I sit here waiting about 5 minutes for a project to load in premiere... And i ask why? Why is it that it has to take so long? What is it actually doing to have to take such a long time to load a project? Is there anything i can do to speed up loading times? Probably not, but by not complaining i'm doing nothing, and id like to be doing something about this problem.

I also hate it when i switch screens, then come back to premier and it freezes up for about 20 seconds before i can do anything.

A royal pain in the BUTT!!!

i think the first problem has to do with that premiere will go through the audio (?) on each sourcefile and conform it to the project

the second is because premiere is checking if any of the source material has changed and updates it. say you switch to aftereffects and rerender something you use in the edit, then premiere will see if its updated so it can show you the new version

...I know when that happens...
Conforming audio happens when you first import the files ...or if something moves locations on the disk...

But What im talking about is when you are Re-opeing an existing project. I am noting this on projects that are over a certain size/number of files in the bin. -With very small projects loading times are reasonable.

I noticed for 3 hour projects loadingtime is longer but never over 30 seconds, 5 minutes seems very long though. Do you have dedicated videodrives?

Are you guys talking DV or HDV? I have a project with 15 hours of DV and some MPG (VOBs... to hell with them :) and it takes up to one minute. But with HDV, I can imagine it could take almost 10 minutes to load. Same amount of DV footage opens in Edius almost instantly. CS4 is even worse, it's incredibly bloated, even though for a reason - there are half a dozen new processes running in the background that facilitate integration between another CS4 apps and the whole thing is really lazy on dual core iMac (WIndows) with 3 gigs of RAM.

The fundamental problem is that Premier is, and has been bad at dealing with mpeg files, or any inter-frame compression formats for that matter. In the early days of Premier most formats used intra-frame compression or relied on proprietary hardware, like the old Radius cards and others, to handle the codec functions. When inter-frame compression support was added it had to be integrated into the existing code base which resulted in a somewhat ropey implementation and the long wait times for HDV projects are the result.

Based upon reports I've read, including this thread, things are no better in CS4. It indicates that contrary to Adobe's contention that a lot of Premier's code has been re-written, the core mechanics have not been changed. That's unfortunate and means we'll have to live with those delays until CS5 at the earliest.

I recently tired CS4 and the problem with opening projects is still the same and sometimes seems a little longer than Cs3.
I agree with the comments about the mpeg files too.

We know use the Cineform codec as we have both PC and Apple based systems on both sides of the atlantic.

Its funny, i was working on a very large, although somewhat short 1hr project in CS3 recently... and the load time for the project was literally 15 minutes, i hope they fix this soon!!!

As I said before, this is a non-trivial issue to fix for Adobe. I wouldn't expect a fix until they do a rewrite. Probably when they go 64 bit. CS5 would be the first logical target.