HD editing latency in Adobe Premier AMD, ATI

[disease8]

Hi after some epic problems with my laptop it appears that my desktop is also not performing to the degree I needed it to. The desktop is meant for mainly HD video editing but also for audio work. A general media making powerhouse. Well its let me down and I need some help to see if I can increase performance without having to buy loads of new components..

I was having this problem with the same computer a while ago before I upgradeed the mother board, hard drive, CPU and doubled the ram. So I am a little annoyed its still having problems. The performance with HD editing has increased but now I am working a larger project with a lot more cuts between shots its all slowing down again and not playing back smoothly.

My Computer is:
quad core Athlon II x4 605e 2.3 CPU
its a Asrock motherboard with a fat FSB 1.6ghz. If you remind me of how to extract all the exact model info I will attach to this post.
It has a 10,000rpm Velociraptor 450gb hard drive
And finally a
ATI HD5700 GPU!
oh and 8gb ram
So whats the weakest link? Do I need a solid state hard drive? Could I buy another velociraptor and use them in RAID?
Or I guess it could be the Graphics Card?

I am flummuxed! And annoyed the first proper propject I have started on this thing and its fallen at the first hurdle..
Makes me want to sell everything and buy a beatings mac! :-(

I hope you can help many thanks,
Dom.

 

[CaedenV]

Hey Dom, and Welcome.
I recently did my build for Adobe Premiere, and feel your pain. I was trying to do my first HD project over the summer on a Core2Duo with 4GB of Ram, and it was absolutely PAINFUL to do. It was plenty of hardware for good 'ol interlaced SD video, but progressive 1080p is a whole different animal. But here are some suggestions to get you moving in a direction in order of the most likely bottleneck:

1) More Ram. I have 16GB of ram, and max it out regularly on HD projects. It does not need to be particularly fast (though 1600 is generally within $10-20 of 1333 these days), but you need bulk amounts of it for Premiere. It will eat as much as you throw at it. I find that 16GB is "enough", but going with 32+GB would be even better if possible, and it is the cheapest and easiest part to upgrade in a system. If you are on DDR2, then it is quite simply time to upgrade your CPU/mobo/Ram. Be sure to set Premiere to leave 2-4GB alone for the OS and other programs so that you can still multitask while editing, otherwise premiere will eat it all, and make even web browsing slow when exporting a project.
2) More HDDs. RAID is great and all, so are 10K drives, but neither helps as much as much as having multiple single purpose drives. Your setup should have at least 3 HDDs. 1 for the OS and programs, 1 for content, and 1 for your scratch disc, cold storage (old projects), and rendering. After you have these 3 areas covered, then start thinking about setting up RAIDs for one of those purposes (probably best to RAID the content/footage drive). I run 3 7200rpm drives (you really dont need the low seek time for video, just decent throughput, so even some of the new 5900rpm drives do great for editing), and it has more than enough throughput for most things (though RAID and SSDs would help utilize my i7 better). To give you an idea, I did a test and was able to layer effects and transitions on 5 layers of video coming from a single 7200rpm drive. Granted, premiere throws everything in Ram pretty quick, so it may have been rendered in the background, but if a single drive can serve it to ram faster than I can set up the edit and play it back then RAID is really not needed. When you have a single HDD then it gets too bogged down with read/write requests, so even though it may be a fast drive, it is not allowed to focus on the task at hand, which creates major bottlenecks.
3) The CPU. Your CPU is the bare minimum for HD editing. Before moving up to the i7 I tried a Core2Quad (rough equivilant to your athlon 2), and it did not fix my problems (though it did help). I would highly suggest moving up to a Phenom2 or FX 6-8core processor if your mobo will take it. Also, something in the 3+GHz range will help as well. If your board will not take a better processor, then it is time to move over to Intel. Adobe products are optimized for Intel chips, and even an i5 2500 would be a massive step up for you, much less an i7 2600. For the mobo go with something that has solid caps, a good rating, and a p67 or z68 chipset. ASUS and ASRock seem to be the brands to stick with at the moment, but MSI makes some really nice p67 boards that would more than get the job done for under $100 if budget is a concern.
4) GPU. AMD makes great gaming cards, but they are not (well at least until the 7000 series came out they were not) good for productivity work. Adobe premiere takes advantage of CUDA processing on some upper end nVidia GPUs (specifically the 480, 570, 580, and all of the Quadro cards for the CS5.5 version). AMD's new 7000 series cards have a great architecture for professional work, but it will be some time until we see the software to take advantage of it. Also, the nVidia 600 series coming out should take CUDA to a whole new level. That being said, this should be one of the last things to upgrade as it will only boost the processing speed in specific situations. There are only some transitions, effects, and color correctors which use CUDA, but when they do it really speeds things up! I have been very happy with it because color correction is hugely important to most of what I do, and the CUDA processing lets me see the end result in real time, and it is (supposedly) of higher quality than the nonCUDA version of the same plugins.

On a final note; you did not mention what version of Premiere you are running, or what format your video is in. Getting a newer version of Premiere can help sometimes, and also converting everything to uncompressed or very lightly compressed (think lagarith) formats can help ease the strain on the CPU. Any time you have compressed footage (like AVCHD, h264, etc.) then the CPU has to decode each layer of video in real time... which is tough work. However, converting everything over can be impractical (especially with a small 500GB drive) as uncompressed HD video takes massive amounts of space, plus all the extra rendering time is a major pain in the... wallet. If you are getting paid for your projects, then it may just be time to upgrade the CPU, mobo, and Ram for $4-500, and then add a few extra HDDs/SSDs to the system over time to help out. Then use the upgrade as a tax deduction for 'work related expenses' if you run as a small business.


Best of luck!

 

[disease8]

Hey Dom, and Welcome.
I recently did my build for Adobe Premiere, and feel your pain. I was trying to do my first HD project over the summer on a Core2Duo with 4GB of Ram, and it was absolutely PAINFUL to do. It was plenty of hardware for good 'ol interlaced SD video, but progressive 1080p is a whole different animal. But here are some suggestions to get you moving in a direction in order of the most likely bottleneck:



Best of luck!

Doooood!!!
I cannot believe you spent all that time replying you are a saint!! I would hug you but you might think i am gay, actually you prob live in the states so it would be impossible!

I am a bit gutted that What I have will not be enough. I think I will possibly get another hard drive and see where that takes me. Make that my "Video" Disk just for editing with premier. After that if I still have problems then I guess the processor would be next. I dont really want to change the mobo as I only just upgraded and I think it kicks ass it can take 6 core processors and the bad ass ones at that so this will be the next step.

I hope those two things will make all the difference, hopefully just getting an extra velociraptor for all my video footage. You have given me SO much to work on now man its amazing. I really don't want to spend an extra $4-500 on this computer as I have already put like £3-400! Argh! Anyway I guess its my fault for wanting a computer capable of HD editing but keeping it very cheap.

You are a genius and obviously know your stuff. Thanks so much.
I am using MTS AVHD They are coming out of a Hacked GH-1.

 

[CaedenV]

Oh, and my specs (a guide if you look at upgrading):

i7 2600 (Hyper 212 Evo cooler, for silence, I do not OC my editing rig)
16GB of DDR3 1333 (1600 has now dropped in price, so I would suggest getting that now. If 8GB dimms ever drop in price I will upgrade to that for 32GB of ram... but that likely will never happen)
ASRock extreme3 gen3 mobo
GTX 570 (bought a dirt cheap one as I will be changing the GPU cooler pretty soon, if you are not into modding your cards I would highly suggest getting one with quiet/silent fans, as editing with fan noise is annoying) This is the suggested minimum for CUDA work in Premiere, and man is it a monster card! I love it, but it is WAY overkill for 90% of what I do lol!
750W OCZ power supply (550W is more than enough, but I want to get back into gaming so I wanted enough power to do 2 GTX570s so I can SLi later. Premiere does not take advantage of SLi, so plan on a single card build if the rig is for editing only).
Thermaltake v3 Black edition case. Not the prettiest, nor the best case on the market, but it breathes easy, and has room for 3 120mm fans (technically 5, but the 2 on top are useless slots), and it was dirt cheap on sale when I got it. Fill whatever case you have with low RPM 120mm or larger fans, and enjoy editing in a nice quiet room! (though I suppose that 10K drive is probably a bit of a screamer lol).
3 HDDs (all Seagate currently). 500GB system drive (using ~150GB), 1TB documents/rendering/cold storage drive (using ~650GB at the moment), 1TB content/project drive (currently empty as I am between projects, but I tend to use ~2-400GB of it for projects when in use).

Future changes:
Accellero cooler for my GTX 570 to get it to shut up

~250-300GB SSD. 60GB will be used as a cache for my 500GB drive (which will become my documents/storage drive), and the rest will be for the OS and programs. I just need to wait for SSD prices to come down a bit more.

After I get the SSD I will either RAID my 2 1TB drives, or move up and RAID 2 2TB Samsung f4 drives (5900rpm) for my content drive (while the single drive does the trick for me, I am only using ~60% of my i7, there is a huge HDD bottleneck in my system that is driving me crazy!). All raids for inside the case should be RAID1. Last thing you want is to loose a drive and a project with RAID0.

Another option I am looking into is moving my storage to a RAID 5 or RAID 10 in a home server so that I can cut down to a single SSD in my system, and get rid of the HDD noise (can you tell I hate editing with background noise? lol). The only thing preventing me from doing this is bandwidth. 1000/t ethernet can only do ~120MB/s, which is about what I get on a single internal HDD right now. I am looking into what it would take to cheaply (but reliably) link 2 ethernet ports to get 240MB/s which would be more than acceptable. My understanding though is that you can only have 1 data stream through a port at a time (at least on the equipment in my budget lol), and that would not work for what I want to do (though it would help with multi-tasking on the network). Newer/faster ethernet standards are on the way, but I am betting they will be out of my price range for a while yet (10,000/t can do 1.2GB/s, but it is crazy expensive as it is only for professional markets).

anywho, I hope that helps, and good luck!

 

[CaedenV]

Doooood!!!
I cannot believe you spent all that time replying you are a saint!! I would hug you but you might think i am gay, actually you prob live in the states so it would be impossible!

I am a bit gutted that What I have will not be enough. I think I will possibly get another hard drive and see where that takes me. Make that my "Video" Disk just for editing with premier. After that if I still have problems then I guess the processor would be next. I dont really want to change the mobo as I only just upgraded and I think it kicks ass it can take 6 core processors and the bad ass ones at that so this will be the next step.

I hope those two things will make all the difference, hopefully just getting an extra velociraptor for all my video footage. You have given me SO much to work on now man its amazing. I really don't want to spend an extra $4-500 on this computer as I have already put like £3-400! Argh! Anyway I guess its my fault for wanting a computer capable of HD editing but keeping it very cheap.

You are a genius and obviously know your stuff. Thanks so much.
I am using MTS AVHD They are coming out of a Hacked GH-1.

No problem! The only thing I love more than projects, is building the machines to do them (even if on a budget). When I was in college I spent most of my time helping to repair video editing rigs for fellow students, which was a lot of fun (it's always more fun when it is someone else's system lol). Besides, I am between projects so Ive got nothing better to do

anywho, ya, moving up to a 6 core phenom2 would do wonders for you, the athlons just lack the horsepower to do HD editing.
The AVHD is pretty compressed video, so converting it to something lighter (like a lightly compressed h264, or lagarith) would help a lot on the CPU load, though it would take extra conversion time, and eat up HDD space like nothing.

If you recently purchased the system see if you can return some of the parts to exchange for better ones, or see if you can sell the rig as a 'gaming computer' (I'm sure it would game pretty well) and use the money to start over. Ive been doing video editing off and on for ~10 years now, and this is my 3rd editing rig I have built (for myself at least). The first one was a working disaster (though it did get the job done after a few tries), the 2nd rig suffered from lack of budget, but now this 3rd rig is a dream come true, and I hope it will last me for several years to come. The parts only cost $700 which wasn't too bad (last 2 rigs were complete builds and were well over $1000 each). It just took 10 years to get it right

 

[disease8]

Thats great thanks! I am looking into an upgrade for the processor seen a Hex Core Phenom, cores at 2.8 for about £120 which seems very cheap. Just need a small hard drive for my windows installation (I prob have one lying around) then move the install off my 450gb velociraptor onto the small one and use the velociraptor as video storage only fro projects I am working on.. I hope with those two changes I will have some stress free editing! It was nearly there at the moment I have edited projects before on it just that they didnt have so many shots! I will keep looking at your posts for ideas in the future. I think my MOBO can only take up to 16gb ram, but thats another upgrade I can look into in the future...

 

[disease8]

So just to double check. DO you think that CPU and Hard drive will make the biggest differences for me?

 

[CaedenV]

parallelism will always help with an editing rig. Moving from 4 small/slow cores to 6 bigger/faster cores will do a lot. Here is an example:
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/111?vs=203
You can expect an approximate 50-100% increase in processing performance assuming that is where the bottleneck is.

Before I upgraded my system I threw in a Core2Quad and OC'd it to 3GHz to see if I could keep my old rig (where I work we have a ton of old equipment to choose from, we refurbish computers for low income families in the area, we have done over 60 computers this month alone). It did help some, but the real bottleneck in my system was the max 4GB of Ram it would take, as well as it being DDR2 800mhz. Being as your system is DDR3 instead of DDR2, and that you have 8GB instead of 4GB I doubt you will run into the same issues, but just be warned that you may want to upgrade the Ram to 16GB as well.

Good luck!

 

[disease8]

parallelism will always help with an editing rig. Moving from 4 small/slow cores to 6 bigger/faster cores will do a lot. Here is an example:
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/111?vs=203
You can expect an approximate 50-100% increase in processing performance assuming that is where the bottleneck is.

Before I upgraded my system I threw in a Core2Quad and OC'd it to 3GHz to see if I could keep my old rig (where I work we have a ton of old equipment to choose from, we refurbish computers for low income families in the area, we have done over 60 computers this month alone). It did help some, but the real bottleneck in my system was the max 4GB of Ram it would take, as well as it being DDR2 800mhz. Being as your system is DDR3 instead of DDR2, and that you have 8GB instead of 4GB I doubt you will run into the same issues, but just be warned that you may want to upgrade the Ram to 16GB as well.

Good luck!

thats great I will see what happens with the new hard drive, then with a new cpu and then if need be will double the ram...

 

[disease8]

I have been looking into this and have a couple of questions.
DO you think I could get away with a Phenom x6 that is 2.7ghz instead of 3ghz? (The difference in money is minimum £50).
And Where should Adobe Premier CS5 be installed, is it still ok to install that with the OS on the system disk?

Many thanks,
Dom.

 

[disease8]

And will I need a more powerful fan? Wary of spending so much on cpu at once will have to wait till next pay day on friday. Just bought a cheap hard drive for OS disk.

 

[CaedenV]

Dont worry about an after market cooler until you start overclocking. The Hyper 212+ is about $30 USD which is pretty cheap, and it is one of the best performing air coolers on the market today (just not as pretty as some of the Zalman CNPS coolers).

Yes, for AMD get a cheap one and then overclock the hell out of it. A 2.7 should OC to 3GHz without any stability issues (you could likely get to 3.5-4GHz, but it depends on the setup). I don't generally suggest OCing a production rig, but AMDs are made to OC a little, and upping the clock 500MHz is not going to hurt anything.

 

[majorgibly]

Dont worry about an after market cooler until you start overclocking. The Hyper 212+ is about $30 USD which is pretty cheap, and it is one of the best performing air coolers on the market today (just not as pretty as some of the Zalman CNPS coolers).

Yes, for AMD get a cheap one and then overclock the hell out of it. A 2.7 should OC to 3GHz without any stability issues (you could likely get to 3.5-4GHz, but it depends on the setup). I don't generally suggest OCing a production rig, but AMDs are made to OC a little, and upping the clock 500MHz is not going to hurt anything.

Can I ask why you don't overclock production rigs?

 

[CaedenV]

stability is key, so you build to spec. A small OC is fine, but you can do with with the non-K version. If you 'need' to OC to do what you want to do with your rig then what you really need is a better grade rig. Plus, anything more than a small OC can cause instability and shorten the life of your parts. Production rigs should put stability first, and performance (while needing to be fast enough) is a 2ndary consideration. In fact, a true workstation is a computer that has redundancy or error correction on as many levels as possible, and are highly parallel in nature, while a more 'civilian' production rigs lack the error correction, they are becoming every more parallel (multi/many core, duel/quad channel, multiple HDDs), and with some redundancy (raid).

Think of it this way; If you depend on your machine for your livelihood, would you rather output 2-3fps faster? Or be sure that your rig is dependable? because if you screw up the release of a project then the projects will dry up, and then you cannot put food on the table. That is why you do not OC a production rig.

 

[disease8]

Dont worry about an after market cooler until you start overclocking. The Hyper 212+ is about $30 USD which is pretty cheap, and it is one of the best performing air coolers on the market today (just not as pretty as some of the Zalman CNPS coolers).

Yes, for AMD get a cheap one and then overclock the hell out of it. A 2.7 should OC to 3GHz without any stability issues (you could likely get to 3.5-4GHz, but it depends on the setup). I don't generally suggest OCing a production rig, but AMDs are made to OC a little, and upping the clock 500MHz is not going to hurt anything.

Hi thanks again. So the day has come that I have been paid and I am eagerly checking out hex core's on Ebay. I am torn between getting on that is 2.8 2000mhz fsb or 3ghz 4000mhz fsb. It is quite a large price leap, I think my mobo is only 1500mhz fsb anyway but if I got the 4ghz fsb I would have room for upgrading mobo....

Argh hate making these kind of decisions, I have wasted so much time and money buying all the wrong parts already! (This will be third CPU)...

If you say 2.8 will be ok I should probably listen as i need to save £!!
There is one NEW for £120 including p& p... or its more like £160-£200 for 3ghz one..(possibly second hand).

 

[disease8]

Got this: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/160697765972?ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1439.l2649#ht_1203wt_1139

 

[disease8]

Already re-installed OS and CS5 on a 80gb 7200rpm drive I bought leaving the 450gb 10k rpm one free for storing video file for editing.
So will let you know how I get on with these upgrades! Then I guess look into ram if I need to. Maybe when I have to work on a larger project,

 

[disease8]

to have done the trick. I am having problems with my graphics card and Premier crashes when half way through a render.. :-(

 

[disease8]

Ok so everything appears to be working much better thank you !

Just wanted to clear up, do I keep my premier project files on the system disk or the video storage one?

I have overheating problems where the PC was shutting down during rendering but just had to uninstall OC Tuner and give the heat sink a clean!

Many thanks again now I can get on with editing. I noticed my ram is nearly half way taken up with only a tiny 5 minute video so I know this will be on my list of upgrades asap.

Dom.

 

[disease8]

Just to update this, the advise was great and my new system is brilliant. I upgraded the motherboard and cpu and added another system hard disk to free up my main storage drive which is 10,000 rpm. The Hex Core Phenom processor i got is speedy !!

 

[LatteBrothers]

We've been doing some great work with builds using SSD's and Premier. For the video editor, there are some things you should know.

If done correctly, you will get render speeds that simply blow-away even high-speed HDD's.

If money is not a problem, us couple of fast 300 GB SSD's on a motherboard that supports 6GBs SATA on (2) channels. Stripe them at RAID 0 to finish with a super fast 500 GB drive for rendering video.

Add (if your motherboard permits) one more 300Gb drive as your boot drive. Expect to pay about $900 for the (3) SSD's - Money well worth spending for the professional video editor.

Read the whole article at:
http://www.facebook.com/notes/latte-brothers-communications/studio-b-notes-ssds-video-processing-and-computers/141193519357890