Problem with Premiere Pro CS5 and W520

Adobe CS5.5 is supposed to be optimized for the Quadro 2000M and be able to decode H.264 video from a dSLR much better than before. Something must not be working properly though.

When I import a video straight from my camera and play it, in the preview window it plays smooth for about 3 seconds before skipping very badly. According to a desktop gadget, the GPU is only being used about 5-11%. RAM is at 44% used.

Am I missing something obvious here?

 

What camera? It sounds like you aren't using CS5 yet unless I am misunderstanding the exact workflow.

 

It's a Nikon D7000. It takes .MOV format 1080p/24 h.264 video. I recently bought it and have very little experience with video editing software. In the past I have used Sony Vegas, but I wanted to give CS5 a try. In fact it's part of the reason I bought this computer.

 

I don't have a w520, but I have seen a few discussions here about the Optimus settings, perhaps that might be a starting place.

There are other Optumus threads, but noticed a thread here, too: http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/W-Series-ThinkPad-Laptops/w520-Optimus-Switching/td-p/420595

 

My point was that you mention in the original post that you import the video and play it. What are you playing it with? CS5, Quicktime, or what? The import is likely either a copy or move and you haven't yet re-encoded anything.

If you are importing into CS5 then playing it there, it could very well be an Optimus bug as Brenda indicates. You can sandbox that a couple of ways. You can either run CS5 against the NVIDIA GPU (see the right mouse click options) or flip the BIOS setting to Discrete.

 

If you haven't already, move the video file from your camera's memory card to your hdd. Then play/encode/decode etc. Should see a big difference.

Also turn off optimus, make sure your dedicated gfx card is running full power. Make sure Win 7 is running at high performance settings, gfx card also.

Hope that helps.

 

I think I actually stumbled on that thread at some point during research. I have upgraded the latest Nvidia drivers from their site, but that didn't really help.

Sorry, I didn't really understand. When I say I import the video and play it, I simply drag it into CS5 from the file explorer within CS5 and click play in the preview pane. It's true, I haven't encoded anything - just trying to play it.

I've tried switching to discrete only, optimus disabled in the BIOS but it didn't change anything. I'm doing this on an external monitor, so everything is discrete anyway.

I have moved it onto my hdd from the memory card.

The weird thing is if I play a game, the GPU jumps to 95% use, but CS5 just isn't utilizing it, even though I tell it to in the Nvidia control panel. Now, what about the fact that it plays smoothly for about 3 seconds before skipping progressively worse. Is there some buffer being used up that I can check into?

 

Keep trying different things/settings until you isolate the problem.

Roll back your nvidia drivers.

See how it plays with intel gfx.

Try disconnecting external monitor and see if happens just playing on the laptop screen.

Does it play fine on another machine, scenario ??

Nvidia and Lenovo are both known to still have issues going external sometimes.

Btw are you using a dock to go external ? If so, nix that.

See what happens.

 

Thanks I will try that troubleshooting when I get home from work. Btw currently not using a dock. I don't have another capable machine to test it on, but maybe will later this week.

I also found this... and I will probably try it first: Nikon D7000 footage stutters | Playback | Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5

Another person mentioned that anything less than 8GB is not sufficient for this program. I have 6GB and only 44% utilization. I set the preferences to allow Adobe to use 60% if needed. If RAM was an issue, would I see it being maxed out?

Thanks again.

 

crap, I missed that

yeah, could be the .mov format causes probs

 

Yep it worked, flawless playback and still only 10% GPU usage. Yay. Thanks for the help everyone.