Premiere Pro CS6 - *massive* slowdowns!

Wondering if someone could help me out here...

My current Mac movie editor of choice is Adobe Premiere Pro CS6, which I use on my (still fairly new) MacBook Pro. I've used it for other things recently, including retinting every shot of a movie, and it seemed to be okay. I usually have to leave it sit around 15 minutes to get all of its 'media pending' issues sorted out, but once the files are fully loaded, I'm free to work.

But now, I'm hitting a huge problem that's more or less dragged a project to a halt - it's decided to be *incredibly* slow to the point of being unusable, and seemingly only with this project.

Long story short, I'm trying to recreate (in better quality) an old edit I made of "Casino Royale", the 1967 one, where I moved scenes around and added a gunbarrel. I'm essentially using three files for this:
* A rip of the Casino Royale DVD, converted to M4V so Premiere would open it
* A copy of my old edit, which is an MP4 file (most likely created in Premiere a few years ago)
* A DVD rip of my old edit, converted to M4V

I've even chosen the 'render all effects in work area' option, and most of the clips have a green line above them in the timeline. (I've tried 'render entire work area' and it literally sucked up all space on my computer... 200 GB worth!!) But when I first open the project, I have to wait hours - no exaggeration - for 'media pending' to go away; and if I so much as move a clip a couple frames, it won't play and will act like it's loading something, again for hours.

Does anyone have an idea what could be slowing this one project down so much??

 

In my limited experience, long (feature-length) timelines slow down Premiere a lot. When I once edited a movie, I had to do in chunks and export it in three pieces. That was several years ago, but I've heard that long timelines still can be an issue.

But it sounds like you had previously built similarly long timelines without a problem?

Can you give a few more details on projects that have and haven't worked in Premiere lately?

 

Yes - the other project I've worked on very recently was another full-length movie re-edit, with loads of special effects; I was essentially trying to overhaul the appearance and mood of a movie (working from an M4A DVD rip), which required extensive recoloring and relighting of literally every scene.

As I said, it takes a *little* bit of extra time to load this, maybe about 15 minutes before I can get into it, but NOWHERE near the amount of trouble I've been having with "Casino Royale", which is nothing more than simply shuffling scenes around.

 

I'm not on a Mac so maybe my advice is somewhat misguided but I would say that Premiere is overkill if you're just cutting and pasting scenes around. You might want to consider looking at an MPEG editor for Mac which will work directly with files from a DVD rip without really converting them to a totally different format. The whole conversion in and out of DVD format should be avoided if at all possible. On my PC I use a program called VideoRedo (Windows only software) which will work directly with MPEG or VOB files from a DVD rip if all I want to do is straight edits of source material.

This is probably not the answer you want and none of this explains why you're having difficulties with this particular movie in comparison to the other project.

 

Well, I do need to do some simple crossfading, but that's all.

Essentially, I'm trying to overlay the new source material onto the old, poor quality edit and try to match it frame-by-frame, being able to switch video tracks on and off to see if I'm being accurate.

 

The problem is your MP4s and M4Vs. Those are highly compressed formats that are not suitable for editing. It's a wonder that it even worked in the first place.
I can't tell you which format to use. I use Apple ProRes, but if you don't have Final Cut Pro installed, I don't know if that will work. Otherwise maybe DV will work, but be prepared to have huge file sizes after you convert your DVDs to an editable format.

 

These are the correct answers, in my opinion. A lot also depends on your choice of input and output formats. Neither MP4 nor MKV are good choices, even in high-powered editing systems. In pro editing, DNxHD, ProRes, DPX, and TIFF are all valid formats used all over the place.

The problem with doing anything from a Blu-ray is that the images have already been stepped on too much. This is like trying to remaster an album from 128kbps MP3s. (Or worse.)

 

That is true, but the problem there is that you're going to run into I-frames that limit where you can have a cut. This is the problem with using an interframe format:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_compression_picture_types
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intra_frame
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter_frame
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_frame

The easy way to remember it: Intra-frame is good; inter-frame is bad. Working with super-compressed formats is very bad. What's worse is that these are all 8-bit, which really sucks.

 

I think in the fan edit world, it's a foregone conclusion that you get a hold of what you get a hold of and accept it. That seems to be what Lazenby's going for here.

Yeah, 4:2:0 sampling from a DVD rip is a pretty bad place to start from if you want to re-grade a movie. But if someone gets some enjoyment (or learning) out of doing it, more power to them, I say.

 

What program would you guys recommend for basic movie editing. Something on a budget and not high end.

I would just like to be able to make some movies more kid friendly by deleting a scene here or there.

Thanks

 

I've always had great results with Videoredo. Never had a problem with glitchy cuts, it always cuts where I want it to cut. It could just be that I never need to do the kind of cutting that would reveal the limitations of I-frames.

 

So then, what program do I use to convert the DVD files to an edit-friendly format??

 

What platform? The truth is that anything you use is kind of futile, because you're starting with a horribly stepped-on compressed version (DVD or Blu-ray). Converting from -- say -- .VOB files to ProRes 422, editing, and then converting back to .VOB will result in a ton of artifacts, because of the layers and layers of compression going on. It's kind of taking a Xerox copy of a photograph, making a new photograph of it, adjusting the new photograph, and then going back to a Xerox copy. It's never as good as it would be if you could just get your hands on the original negative or the raw camera files.

So I'm basically saying give up and live with the disc -- which I know is not fun, but it will give you better quality than what you're trying to do.

If we had very, very high quality movie downloads available out there (which are technically possible), that would be a different story.

 

Uh......... you are aware that people make fan edits of movies all the time, right? This is my hobby; and this is the only movie I've ever had a problem editing.

I don't mean to be rude, but I just want to be able to edit the movie.

 

I love Vidiot's advice: give up. Anyways we know he does this kind of thing for a living and nothing at the prosumer level is going to pass muster - which is understandable for someone in his position. My recommendation would be to go look at videohelp.com. Lots of info on the site and the forums. You might want to post your question on one of the forums there. Good luck!

 

You mention that one version is the "guide" version. Whereas its quality is not your top priority (I was going to say premiere), what if you converted it to a format that is less CPU intensive (seeing as you are on a MAC it might be Quicktime, or Mpeg2). I think you are talking Standard Def, so downsampling this "track" is likely a waste of time.

You say you have a newish Macbook Pro. This may mean that your RAM is not upgradeable, but if it is, it might be worth exploring. Oh, and this may also be an issue, lack of empty drive space for temp files etc.

 

Nah, my drive's only half full, it's good.

I did try converting the files to DV yesterday, with MPEG Streamclip - but it after it took ten minutes to render *six seconds* of blackness before the MGM logo (like, literally), I gave up.

 

Ok, now you are outside of Premiere, and still getting abysmal results. Is it possible Streamclip was not updating its preview window? What about letting it run overnight?

 

I think it's not your movie to edit. If you had made a film from scratch, would you be happy that fans were taking it apart and trying to "improve" on it? I think you have to look at the moral side of this as well as the technical.

If it makes you happy, go for it. I can condone certain things, particularly friends of mine who enjoy taking mono pieces of a song and figuring out how to make a new never-before-released stereo version, knowing it's never going to be commercially released. But in all cases, they have access to tapes, LPs, and CDs and aren't working with compressed files. The compression will kill ya. MPEG4 in particular is nasty to deal with in editing.

 

Are you serious? Are you actually serious? No, you know what, I'm not having this argument. Very little makes me happy in this ****ty world as it is, and no one's stomping on something that does.

 

That's my next step. Another problem may be that I'm trying to convert the M4V's that already USED to be MPEG's, since I don't have Apple's MPEG-2 plug-in.

I have a feeling I'll be buying that in the near future.

 

Two possibilities - try improving your hardware. Max out the RAM at 16Gb and go for a large Solid State Drive (OWC sells them). Easy to fit in older Macbook Pros. I've just converted Diane's 13" Macbook Pro (mid 2012) from a sluggish, always churning beach ball into a turbo monster by replacing the hard drive with an OWC Mercury Electra ($289) and 8GB RAM (up from 4Gb standard) at $139. They even supply you with the correct tools and an enclosure for your old hard drive.

 

Yes, I'm serious: MP4's are very hard to deal with in editing. They're a nightmare in color-correction. As I said, ProRes, DNxHD, and DPX sequences all work well.

If the hardware is heavily taxed by the decoding/encoding of the MP4's, you'll need lots of GPU's and a very fast CPU and tons of system RAM in order to speed up performance. I agree that I/O will have an effect, but if it's just HD, that's not that big a problem. The choice of file format is the problem. Starting from DVD or Blu-ray is not great, either.

 

Vidiot - thanks for the words of wisdom. I literally know nothing about video editing, except it's supposed to be very memory intensive. Those new solid state drives even speed up the boot time from 30 seconds down to less than 10 seconds.