premiere too slow?

[justified]

I'm trying to edit MPEG2 (because it's the only format I can capture in), with Premiere. Trying to move between frames is really slow though since it tries to preview the video in good quality as well as the audio. Is there a way I can speed things up by reducing the quality in the video and stop it from previewing the audio?

[bbllc]

Your best option is to convert the files to AVI files. Use Virtuadub-MPEG2. Once you are finished editing the files re-encode them into Mpeg2 files.

[shaynew]

If all you need is the video from the mepg2 and you have vobs available of the same file, then I know you can get AVI's out of vdub-mpeg2 like justified says.

But if you use vobs you may get very out-of-sync audio in the AVI vdumb-mpeg2 makes. And I didn't see any easy way to fix that, since tweaking the audio delay/skew by hand never seemed to work.

--Shayne

[rob1]

If you are doing a whole lot of editing for a big project and have plenty of space, here's something I've done to speed things up. Convert all of the clips in the bin into low quality proxies. Basically, pull each clip into the timeline individually and save it as a new clip- I use PICVideo MJPEG codec to compress at a quality level around 8. It's pretty crappy looking, but it's fast to edit and it's an exact/crappy duplicate of the high quality clip. I stick all of those low quality clips in a folder called 'folder 2' (all the original clips are in a folder called folder 1). Then, I start over. I pull the low quality clips into the bin, do all of my editing. It moves pretty fast. When I'm done and have closed premiere, I go in and change the name of the folder with the low quality clips and start premiere back up. It's going to say 'you are missing file 'X'' and give you a chance to search and replace the file. Then, I just replace it with the high quality clip.

So, you end up with a final project made using the highest quality mpgs, but you got the speed benefits of the low quality proxies when actually doing the editing.

This much effort is only worth it for a fairly big project- because it's a pain making the low quality proxies. But for a big project- it's a good move. (Note- I'm pretty sure with Premiere pro you can change the 'link' to a clip in the bin by clicking on it, choosing 'break link', then going back and 'linking' the clip to the higher quality proxie. Either way, works the same.)