Hot PC, Cold Scrub

[kevindcornwell]

I am in need of either some advice, or some consolation. I purpose-built my pc thinking I'd have no trouble scrubbing or doing any video editing tasks. Rendering is a snap, but editing is horrible. When I move the timeline needle, it takes about 6 seconds for the preview window to show the new frame. Scrubbing is out! I can't preview at all unless I render first. Yes, I've got cuda turned on, etc. But obviously I'm missing something. Ideas please - I'll try nearly anything! Is avchd this troublesome? Should I shoot at a lower resolution (I don't want to as I have to zoom in to eliminate the stabilized edges.) You can see some of my underwater work on YouTube, search for kevindcornwell (I know my output is infantile - have mercy, I'm just starting out...)

TIA,
Kevin

Scenario:
--------------------
1920x1080 avchd source
1080x720 working size (and output to DVD)
RGB color curves and Unsharp mask applied to every clip


Software:
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Windows 7Pro 64-bit
Premiere Pro CS5
Mercalli 2.1 for pre-stabilization (I'm a beta tester)


Hardware:
-------------------------
i7 extreme (X990) 12core 3.45Ghz
24GB Ram
2 x 2TB drives
1 x 500GB system drive
1 x 128GB SSD scratch drive
GeForce GTX480 (drives two 25" LCD's)
GeForce GTX430 (drives a Cintiq 12" tablet)

[kevindcornwell]

For reasons I can't explain, I had the idea in my head that it didn't matter where my assets were located. I have them all stored on my network. So when I imported them into PP CS5, everything bogged down to a near-halt. So, now I've replace my two 'green' 2TB drives with two 7200rpm enterprise sata's, set them up striped, AND my new workflow is that I place the needed assets on the striped pair first, before I import and get to work. Everything is now working the way it's supposed to. I can finally get some real editing done.

Thanks,
Kevin

[Marc Peters]

Thanks for the update Kevin - glad you go it all sorted.

[kevindcornwell]

I have 8TB of network storage on a NAS box. My workstation has: 500GB system/OS hdd; 2 TB hdd for 'whatever'; 4 TB (2 striped 7200rpm 2TB hdd's) for video work; 128GB SSd. What I was doing 'wrong' is that I was importing the assets into PP CS5 across the network from the NAS box. What I'm doing now, is copying the needed assets from the NAS to the workstation's RAID (the two striped hdd's). THEN importing them into PP CS5 from the RAID. I use the SSD as the scratch for video and audio previews. I can now scrub and preview in real-time. What an incredible relief. My assets are all 1920x1080 AVCHD and my output is invariably 720x480 for DVD or web use. On this hardware, a 5 minute video takes about 12 minutes to export/render which includes Downsampling/Unsharp/RGB curves/audio.