Premiere Pro: playback slows down as I add more clips

Midnight Detective · Post by **Midnight Detective** » Sat Apr 28, 2007 8:39 pm

I'm using the codec suggested in the tutorial (PICvideo M-JPEG 3 vfw Codec) and still my avi clips are played back slow and choppy and the more I add on the track, the worse it gets... What might I be doing wrong?

Zarxrax · Post by **Zarxrax** » Sat Apr 28, 2007 9:02 pm

Premiere Pro is just slow and choppy by nature :\
Adobe recommends a 3ghz or faster processor.

Scintilla · Post by **Scintilla** » Sat Apr 28, 2007 10:01 pm

1) Are you actually rendering preview files? Also consider going to the MJPEG codec settings and reducing the video quality.

Midnight Detective · Post by **Midnight Detective** » Sun Apr 29, 2007 3:26 am

Rendering how? Oh dear, I'm in over my head, aren't I? But we all have to learn sometime...

Scintilla · Post by **Scintilla** » Sun Apr 29, 2007 9:09 am

When you have a section of the timeline that Premiere Pro doesn't think it can play back in realtime (usually due to use of transitions or special effects or having clips on more than one video track simultaneously), you'll see a red bar appear over that section, up by the Work Area Bar.

Whenever this happens, you can render preview files for that area. Just drag the handles of the Work Area Bar to include the part that has the red bar, and then hit Enter. The red bar should change to green as the previews are rendered.

You'll know it works if it plays back and you see the PICVideo watermark on that section of the video (unless, of course, you bought the full version of the codec).

The big problem with this is that Premiere Pro oftentimes thinks it can play back your video in realtime when it really can't (especially if you're using AVISynth scripts), and therefore it won't allow you to render previews. This is my one major gripe with the program and I wish they would fix it.
In order to force Premiere Pro to let you render previews for a section of video, just throw a color matte into a higher video track and reduce its Opacity to 0%. It'll look just the same as before, but the red bar should appear for that section.

If you still don't see speed improvements after that, you may wish to consider right-clicking the timeline monitor window and changing the visual quality setting to "Draft Quality". This can be helpful if you don't mind putting up with some pixelation while you edit. It won't affect the final export.

Zarxrax · Post by **Zarxrax** » Sun Apr 29, 2007 12:22 pm

Scintilla wrote:The big problem with this is that Premiere Pro oftentimes thinks it can play back your video in realtime when it really can't (especially if you're using AVISynth scripts), and therefore it won't allow you to render previews. This is my one major gripe with the program and I wish they would fix it.

I think they have fixed this in CS3. At least, in the 10 minutes or so that I tried it, that appeared to be the case.

Midnight Detective · Post by **Midnight Detective** » Sun Apr 29, 2007 2:35 pm

Thank you, with rendering the video now plays properly.