PPro CS5 GUI on mac really jerky

[yuki.P]

Moving clips around on the timeline of CS5 on the mac is like playing Russian roullette; you never know where the clip is actually going to fall. It's like the interface has a refresh rate of 5fps or something. It seems to take forever for clips to snap against each other, and this lag causes the user to think something is wrong and then move the clips around more than necessary.

Please please tell me that this will be addressed in a point release. I don't want to have to pay to upgrade for a solution to a problem that should never have made it to a full release.

[LFedit]

A completely fresh install of 10.6 and a full system update to 10.6.8 successfully installed CS5.5.  Ran the CS5.5.1 update and tried this set up on a MacPro 3.1 system without CUDA support.  Timelines are fast and fluent and h.264 scrubs smoothly in both the timeline and the source monitor.  Took the same boot drive and installed CUDA drivers for a Nvidia 4000 for mac and ran this boot drive on a MacPro 4.1 system.  The same results as mentioned in a previous post above, fluid instance movements on the timeline, but a huge lag in H.264 scrubbing.  I will be fresh installing Lion again, running the adobe cleaner and attempting to reinstall 5.5.  Thanks for you reply Butch2oc, and glad to hear things are going well with the updates. I'm hope I can have a functioning CS5.5 system soon, as I still have not had a possitive experiece editing in premier on my primary MacPro 4.1 system yet. I will report my findings.

[LFedit]

To any one that is still having issues with performance on MacPro 4.1 system.  Official response from Adobe support is that it is still a bug that has not been fixed by the 5.5.1 patch.  My bug # is 2881825, the same bug # from July when I first contacted support about the issue.  I'll update when the bug is finally addressed.  I guess it's back to FCP7 for me.  It's too bad because I was so hopeful for Premiere as an editing suite. 

[Keith Moreau]

That's too bad, because it seems that Butch2oc has a similar 4,1 system and his is working fine. Are you sure that the Adobe bug you mentioned is specifically for 4,1 system?

[LFedit]

I wasn't told specifically that it was a bug for 4.1 systems, but I can confirm that OS10.6.7, 10.6.8, and 10.7.1 all with the 5.5.1 patch works spectacularly on a MacPro 3.1 system.  I can only make assumptions at this point, but it does seam to be an architecture issues with the new MacPros.  Not that I wish it on any one, but it would be nice to hear reports of the issue still occurring on other machines after the patch update, to know that i'm not out on an island with this problem.

[Wil Renczes]

LFEdit, I think you're misinterpreting the feedback you got from tech support.   If you've been led to believe that there's an outstanding issue that Adobe needs to fix, that's fully incorrect.  There's nothing codewise here that I see that we can provide to fix this issue. 

As far as I can see, bug 2881825 was logged by a tech support person, and the only info in the bug was some regression notes from another QE that basically says "It's laggy on 10.6.8". The bug notes also states that it doesn't occur on 10.6.7.

From where I stand, it's the same issue that we've been discussing so far, and all indications point to it being an OS performance issue, specific to 10.6.8, &  fixed by Lion.

[LFedit]

Thanks for the reply Wil Renczes, I have been lead to believe there is a outstanding issue that Adobe needs to fix.  As such I was told from the support person at Adobe that the bug is being addressed with senior staff and I will be contacted when the bug is addressed.  I was quite clear in stating that the 5.5.1 patch did not fix my issue on my Macpro 4.1 system with the following OS's installed: 10.6.7, 10.6.8 and 10.7.1.

I have clean installed OSX 4 times trying to resolve this issue on a MacPro 4.1 system.  Each time uninstalling CS5.5 and running the adobe cleaner, and reinstalling.  Each time i've done an install I have tested the boot drive in a MacPro3.1 to compare performances.  Each time the OS was installed, the issues regarding timeline lag  were fixed on the MacPro3.1 but not on the 4.1.  And the instance movement on the timeline was fixed with Lion on both systems.

I suppose I should get back on the phone and update my bug log, as Lion has not fixed my lagging timeline with h.264 material on a MacPro4.1.

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

[Todd_Kopriva]

LFEdit,

Please post the case number for your interaction with Adobe Technical Support. I want to make sure that the person that you've talked with has the correct information.

[LFedit]

My case number is 182 687 843.

thanks Todd

[Macphil11]

Todd: As sad As I am that my Move to prp obviously had came to early and I had to go back to fcp: I love this kind of support adobe is offering! Go, fix the things that need to be fixed and more fcp users will join in.

Regards,

Philipp

Ps: 4,1 jerkiness in performance is just one of the points which forced me back. Audio-export (track by track...) had been the ultimate one. And, of course: no external monitoring (at least not with mercury engine on). The whole system is so slow - although it's got 64bits, quadro 4000, 32gb ram. Fcp can't use any of these - but is still so much faster.  Please: do something about it, fast!

[Guest]

I have been monitoring this thread for quite a while with hopes of some answers to the poor performance experiences I have been having since January.

I have yet to try the updates .. or purchase Lion to solve problems that were a combination of a weak implimentation of Mac OS X and Adobe.

My system is at least stable .. to which I refuse to change while in the middle of projects  ... soon after I finish a few projects .. I will attempt to install the updates and Lion.

I would like to make a statement as a Mac User .. and for othe Mac Users:

The Mac version of the Master Suite 5.5 does not live up to its claimed performance .. causing many Mac customers griefs .. and for me .. problems since January.

So ... we all have to purchase Lion to fix this?

I do not have a problem paying $39 for a 'upgraded' fix .. but others might ... since they may have to upgrade many other apps to Lion .. some that may not even be available yet.

For the sake of us all .. I hope your team can author a product that can perform without another series of issues that was never resolved in Snow Leopard.

Good Luck.

[lasvideo]

Wil, Phurther, and LFEdit,  I  just want to make sure all relevant info is communicated, I am on Mac Pro 3.1 (these seem to be the problem free version) , OSX 10.6.8 (see signature for more details) and PrP 5.5.1 I had no lag with any media with 5.5, and I have no lag now with 5.5.1.

Tom Daigon

Avid DS / PrP / After Effects Editor

www.hdshotsandcuts.com

Mac Pro 3,1

2 x 3.2 ghz Quad Core Intel Xeon

10.6.8

Nvidia Quadro 4000

24 gigs ram

Kona 3

Maxx Digita / Areca 8tb. raid

[Guest]

Thanks.

I will post my specs soon .. and hopefully at least try some upgrades soon.

I would like to know how many 12 Core users are out there .... like me.

[lasvideo]

Will - "From where I stand, it's the same issue that we've been discussing so far, and all indications point to it being an OS performance issue, specific to 10.6.8, &  fixed by Lion."

Wil, for what its worth, I get the feeling its more an issue related to hardware changes made to Mac Pro 4,1 and up. Owners of  Mac Pro 3.1 running 10.6.8 seem to be the only systems not complaining about these issues.

[Keith Moreau]

Well, I'm running a Mac Pro 3,1 with 10.6.8 and 5.5.1 and I can tell you the performance is far from spectacular. I've got my Mac Pro about as fast as I can make it with 24GB of RAM and an NVidia Quadro 4000 card. There is no improvement in the 'laggy timeline issue' and in general I can't detect any significant change from Premiere Pro 5 to 5.5 to 5.5.1. So it doesn't seem the reports are consistent. It would be great if there was some definitive explanation for these varying degrees of performance on similar systems. I'm hoping the upgrade to Lion will help me out with various performance issues I'm experiencing, but again it seems you have upgraded to Lion and don't report a performance increase, is that correct? For me, moving to Lion is a big change because of a number of plugins and apps that are not yet Lion compatible.

[lasvideo]

Keith, what kind of raid array do you play your media from. That seems to be the only difference between our systems. I have a Maxx Digital / Areca controller that averages 745 MBPS. It plays Red and H.264 from a Canon 5DM2 at 1/2 resolution just fine.

[Keith Moreau]

All my media is spread across several RAID 5 drives connected by eSATA connections, average speed is about 250MB per second (megaBYTES per second) for each drive, using media that isn't all that high bandwidth, prores 422 is the highest bandwidth format I use, most is in the 35mb/s to 50mb/s range (megaBITS not megaBYTES). In 5.0 and 5.5 I've experienced the laggy timeline issue and marked drops in performance as the project gets bigger. A reboot will make things a bit faster in general for a while. Stacked CUDA effects, such as 3-4 color correction effects make things markedly slower, though the CPU usage isn't all that high during the playback, playback often is sluggish. I'm really hoping that the Lion upgrade will fix what I perceive as a downgrade in performance since 5.0, despite extensive performance upgrades to my 3,1 Mac Pro, such as 24GB RAM, SSD Boot drive, Quadro 4000 card.

My last project was 9 minutes long, and by the end I had a normal amount of effects (all CUDA) and I was still getting really poor timeline performance, such as playback becoming sluggish, slower than normal FPS for stretches of the sequence that would either fix themselves over time or just get worse, long pauses between pressing 'play' and the sequence actually playing, 25% of the time audio not playing back when first playing the timeline, a quick stop and start would fix it.

Don't get me long, Premiere Pro blows away FCP in many ways, mostly because it saves me a lot of front end time and media space because of use of native formats and not having to transcode, however as I start using it for longer form projects in the 30 min to 2 hour range, I'm getting a little scared that it's not going to hold up and I'm going to get bogged down during critical times.

Again, I'm hoping a Lion upgrade will fix these issues, but I'm still not convinced it will. I also think a 'clean' of install Premiere will hopefully help.

[Wil Renczes]

So let me be perfectly clear on what I think are two separate issues that are being lumped together here:

http://forums.adobe.com/message/3801246#3801246

This is the issue that Paul Joy helped narrow down, where it's clear that there is a specific UI refresh issue.  You can see the problem occur with synthetic footage such as Bars & Tone or a Color Matte - no footage that requires decoding is necessary to see the problem.  This is the issue that I personally spent time profiling, and afaic, was (is) an OS issue on mac. The redraw call uses an OS blit routine, and that's where I saw all the profiling time being spent.  I believe that this is what many people are seeing improved on Lion.

Separately, I think that people are finding AVCHD / DSLR realtime playback to be sluggish.  This was improved somewhat in the 5.5.1 update, but it's still very much system dependant and it definitely requires a lot of cores for realtime sustained playback.  We know for a fact that Main Concept tends to spool up a lot of threads on mac, and we think that it causes contention issues on machines with less cores.   This is really a format specific issue, and it boils down to how many streams you're trying to use simultaneously, and how many cores do you have to keep up with the work.  This is that edge where having an intermediary codec can prove to be a useful thing.

[Keith Moreau]

Will, your input is much appreciated by us all, and, if you can be candid, I have heard from the PC-Centric folks at the Premiere Hardware forum that the Mac OS is intrinsically flawed when it comes to multi-core performance, and that above 12-cores or (virtural or real) the Mac gets bogged down and then Windows beats the pants off it. This, I believe since I have only an 8 core machine (no virtual cores like the new Intel chips) I haven't hit that supposed 'wall' yet. However, new Mac Pros will hopefully be coming out in the next 6 months, I hope, and these will have lots more cores than 8, maybe up to 24, 30 or beyond. I plan to get one of these new Mac Pros, as probably a lot of other Mac folks will be getting.

Is there any truth to the multi-core wall? Is the Mac just going to continue to have performance issues, regardless of how many cores are in the machine? If that's the case, is there any way that Premiere for Mac can somehow make architectural changes so the 1-2 million potential FCP - Premiere switchers that have Macs will not be penalized by this alleged limitation?

[LFedit]

Thanks Wil,

I believe you are correct with the two separate issues.  Lion on both 3.1 and 4.1 systems with the 5.5.1. update eliminate the lag of moving instances around on the timeline.  On a side note, the 3.1 system with the 5.5.1 update has eliminated the lag of moving instances on the timeline on OS 10.6.7., 10.6.8, and 10.7.1.

Interesting observation Keith, Having access to both 3.1 (non hyperthreaded multicore) and 4.1 (hyperthreaded multicore) the findings would be consistent as far as h.264 performance.

Unfortunately the 3.1 system i'm running is far underpowered than the 4.1 system and the tests that i've reported back on the forums are all on single stream DSLR footage on both machines.  The 3.1 system without CUDA and hyperthreading, conmpletely out performs my current 4.1 system.

[Keith Moreau]

LFedit, I don't think 5.5.1 eliminates the timeline lag problem, at least for me I have 10.6.8 and Premiere Pro 5.5.1 and that issue is the same as all previous releases. The only way for me to eliminate the lag is to increase my timeline to 1/2 to 2/3 of my full 30" CinemaDisplay, which is what I do now when the lag is too intrusive.

[LFedit]

Thanks for the update Keith,

Sorry to hear your issue is not fixed on 10.6.8,  I had tested it on 10.6.8 with the 5.5.1 update on the MacPro3.1.  The lag seamed much  much better.  I have since updated to Lion on that machine, and the timeline lag is gone.  Sorry I can't confirm this back on 10.6.8 for you, but it doesn't surprise me that close to identical systems perform differently at this point.

[Cutwithray]

Do you think the difference between the new Mac Pro Towers is not necessarily the generation of tower but rather the Quadro 4000?

Can anyone with the latest gen Mac Pro using a Quadro 4000 tell us about their results running Lion and the two issues

1) GUI Bug - Lag

2) H.264 Editing

Thanks

Ray

[Paul_Joy__UK_]

My Mac Pro has a Quadro 4000, as staed earlier the timeline lag is gone under lion but I do see poor performance with h.264 scrubbing.

[lasvideo]

Since the Mercury Engine relies on lots of ram, high speed media array and the 4000 for optimal performance, I think its important to factor in these variable to the quiries from users with problems.

[Cutwithray]

Can anyone tell me where they are getting their Quadro 4000 drivers from that run under Lion? The latest official driver is:

256.02.25f01

2011.06.24

Mac OSX SnowLeopard

I read some developer drivers are around but nothing official from nVidia.

Thanks

Ray