I have been testing the trial version of Cineform NeoHD version 5 with the full version of Premiere CS5 and I find that clips that I colour balance with FirstLight do not play back smoothly on the Premiere timeline. The clips do playback smoothly in Windows Media Player and Premiere Elements 7.

I am running Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit on a Intel Quad core Q6600 @2.4gig, 8 GB memory, Nvidia GeForce 8500 GT, 1TB SATA system drive and a 2TB SATA for my video files. Although this is not by any means a high spec system I do not understand why playback is good in Premiere Elements and not in Premiere CS5, which has the advantage of the Mercury playback engine and is a true 62bit application. The problem must be related to something I am doing wrong but at the moment it has me beat. Grateful for any help and advice.

At present I have Neo 1.6, which I uninstalled for the trial but I was impressed with the FirstLight tutorials and the upgrade offer to NeoHD. The prospect of render free colour correction and all the other features really appeal.

Ken

If your PC is struggling, try setting playback resolution to 1/2.

Thank you for your very fast reply but what I am confussed about is why the files play back so well in Premiere Elements and not in Premiere CS5.

What is the acquisition format? Was it HDV?

Then...what was the sequence setting in PPro?

The original footage was AVCHD from a Panasonic HMC 151 (150 in the USA). I used the Cineform preset for 1080i 25 fps.

I think Premiere Elements defaults to 1/2.

Does AVCHD have a 1440 framesize that would need to scale with a 1920 preset?

I'm no AVCHD expert.

If you are not sure what to choose just drag the file into the New Item icon for the best sequence settings.
Edit: i am not sure if this will give realtime.

David,

That may be the case with Element, I never gave it a thought. Do you know why they played so smoothly in windows media player please?

Tim,

AVCHD from my camera is full 1920 X 1080 although in practice the real resolution is only about 1400 as the chip uses pixel shift technology.

Ann,

I tried what you suggested and the timeline has a yellow line where using the Cineform preset there is no line. The interesting thing is that using your method it plays back very well at half resolution but with the Cineform preset I needed to use quarter resolution.

Many thanks for the all you helpful suggestions.

Ken

Ken,

WMP is using DirectShow not the Premiere API, DirectShow is faster as it is native 4:2:2 YUV. Premiere's playback engine often requests 4:4:4:4 RGBA, twice the data and needs a color conversion (adds time.)