Can Premiere handle this?

[Chris Campbell]

About to tackle my first premiere job (CS6) after many years on Avid and FCP. The project is going to end up as 4 HD screens side by side, all showing different content in sync.
It will be about 8 minutes long.
Most of the footage will be 5k Epic at 29.97. Some shots will span 1 screen, some 2. My plan is to edit the files natively in premiere in a custom 7680x1080 RED sequence (4x1920), with 4 main tracks, each track representing one final display. I will then send the project to AE and render out each HD screen file using the output crop setting in the output templates.
So far in my testing I seem to be able to get ok playback at 1/16 res. and everything seems to work as planned. Anything to watch out for? I'm a little worried that performance might bog down after I'm well into the project.
I'm on an 8 core macpro with 8 gigs of RAM and Mercury CUDA support.
Thanks
Chris

[Karl Soule]

RAM is potentially a little light, but you're well within Premiere Pro's maximum 10k x 8k (26MP) maximum resolution. We have seen people do work like this before. If you are doing any transitions within tracks, try testing those out early, since they effectively add more clips to decode. If they're working fine, you should be okay.

[Andrew clemson]

Surely for a job like that you can justify buying some more RAM? OWC sells it stupid cheap.

[Wes Howell]

The year of the Mac can make a difference and the type of CUDA card can as well.
For example, The Quadro 4000 is a rock solid card (and there are other great newer cards too) but we've seen several issues with some older GTX285's.
It's my opinion that you should be using a minimum of at least 8 I7 / Nehalem or newer cores. Newer processors such as Sandy Bridge can work well with 4, but I still prefer 8 or 12.
The Nehalem / I7 Cores were a big jump in performance when they came out a 2-3 years ago.

You also may want to create a stress test / proof of concept as you're working with a very large frame dimension / sequence settings and you're doing something a bit unique. Even if you duplicate a bunch of media and start a long render overnight - it might give you some peace of mind. That's probably what I would do.

Best,
Wes

[Alexander Ibrahim]

Everyone is spot on, but I want to emphasize that you NEED more RAM.

So, if you do nothing else, go get more RAM. Just buy all you can afford for your Mac.

If you have a 2010 or later Mac 24GB is a sweet spot for value, but with RED I see improvements that are worthwhile even if you jam the machine with all the "unsupported" RAM you can get through OWC.

I highly recommend OWC for RAM. Over any other third party for Macs.

[Chris Campbell]

OK, thanks everyone. I will definitely look into more RAM.