the same clips to Vegas 6.0d timeline everything is nice and smooth as it should be.

I just did a google on "ppro 2 and playback problems", got quite many hits.

(like 501.000 hits)

Reading through the manual/adobe support they only mention the standard mumbo jumo - defrag HDD, check scratch disks etc. So I'm still stumped!

// Lazze

... A thought hit me(ouch): It looks like PPro de-interlaces on the fly, something that I haven't told him to do, can I turn that off somewhere? That should take some horsepower(and the stutters are most visible on fast motion secenes)

I played around with "field blend" and fieldorder/de-interlace, no difference - which in itself is strange.

//Lz

One last note for the evening:

I can play one of the clips that behaves badly in PPro in explorer(WMP) and Vegas using 1900x1200, that is like 220% the size and the picture is still perfect. So maybe PPro just doesn't like AMD?

I have a dual core cpu(X2 4600+) - not using Hyperthreading since it isn't recommended when having dua cores.

Gfx card is a nvidia 7800 GTX with the latest WDM drivers and DirectX 9.0C

XP Pro SP2 with all updates.

Deleted audio track in PPro, no difference!

Hope someone has a good suggestion!

Good night!

// Lazze

Some things to try
 

I assume with terra-bytes of disc, you have the system volume separate from the video store. [I don't on my HDV machine, but am using a 4 disc RAID5]. I'll also assume all your discs are ATA or SATA and none are USB or Firewire.

For something to do, you could turn off the "GPU" setting on your video card. That shouldn't be necessary on SD anyway.

Are other things running while PPro is running? Photoshop, bulletin board software or even music server software?

I just noticed from the above post that you call out two sound cards. Could they be fighting? You could try disconnecting the firewire Terratec.

Don,

Thanks for your input.

The Terratec box is external - so I pulled the plug, no difference.

I've tried to have the video locally, on my gigabitnet and on separate local disks. All disks are SATA 7200 disks, less than a year old. I have a 2tb+ fileserver + 1tb local HDD:s

Since everything works 100% in Vegas, Windows Media Player and Windows Movie maker - It points to PPro in itself. Like bad DV codec, maybe I'd just try to re-install. I have a separate MC Encoder license, maybe I should install that one, I belive it will change my DV codecs to MC DV.

Or, maybe this is a dual core "bug", maybe related to AMD with chipset xxx(in my case ATI 482). I have a spare machine, an intel 3.2ghz box with 3gb mem(DELL machine) - I could install on that just to check out if it is the same.

// Lazze

The problems seems to have healed. I haven't the slightest clue of what is different today from last night. I haven't installed a thing since yesterday.

Hmm, I wonder - I have fast user switching enabled, maybe my wife was logged in to her account last night. I'll check right away if the problem comes back with another user online.

I'll be back ( sorry ;-)

//Lazze

Is it possble you had something running in background using up resources ? Even something insidious ???

Also, take a look at this thread. http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=67107

Chris,

I have some stuff running in the background - like NOD32 AV and Daemon Tools. But they're running now as well and now everything works. As they say "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" :-)

I read the other thread, thanks!

Will start a new one now...

// lazze

I have the same system components you listed, and yes, I also had this same problem at first. I did two things that solved the problem (I did them both at the same time, so I don't know if it was one or the other--or both--that did the trick. You might want to try one at a time just so you know.

First, I disabled the Cool n' Quiet feature on the BIOS. I was told by the computer tech I was working with that this would stabilize the rate at which the Athlon 64x2 processes video.

Second, I bumped the priority setting of Premiere Pro to High. You can do this through the task manager. Usually your PC defaults applications to medium priority and reserves high priority for your OS. So now my Premiere Pro is getting as much "umph" as the OS.

My playback is now silky smoothe. Good luck and let us know how this turns out.

Dave

David,

Thank you for your input!

One more thing that I have figured out is that NLE:s doesn't like other NLE:s. Ie. don't runt Vegas and PPro at the same time.

PPro 2.0 is ok - except the "rendering peak files" that does on for ever and ever on my 4.6+ghz AMD X2 with 4gb mem...strange. I'll have to do another check on my scratch disk settings

//Lazze

One way to really speed up the "rendering peak...." is to import the media and not touch anything in PPro until it has generated all peak files. If you do anything i PPro while it is generating peak's, it will take long time.

/Roger