7D/CS4 editors?

[Craig Coston]

I am having a heck of a time getting Premiere CS4 to play nicely with my footage. I can't get adequate playback of my timeline even with no effects on the clips, and with the playback quality at "draft". Half the time Premiere hangs and I have to close it and restart it. Is anyone having success using it with or without Neoscene?

Here is my setup:
Intel Core2 Q6700 2.66Ghz Quad core
Asus P5W 64 WS Pro motherboard
4GB DDR2 667Mhz
ATI x1950Pro 512mb video card
WD Raptor 72GB system drive
3x500gb Seagate in RAID 0
Matrox MXO2 Mini (2.0 drivers)
Cineform NeoScene 1.4.0
Adobe Production Premium CS4 (4.2 on Premiere)
Windows Vista Ultimate 64 bit

Is my system just not powerful enough?

[Jesse Haycraft]

I don't think any but the bravest of souls attempt editing 1080P H.264 footage natively :P No I don't think it's your system. Proxies are the answer. Can't speak to Neoscene as I don't use it myself.

[Jeremy Hughes]

I have 8 cores and 16GB of ram and still have issues. You need to transcode into something else. I edit on FCP mainly to take advantage of prores. Heard a lot of people use XDCAM on PC but I think that adds more generation loss.

[Mike Hinchey]

I was having the same problems on CS4, basically couldn't get it to work. I got Neoscene and that took care of it.

[Allan Tabilas]

People can use proxies (no matter how fast your PC is) to edit 5D or 7D footage. You can either move or switch the MOV container to MP4, or transcode the MOV to a MPG2 based codec in a M2T container.

[Mikko Topponen]

I just render the shots in Premiere and cut those.

[Craig Coston]

Thanks for the responses. Can the people that have Neoscene actually working well post their system specs? I'm mainly wondering if I'm underpowered for it.

[Allan Tabilas]

Adobe has a sneak peek for the Mercury Playback engine in Premiere (probably CS5, who knows). This can smoothly playback multiple streams of 4K Red, AVCHD, DVC PRO HD (9 streams), and effects like color correction, all in realtime, with Nvidia Geforce cards (CUDA) -- this also includes the 5D Mark II MOV files that CS4 cannot handle without transcoding or rewrapping to MP4 (I have a Core i7 920, and it cannot play the raw MOVs smoothly either). Hopefully this comes out by summertime next year.

DAV's TechTable: Sneak Peek: Adobe Mercury Playback Engine

[Paulo Teixeira]

In a TV studio, I first used Premiere to edit my HDV files from my HC1 and it took someone only minutes to show me how to edit on it and I couldn’t believe how easy it was although having experience on Final Cut has helped a bit. Anyway I recently bought CS4 in preparation for CS5 knowing about how good it’s going to be for native H.264 HD files with many layers of effects but it’s a shame that I’ll have to buy a new computer to experience all the benefits but then again, a miracle might happen, and I’ll be able to afford it once CS5 is released which I’m assuming around NAB. That’s definitely a good time for a showing. I’m sure they would draw gigantic crowds. Premiere was never considered a powererful editing program until they decided to fully support native AVCHD editing and Blu-Ray authoring especially on a MAC. Being able to decently edit RED files also helped a lot. With what Adobe is doing with CS5, companies such as AVID and Apple should watch out. I’ve also used AVID and although there’s a lot of stuff in there, I think CS5 will cause them to dramatically reduce the price of Media Composer.

I'm not going to realy say that CS5 will be better than Final Cut or Media Composer by the time it's released but still, Apple and Avid should worry.