Time-Lapse Sequences DO NOT WORK in CS5 ! Why??

[George D.]

As I have progressed in my learning of Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 utilizing the footage from the Red-One and the Nikon D2X DSLR (which I use exclusively for timelapse) I am still struggling to make these timelapse sequences work properly.

I know how to put the TIFF timelapse sequences into the CS5 timeline as a complete sequence, but getting them to run smoothly without hick-ups is just not happening. I don't want to have to reduce the quality to make it work, because these sequences have to be placed back to back with the Red-One footage in the timeline.

I've tried making it a QuickTime movie first, and it does run a little smoother, but still has stalls and stops, which make it unusable.

Maybe the individual images are just too large for the Windows7 PC to handle. But, if it can handle Red-One footage, why not these? I even reduced the playback quality to 1/16th and it makes no difference.

I was told that I may need an extremely fast storage system in my computer to handle this footage. Do you have any suggestion as to the storage system I could get and have installed? Since each TIFF frame is about 9MB, and at 30fps, what would that take?

It is VERY important that I get a handle on this problem so our timelapse sequences work well. For wildlife, involving plants, egg development, etc, it is CRUCIAL.

Thanks very much.

PS - I hope everyone is having, or has had, a wonderful Thanksgiving.

.

 

[paulherrin]

you need to render the timelapse sequences in your project. they're going to look fine, but since they are each considerably sized files, each one has to be read in order to playback. you're probably not going to get good playback on your computer. red one footage is very much different to the computer than a frame sequence. you'll find that out if you export your red footage to a dpx or tif sequence, you'll be experiencing the same thing.

 

[Paul Russell]

Open up a seperate Premiere project, put your timelapse in and then render it out to an AVI using the lagarith lossless codec, which is free.
http://lags.leetcode.net/codec.html
Then use that AVI for your editing. If you want even more performance, create a proxy file,

 

[Brad Allen]

Hi George, the guys before have pretty much answered this, but I'll add onto what they have said.

If you are needing playback of tiff's at real-time without rendering then you are going to need a storage system that can support readback speeds of 270MB/sec (9mb*30). Any current hard drive will not be able to do this on it's own - especially not if you are asking it to sustain this speed. This leaves you with a few options.

1. Prerender for realtime playback on the timeline. This will tell Premiere to go and compress those tiff's into a more playback friendly format on the timeline so that you can see what it looks like. (This is your cheapest and easiest option in my mind)
2. Create a RAID array. A raid array will allow you to pair multiple hardrives together so that they share the burden of speed between multiple drives. They are complicated and you need to know your stuff before you invest in setting one up. They can also get messy when thinking about data redundancy. You can read more here
3. You could buy a SATA 6gbps SSD. Many of these can achieve upwards of 500MB/sec readback speed. However, not all SSD's are created equal and doing your research on which drive to use is extremely important. They can also be fairly expensive, and you will want to make sure that you have SATA 6gps support on your motherboard.

Hope that helps