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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Premiere CS6 anything but smooth (6.0.1 made it worse!)

Petri Teittinen

Petri Teittinen

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I'm getting ridiculously bad playback out of Premiere CS6 after updating to 6.0.1. I spent a day shooting motocross at high framerates in 2K, 3K, 4K and 5K. RED Player and RCX Pro play the files very smoothly. Premiere chokes totally on all of them and keeps on throwing up the yellow "Media Pending" screen, regardless of where the files reside.

Hardware specs:
Windows 7 64-bit
Nvidia GTX-460 (for GUI/display)
Nvidia GTX-580 3GB (for heavy lifting)
RED Rocket
Intel i7-3930K CPU (no overclocking)
Asus Rampage IV Extreme mobo
32GB of RAM
SSD drives
RED Station via eSATA (160-180 megabytes per second to RAM)


Some notes:
1) Adobe Speedgrade playback performance is excellent due to RED Rocket use. (Until Nvidia OpenGL driver crashes, i.e. for about 3 minutes.)
2) Before updating Premiere to 6.0.1, I could see REDCOLOR3 and REDGAMMA3 listed in clip Source Settings. After update, both are missing.
3) After Effects is trying to use GTX-460 for OpenGL and claims there are no supported CUDA display adapters in the system.
4) Have tested Nvidia graphics drivers 301.42 and 304.79 (beta). Both exhibit display driver and OpenGL driver crashes. Exiting RED Player can cause a display driver crash. Once the driver crashed while Windows was doing nothing but copying files from one drive to another.

Will test Da Vinci Resolve 9 next.

Any advice and/or recommendations is much appreciated.

edit: Amended text a bit to make it clear that playback performance went to hell after 6.0.1 update.
 
Aleksandar Colancevski said:
Advice? Buy preinstalled computer like Dell Red Edition or just forget that homemade Windows will work smooth anytime soon, whatever hardware you have.
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Well that's just total and utter bullshit, but thanks anyway.
 
William Robinette said:
Well for #2 on your list, you have to re-install the Adobe Labs update every time you upgrade to get the latest redcolor/gamas
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Oh? OK, I did not know that. Thanks. I was under the false impression that 6.0.1 already included the latest importers etc.

edit: re-installing Adobe Labs update did not help at all. I tried the old trick of deleting Premiere preferences, but that didn't help either.
 
Try to go with only 1 graphic card and no Redrocket. Try to use R3D file without sound.

Be careful, nvidia GTX 460 is not in the list of Adobe graphic card supported by CS6. you have to change the cuda supported card file.
http://www.adobe.com/fr/products/premiere/tech-specs.html

You should be more fluid with just Premiere CS6 and 1 nvidia card than within RCX. You you don't have access anymore to the RedColor3 Redgamma 3, be sure it is because you have to reinstall the RedEpic importer form Adobe Lab (dated from june).

I think you have a cuda problem with your graphic card. Remove the 460 and the Rocket. Then , get the last Adobe lab Red importer, and try. It should be very smooth with only that configuration. Then try to improve with the second GPU and the Rocket.

Olivier
 
First quick test with Resolve 9 and a 3K high framerate file. Plays smooth as butter with Decode Quality set to "Full Resolution Premium".

4K high framerate at Full Res. Premium reaches 18 fps. Dropping down to Half Res. Premium and it's buttery smooth again. Hmmmmh.
 
Updated mobo BIOS to latest version and messed about with various software for a while. Not a single Nvidia driver crash so I guess new BIOS helped in that respect. But it did nothing to Premiere playback. Resolve 9, RED Player and RC-X Pro all play Epic files smoothly. Guess I have to uninstall and re-install CS6 to get back to v6.0.0 for smoother playback.
 
Petri Teittinen said:
Updated mobo BIOS to latest version and messed about with various software for a while. Not a single Nvidia driver crash so I guess new BIOS helped in that respect. But it did nothing to Premiere playback. Resolve 9, RED Player and RC-X Pro all play Epic files smoothly. Guess I have to uninstall and re-install CS6 to get back to v6.0.0 for smoother playback.
Click to expand...

Did you try removing the GTX-460?

Not 100% sure about this, but I'd heard that CS got confused with dual GPU cards from nVidia. What you have are dual GPU's that are dissimilar - and Adobe may not test for that or deal with that.

In a perfect world, you'd be able to throw a GTX-690 and Adobe would take advantage of both GPU's, but ... that world may be off in the future a bit unfortunately.

But, I do like your idea of multiple video cards. Unlike Adobe, Eyeon Fusion is designed to take full advantage of that, and Eyeon is exhibiting at nVidia's booth at SIGGRAPH.
 
Les C. said:
Did you try removing the GTX-460?
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No, it's there for Da Vinci Resolve.

But, I do like your idea of multiple video cards.
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It's Da Vinci's idea, not mine. Resolve configuration guide for Windows makes a strong point for two GPUs, one of which is for display/GUI only.
 
Petri Teittinen said:
No, it's there for Da Vinci Resolve.


It's Da Vinci's idea, not mine. Resolve configuration guide for Windows makes a strong point for two GPUs, one of which is for display/GUI only.
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I think multiple cards will be the future, and I hope that Adobe catches up with this trend, but ... they are definitely mass market whereas Resolve and Fusion are for very specialized extremely high end users.

You still might yank it just to see if it clears up the problem, and if it makes enough difference with Resolve to justify its presence.

Be sure to request support from Adobe for multiple GPUs on separate cards (and on the same card). If enough people ask for it, and it gives them bragging rights over competing products ...
 
The thing is, I got a lot better performance out of Premiere CS6 before updating to 6.0.1. None of this "Media Pending" nonsense, permanent freeze frames during playback or 10 second delays with v6.0.0. I think I might be better off going back to the earlier version, despite all the bugfixes in 6.0.1.
 
Petri - you should know that most are reporting, if any change, a speed up in performance with 6.01 over 6.00, so there's something wrong here. Just downgrading to 6.00 may not fix the problem.

#1 - Is the RED Rocket card enabled in Premiere? (Found in the Source Settings panel - import a clip and see if it shows up.)

#2 - Is Premiere Pro recognizing the better Nvidia card by default? In your Project Settings, are you seeing GPU Acceleration on?

#3 - Have you run any diagnostic tools, like Sisoft SANDRA, to check and make sure there aren't any other weird throughput issues? This utility compares all the different data pathways in the system to known good configurations, and it's helped me diagnose stuff like a bad Southbridge driver before.

#4 - Have you tried holding down CTRL - ALT - SHIFT during Premiere Pro launch? That bombs out a few different prefs files, and can sometimes clear up anomalous behavior.

#5 - 2 video cards of differing power levels can be a bit touchy. Make sure the Premiere Source and Program monitors stay on the "heavy lifting" card. If they span over both cards, it'll create problems. As a troubleshooting technique, I would try removing the lesser-powered video card from the system, and rebooting the computer. Windows sometimes can swap which card is used for "heavy lifting" in the system, and it could be part of a temporary problem. Removing the card will clear things up, and then when you put the card back in, things will work normally.

Hope this helps - what you're experiencing is unusual, but hopefully we can figure out the weirdness and get you back to editing.
 
Thank you very much for posting, Karl! I'll test your tips when I have a free moment a bit later today.
 
Anytime, and let us know what resolves it - this isn't an "official" channel for troubleshooting, but there are a fair amount of Adobe people that check in on the boards. Hopefully, we can get you past this quickly.
 
Ohh-kay. I ran some tests based on your tips. The first thing I did was to hold down CTRL-ALT-SHIFT during Premiere Pro launch, and it certainly zapped some preferences. Couldn't drag&drop any Epic files into Premiere afterwards, for instance.

So I closed Premiere, re-downloaded the latest RED Importers from Adobe Labs and copied them to relevant directories. Ran Premiere and now it allows drag&dropping Epic files, and shows REDcolor3 and REDgamma3 in clip Source Settings. For testing I dropped in a 96fps file with a resolution of 4800x2700.

As per Karl's tips/questions:

#1 - RED Rocket enabled? Opened clip Source Settings and yes, there's a pulldown menu letting me choose whether to use one Rocket, all Rockets or none at all. Selecting One or All makes no difference in performance.

#2 - Project Settings selects GPU Acceleration (CUDA) automatically so I assume it finds a CUDA compatible card in the system.
Note: I have not added GTX 460 manually into the "cuda supported cards.txt". Since GPU Acceleration is enabled by default and GTX 580 is listed by Adobe in the text file, I'm assuming Premiere selects and uses the GTX 580.

#3 - Ran a few tests with Sandra, found no problems. Excellent results, in fact.

#5 - See #2 above: I'm fairly certain Premiere uses GTX 580 only for CUDA. I'd rather not remove GTX 460 as I use the 460+580 combo for DaVinci Resolve on the same system.

I next began fiddling around with Rocket settings and discovered something rather interesting. First, this is what happens when I have Rocket enabled in clip Source Settings:

(Playback resolution set to 1/4 and paused resolution at Full.) I press Space to view clip in Program monitor: timecode starts running but video playback does not: the same frame remains on screen. I press Space to stop playback: video in Program monitor updates to show the frame I stopped playback at.

I have installed two instances of GPU monitoring gadgets on my desktop, one for each GPU. During playback in scenario described above the gadgets show that neither of the GPUs is doing anything. But when I press Space to stop playback, I can see GTX 580's GPU bar leap from 0% to 3% for a fraction of a second.

Next, I opened clip Source Settings and set "Use Rocket:" to NONE. Pressed Space for playback and.... video in Program monitor starts playing almost immediately. I stop playback, raise Playback resolution to 1/2 and press Space again: video resumes playing. What's more, it's playing smoothly!

Looking at my monitoring gadgets during playback I notice a couple of things:
1) All 12 CPU threads are running at 100% (as expected)
2) Both GPUs are churning away, with GTX580 at 8% and GTX460 at 6%. When I stop playback, both drop to 0% at once.

How did some of the GPU load get distributed to GTX460, I wonder? Premiere should not be aware of its CUDA capabilities at all.

My next test hints at an answer. I opened Project Settings and switched Mercury from GPU to software, then pressed Space for playback. And what happens?

1) Video in Program monitor is playing smoothly at 1/2 resolution.
2) All 12 CPU threads leap to 100%.
3) GTX580 GPU use stays at 0%.
4) GTX460 GPU use leaps to 6%.

I think this proves Premiere Pro uses only GTX580 for CUDA -- and GTX460 is used only to draw pixels on my 30" display.

The tests above also point the finger at my RED Rocket. Even though RED Player, RC-X Pro and DaVinci Resolve all use the Rocket without problems, Premiere Pro does not. At least now I know the culprit and can concentrate on solving the issue.

Thanks, Karl!
 
Rolled Rocket driver back to 1.4.19: did not help at all.

Uninstalled Rocket in Windows Device Manager, ticked the box "delete driver" and rebooted. Windows re-installed Rocket with latest driver (1.4.27) automatically, but playback performance with Rocket enabled in Premiere Pro remains the same, i.e. unusable.

RED and Adobe, I'd really like some advice on how to make Rocket and Premiere Pro 6.0.1 play together nicely.
 
Sent a bug report to Adobe about this issue. Fingers crossed.
 
Hi Paul,

If you have a minute, I would recommend that you remove the slower card and open a NEW project in PR.

Once you have a new project in PR open enable the Red Rocket and see if that improves performance.

Ultimately, to get to the bottom of this, we need to break things down a bit more and simplifying the system is something I would recommend.

When you get a sec, can you try that and post your results?

Thanks,
Wes Howell
Adobe Systems
 
Wes Howell said:
Hi Paul,
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Nobody named Paul here :)

If you have a minute, I would recommend that you remove the slower card and open a NEW project in PR.
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I'll give it a shot when I have a moment.

Although... why did Premiere Pro 6.0.0 work with both GPUs and the RED Rocket when 6.0.1 does not?
 
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