Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5: OHCI Playback Problems

[BassPig]

I have been battling a major annoyance with Premiere Pro 1.5, after being a longtime Premiere 6.5 user.

On June 15th, we implemented a decision to begin testing Windows XP and Premiere Pro 1.5. The platform used was as follows:

Machine #1

Gigabyte GA-7DXR+
AMD Athlon XP2600+
1GB Crucial PC2100 DDR SDRAM
VisionTek GeForce4 TI4600 128MB
Maxtor 80GB 7200rpm ATA133 system drive w/ 8MB cache
Maxtor 60GB 7200rpm project drive
2 Maxtor 80GB 7200rpm ATA133 drives in RAID 0 array
2 Maxtor 120GB 7200rpm ATA133 drives in RAID arrays
Pioneer DVR-A07 DVD writer
Creative 12x10x32x CD-RW writer
3Com 3C905TX 100mb/s NIC
Pyro BasicDV IEEE-1394 Fire Wire interface
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz audio card
Wacom Intuos 9x12 Drawing Tablet
NEC AccuSync 120 monitor @ 2048x1536 32bit color
Windows XP Professional, SP1


Ancillary:
JVC HR-DVS3U miniDV/S-VHS Fire Wire deck
Sony DCR-VX2000
Sony PVM1261Q Composite Color Monitor


This platform had been running Windows 2000 SP4 and Premiere 6.5 since that version of Premiere became available and this was the most stable, high-performing combination. We were able to play video off the timeline, to the desktop AND out the OHCI card simultaneously, with no dropped frames, or audio dropouts. CPU usage was 50-60% range.

Since switching that system over to XP, some things were changed:

A new, faster system hard drive was installed. this drive has an 8MB cache on board.
Windows XP was installed.
Windows XP was audited for non-essential services and optimized by disabling those services. The initial build used 177MB of RAM. After optimizing, we reduced the footprint to 64MB RAM.

We then installed Premiere Pro 1.5 and Adobe AfterEffects 6.5.

We're having problems with both, relating to playback to external monitor via OHCI.

Premiere Pro will work okay for a few minutes after launch, with CPU use around 75% during play from timeline. After a few cut edits have been done, the playback CPU use will hit 100% and audio will drop out most of the time. We'll even see an occasional dropped video frame, or frozen frame now and then, but the audio will be muted through most of the playback, only popping on for 1/10 second every few seconds.
If we close Premiere and restart it, reload the project, it will play fine for a while, or until more editing is done, at which point the CPU load will climb from 75% to 100%.

If we switch off the DVS3U OHCI output device, the audio dropouts stop and playback to the desktop is flawless.


We have a similar situation with AfterEffects 6.5. We actually ran this version on Windows 2000, prior to the Win XP Pro testing, and it had no issues with RAM previews. All were at 29.97fps and REALTIME.

Since moving to Win XP, AE 6.5 will no longer do RAM previews that are realtime. Instead, the OHCI output will be jerky and the red warning text NOT Realtime is flashing frequently in AfterEffects palatte.

We note that AE uses 100% of CPU, even when it's doing nothing, if it has the focus. If another window is clicked on, such as Task Manager, the CPU use goes to 0%. Click on AE 6.5, CPU slams the 100% mark right away.


I have rolled back video drivers to a version that was considered stable by the nVidia community of users, however, that only solved a problem with Explorer crashing at random--it did not fix the realtime performance issues.

I have the impression that Win XP just doesn't have the core efficiency to provide these apps with realtime performance, whereas Windows 2000 can handle it easily (We have Premiere 6.5 running well on a PIII 450 too). I cannot believe that an Athlon XP2600+ is not fast enough to run Premiere Pro. There seems to be some sort of conflict with the combination of Win XP, OHCI and Adobe Premiere and AfterEffects.

I was curious if others in the forum are experiencing problems with realtime playback from Premiere Pro 1.5 and AfterEffects RAM Previews on Win XP Pro. Have you found remedies for these problems?

Adobe has been little to no help on this issue so far. Yet it is very hard to sit and edit with a client looking over your shoulder and having to explain why the audio is switching on and off throughout the playback. We need to fix this setup or forget about Premiere Pro altoghether. I hope some of the geniuses here have dealt with and conquered this problem and can advise accordingly.

[communist]

Hmm I did have real time A/V output from the timeline on a XP2000+ / 512 DDR-Ram using PPro 1.0. If you look at the monitors in Premiere there are small round dots in the upper right (?) corner. Click on this and select Playback settings -> the dialog that pops up allows you to configure the playback settings for A/V and where you need real-time output. You may also want to reduce to draft quality instead of high quality or 'Automatic Quality'.

[BassPig]

We did that. It's on automatic, and we're getting a 1/4 resolution realtime preview with skipping audio. Funny thing is, AfterEffects 6.5, running on Windows 2000, ran beautifully--but now that we've installed it on a new XP environment, the very same projects cannot display realtime preview with the external fire wire monitor. If we turn off the firewire device, the preview on the PC monitor is fine. Same thing goes for Premiere Pro 1.5--no fire wire--previews are fine to PC desktop and CPU load drops to nearly nothing during timeline playback. But turn on the firewire--even turn off the desktop preview, so it ONLY plays out the fire wire, and CPU load goes to 85% after a fresh start, quickly ramping to 100% after 3-4 edits were done. It seems that doing a few edits causes Premiere Pro to become less efficient, and that's when the skipping gets intolerable.
I'm thinking there has to be something about Premiere's products and XP and OHCI that are more sensitive to possibly IRQ sharing. But get this---we have another identical machine on Win 2000, and it's got 11 (eleven) devices sharing an IRQ with the OHCI card--and it edits, plays and captures perfectly and has never dropped a frame--ever.
Our XP machine, with a slightly faster CPU, behaves as if it's clock speed were 200MHz instead of 2.14GHz--despite only OHCI and USB sharing the IRQ.
As a last ditch effort, we may try to move cards around in the PCI slots and mess with the HAL to stop Windows XP assigning IRQs, in the hope of forcing OHCI onto a private IRQ shared by nothing and see if that helps, though it doesn't look like much of a prospect, given how well the other machine runs with 11 IRQs being shared.

[theReal]

Have you tried Premiere 6.5 in WinXP? If it works then you can rule out XP as the culprit, if it doesn't you know that WinXP is at fault.
IMO it's a WinXP bug, as you said that AE won't work properly with FireWire preview either.

This makes me uncomfortable because I haven't used FireWire preview since I started using Premiere Pro on WinXP (always assuming it would work).
I'm going to borrow a Sony DSR-11 DVCAM Deck from work and see if it works - I'll report back the results!

[BassPig]

I have not bothered with Premiere 6.5 on XP. The only common benchmark I have is AfterEffects 6.5 on both 2000 and XP. It works perfectly on 2000, specifically the realtime previews out to the NTSC monitor via fire wire; it stutters badly and displays "NOT realtime" when running under XP. Same program, same version, just different OS and one setup works beautifully, the other is terrible.

[theReal]

I borrowed a DVCAM deck from work today and I've been testing FireWire preview for the last 20 minutes or so. Up to now everything is working fine, no differences to monitor-only preview (same processor usage, around 50-55%)
After about two minutes of work I had had two slight audio dropouts, but I'm not sure if they were related to the FireWire preview because there were two other programs running in the background, both with a little HD activity. Also those were singular, minimal dropouts, not skipping audio.
In the last 15 minutes there were no more problems at all - I'm going to test further, however I've already done a lot more than 3-4 edits (working on kind of a music clip, so I'm using a lot of filters and there are many small clips on the timeline).

Maybe you should try a different OHCI controller - preferably a cheap one with no other fancy abilities. The more an OHCI card can do, the more it relies on its own drivers (and is maybe getting problems with different versions of standard compliant drivers)


My system:

Athlon XP2700+ (Thoroughbred Core)
Epox 8K5A2+ KT333 w/HPT RAID
512MB Corsair XMS PC2700
ATI Radeon 7500 retail, 64MB
21" CRT monitor, 1280x1024
Philips Acoustic Edge Soundcard
OHCI compatible controller (cheap no-name)
2 IBM Deskstar 120GB, 7200rpm
1 Western Digital 60GB, 5400rpm
1 Pioneer A06 4x DVD+/-RW
(each HD and DVD as a single master drive with their own cable)
WinXP Professional SP1, German
Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5, German


FireWire device:

Sony DSR-20P DVCAM deck

[BassPig]

My OHCI fire wire card is one that's known for compatibility---it has the TI chipset and is made by ADS. It's called the Pyro BasicDV. Just a basic fire wire controller with three ports and no other features.

Folks in the Premiere support forum were blaming the problem on my motherboard, but the problem did not exist until I reformatted and installed Windows XP Pro and these video applications. Unless there is a particular conflict between the AMD 761 chipset and Windows XP, I feel this remains an unsolved mystery.

In Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5, it is possible to play from the timeline with very few or no dropouts for a minute or more, if Premiere has just been launched and no edits done. CPU use is in the mid-50s in that case. After editing, CPU use (during play) hits 100% and that's when the dropouts start happening. Eventually it gets so bad that it's 50/50 on/off with the audio.

But here's the curious part: if I add audio filters to the audio portion of the timeline, say, a compressor and an EQ, the dropouts all but disappear and I can edit and play from the timeline fairly well. That really confuses the issue, because one would expect that additional processing tasks would make the dropouts even worse, not less.

Way back when I ran Windows 3.1, I recall it having a weird problem where the OS would pause every 4 seconds for 2 seconds, when no tasks were using CPU cycles. I remedied the problem by opening a DOS box and running a batch file that loops a file copy command continuously. Go figure..

[theReal]

if I add audio filters to the audio portion of the timeline, say, a compressor and an EQ, the dropouts all but disappear and I can edit and play from the timeline fairly wellWhen you start a new project and import clips, does Premiere Pro conform the audio (bottom right, small status bar that says "conforming audio")?
Maybe that feature is turned off in your Premiere and the program needs to render audio constantly? That would explain why audio with filters plays fine (as soon as you add filters you probably render the preview area, right?)
Well, this doesn't explain the problems with AE...

*Edit* Have you tried other VIA drivers for the 686B Southbridge? The 686B Southbridge (the one that AMD 761 and VIA KT133/266 use) is known to be problematic with some PCI devices. Maybe you installed another driver version on XP than before on Win2k and this is now causing problems?

You know what my technical director would say in that case? "Buy a Mac!" :rolleyes: ;)
Even though I'm a Wintel guy, sometimes I think he's right... (not that Macs don't have problems at all, but at least you don't have to care if your Motherboard is 100% compatible with the OS and if your soundcard messes up your PCI bus and stuff like that...)

[Milkman Dan]

I've done a fair amount of hardware wrangling in my day, mostly with AVI and MPEG-2 hardware capture cards. Those are pretty picky devices, and those early VIA southbridge chips were total garbage. The whole Creative SBLive! and 686B debacle from a few years ago exposed the very stupid things both companies did with their hardware.

I hate to sound like a wet blanket, but you should ditch that motherboard for one with a more modern chipset. I'm surprised that you found a board with the 761 in it that supports that powerful a chip in it. The modern VIA chipsets aren't all that bad, but I don't trust them as much as I trust a good nForce2 board. Abit and MSI make several good boards in that category.

In conclusion, I don't think it's the OS so much as it's the software for the chipset. I have a Canopus MPEG2 encoder board that wouldn't have anything to do with my older VIA KT266A board (same southbridge as yours). Lockups during capture, and failures to initialize the capture overlay were pretty common. Moved to an NF7-S and never had another issue.

Just a suggestion.