Adobe Premiere video playback - horribly slow!

[Verx]

I apologize if this is the incorrect forum - I couldn't find one that seemed obvious. . .

I am using an old Sony TRV-130 camcorder, and have had no trouble capturing video from it using Adobe Premiere 6.5. On the other hand, once that video has been captured, playing it back in Premiere results in a totally stuttering debacle.

My system is an AMD T-Bird 1.1 GHz box with 640MB RAM and a GeForce3 card. I realize this system isn't exactly "cutting edge", but I had expected better results. . .

If I produce an AVI or MPEG file from the captured video, it plays perfectly on my machine, so I really don't understand why Premiere won't do this for me. It makes it VERY difficult to figure out what sections I want to splice out of the video when I can't play them back at normal speed to listen/watch and determine that.

If it matters, I captured just over 30 minutes of video from the camera, so that should give you an idea of the length. I think the size of the file is somewhere around 6GB.

HELP! :)

-Verxion

[BJ_M]

1. yes -- your system is marginal .. upgrade
or / and
2. defrag your hard drive completely
or / and
3. use a dedicated seperate hard drive ata 133 7200rpm (you would then also need a ata133 controller card).

[Verx]

Can't really afford to upgrade the computer just now (bought a new house and DSLR recently), so is there anything I can do to try to optimize things?

I will defrag my hard disk as soon as I get home to see if that helps. You say to use a dedicated seperate hard drive - just so I am clear, seperate from what? From the windows installation hard disk? From the premiere installation hard disk?

I have two ATA100 drives on the system, I can't imagine that ATA133 would make THAT much difference. . .

Thanks for the feedback! :)

-Verxion

[Gazorgan]

Premiere renders video when your looking at it. When you use a player, it's generally overlayed (less overhead). It won't show you transitions eitehr in real time. Premier 6.5 is kinda old, and it's not meant to preview your work. You are well within the minimum specs to use it, though.

[Verx]

Gazorgan:

So if I had a really fast computer, I would still not see the video play back in Premiere in real time?

How should I be previewing my clips then? Should I be rendering them and then looking at the rendering with another seperate tool?

I am just curious how people using Premiere 6.5 go about picking which frame they want to splice on or that kindof thing if it depends at all on the sound track because playing the clips within premiere means that the audio is worthless. . .

-Verxion

[Tsuchigumo]

I had exactly the same problem in Premiere. Fine capturing but terrible playback with dropped frames. Impossible to edit of course. However, the captured file played perfectly in different mediaplayers (like WMediaplayer).

The solution is very simple
go to Project Settings – General – Playback Settings (of DV Playback)
deactivate Playback on DV Camcorder/VCR

And that's it. Hope it works for you too.