Slow Performance With Large Frames in Premiere 2.0

[k***@umich.edu]

I am having a problem in Premiere Pro 2.0. When I view or edit a
sequence of frames that are HD resolution (1920x1080) the interactive
performace is very, very slow.

This is not the case with sequences of smaller frames (NTSC) where the
perfomance is great. I have a pretty powerful system so I am confused
as to the cause. It's a Dell 690 with 2 Dual core 2.99GHz CPUs, 3 GB
RAM and a 7200RPM, 80GB ATA drive. I have Windows XP Pro with SP2.

The interface is painfully slow and choppy with the larger frames.
Furthermore, when I do a preview, and view the windows task manager, I
never see more than 10% of the 4 CPUs being used while I am waiting for
the preview to render. When I export the frames to a .MOV file, the
CPUs never show more than 25% usage. There is also a lot of
unallocated memory during all of these operations.

Any help or suggestions would be much appreciated.

[Beany]

If the HD footage you're talking about is regular video and it's on
your hard drive, your hard drive may be the bottleneck. I would
suggest using SiSoft's Sandra Lite ( ) and running a "File System
Benchmark" If you do a quick calculation, here's what comes up:

HD resolution 1920x1080 * Pixel Bit depth (in bytes) * Framerate =
Number of bytes that need to be read every second.
If we take 16-bit color depth @ 30 FPS, we get 124,416,000 bytes/
second, which is a shade under *120 MB/s*. This is of course an
estimate, but it is in the ballpark of what Premiere has to do.

For comparison, I have two WD1600JS drives in a RAID 0 config using a
Serial ATA150 motherboard, and Sandra's benchmark for sequential read
(probably the most important part for footage) came out at around
100MB/s. The benchmark's drive index is a tiny bit less than two
Western Digital Raptors (74GB, 10000RPM, SATA150) in the same
configuration.

See what SiSoft Sandra says, but for HD video work I would suggest
getting two drives and stacking them in a RAID 0 (striped) array.
You'll need to check if your Dell's motherboard will support this.

MC