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

[Les C.]

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.

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 ...

[Petri Teittinen]

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.

[Karl Soule]

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.

[Petri Teittinen]

Thank you very much for posting, Karl! I'll test your tips when I have a free moment a bit later today.

[Karl Soule]

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.

[Petri Teittinen]

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!

[Petri Teittinen]

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.

[Petri Teittinen]

Sent a bug report to Adobe about this issue. Fingers crossed.

[Wes Howell]

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

[Petri Teittinen]

Hi Paul,

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.

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?