Adobe Premiere

Thoughts on the best drives to use for Adobe Premiere?

I just put my Kingston V+ 100 drives in RAID 0. All my work data sits on a mechanical drive. However, I put a copy of the raw video footage on the SSD RAID. Wow. What a difference. I can flip into any part of the timeline without lag at all.

I had been wondering if the lag was a CPU or SSD problem before this new system configuration. For me, it was absolutely a drive problem. I was using an Intel X25-M 160GB, but it felt a lot slower.

Crystal Mark shows 250MB sequential reads on the Intel and 320MB/sec on the Kingston RAID. So, what's with the extra speed?

I've heard that Kingston does incompressibles better than most. But it shouldn't be that much of a difference over the Intel, should it?

 

It's not the reads that you're 'feeling' it's the (sequential) writes: the Intel is only capable of about 100MB/s (max) while your RAID0 V+100's are hitting about 3 or 4 times that (actual, sustained).

See:
Benchmark Results: Throughput, IOMeter Streaming, CrystalDiskMark : SSD RAID: Do You Want A Cheap Array Or One Larger Drive?


I know the above link is not including your V+100's - but look at the 4 drive scores for an example of what yours are doing (what size SSD's do you have?) compared to your X25-M.

 

Wait. Why isn't it the reads? Once my raw footage is on the SSD, it's just on there, right? I'm just reading it and not writing it?

160GB Intel X25-M
96GB x 2 Kingston V+ 100 RAID 0

BTW, iTunes doesn't open up any faster. That's probably a CPU bottleneck. That code is garbage.

 

You're forgetting about the Scratch Disk that Adobe products use.


iTunes: lol...

 

Nah, I didn't forget about them. It's just that I thought they were used like RAM and that 100MB/sec would be enough. I guess it's not.

 

Ive been wondering about this myself. My timeline scrubbing is ok with ppro even with multiple video layers. But when i use certain plugins or dynamic linking with ae, i get stutters.
I check resource monitor and i see the most work being done by the hdd. Nice to see that someone confirmed this.
Last question, is your scratch disk located in the ssd and will raiding an ssd (raid 0) actually give significant gains over a single ssd setup?

 

Superkang could you do a test? Could you make a comparison of these?
Scratch disk in ssd, source file in hdd
Scratch disk in hdd, source file in ssd
Scatch disk in ssd, source file in ssd

 

Right now, I have everything on the RAID 0. This is the fastest configuration by far. The dual Kingston setup isn't faster than my Intel X25-M for general stuff. I can't distinguish all the well between fast and really fast. The RAID 0 removes huge timeline bottlenecks, though. It isn't 100% perfect, but it's so much better than having to press the spacebar three times to get your video going.

I'll try to give opinions on scratch and source on hdd vs. ssd at some point. Nothing scientific, though.

EDIT: I moved all my raw assets over to my slow 5400rpm HDD. Oddly, speeds are still improved overall. My theory is that things are all stuck in RAM, so even if I switch between SSD / HDD and pull RAW data / scratch data from either location, the RAM will still contain the same info and CPU is just pulling from RAM.

The other thing is that maybe Premiere (the program itself) just needs to be on a faster drive. I don't really know what's going on.

 

interesting find.
however i think the most telling factors for ppro and ae are ram and random reads (and maybe writes).
ram because of what you mentioned: most of the video info/data and program itself is loaded into memory making timeline scrubbing and realtime playbacks snappy. ive seen the effect myself moving from 4 to 8 to 12 gb's of ram.
however when i use plugins or dynamic linking, i notice a lot of disk thrashing and looking at resource monitor, gpu-z and cpu-z; i see low cpu/gpu usage and lotsa disk spikes. im thinking that plugins, especially 3rd party ones, are not loaded into memory and have to be accessed of the disk. it also seems like there is a lot of reading/writing activity when effects and plugins are used.

 

I think Tiller's link to the RAID 0 performance is largely correct. This feels faster because each time I start a new project, the raw video isn't in RAM yet. Every new video is opened on the SSD. Whereas before, I was always expecting it to be slow, now I'm surprised that it's fast.

However, I suspect my performance will be the same as someone else with a large amount of RAM, but slow drives. The only difference being the first time the file is accessed?

I think there's something else that is fundamental to the equation that we are not seeing. My guess is that it has to do with Premiere code itself, with options that the users are not allowed to tweak.

Ultimately, RAID 0 seems pretty pointless for people not dealing with large non-compressible files. My single Vertex 2 felt just as snappy for most things. If anyone's reading, just get a single fast SSD drive if you don't do video and audio editing.

 

when ever your files exceed ram size, you profit from the ssd serving it to you very fast. and the change to exceed ram size with multiple hd projects is very, very likely

 

Having RAM is good for video editing and so is a fast cpu. I have the G2 160GB Intel as my main HDD and it hosts the files for Sony Vegas but I keep most of my files on my HDD's still due to the large size and with 16GB of RAM I can flip to any part of the timeline without lag as well, and even with my 4.6ghz 2600K running 100% on all 4 cores I can render the video to my HDD without any kind of bottleneck.

So honestly I can say the SSD didnt really speed up my workflow at all and I wouldnt want to put my SSD through the extremely high GB of writes that video editing uses. The SSD is probably being used so much and helped you so much because you did not have enough RAM to prevent a lot of pagefile use.


P.S. the RAM & CPU upgrade are new, I had the G2 Intel with my old 4GB RAM & Q6600 @ 3.6ghz setup for a month or so and it felt just as fast as always except when opening the program it was definitely the RAM and CPU upgrade that made things faster & better for me. I you still mess with ultra fast encoding like Divx then the Raid 0 may help you, but if you do high quality H264 encode like me even the 4.6ghz i7 is not enough to force my hard disk to become my limit.


P.P.S. My videos are 1080p or 720p but only ~15min max for youtube. If you were working on a full move of an hour or more in HD the SSD or Raid 0 will really help open and load those files because no way will RAM hold it, but I will still feel bad about putting that much read/write on a SSD and it would use up so much space so Raid 0 is the way to go for a video editor doing those kind of projects.

For the last 5 or 6 years I have always told people that Raid 0 is basically only good for video editing and not much else as it is the most common consumer level use of Raid 0 that it actually works to give a benifit while 98% of the other stuff people think it is good for it isnt.

 

This theory makes sense because I only have 4GB of RAM, which is low for Premiere. However, my RAM usage never exceeds 3GB. The only time Premiere really wants to go over 4GB is when I render at 1080p. Even then it limits itself to 3.9GB because of its internal limiter.

Of course, the counter-argument to that would be: if you had more RAM, then it would use more than 3GB. And my answer to that is: we'll soon see.

My Core i5 and 8GB arrives today. If needed, I'll add another 8GB.

 

You may as well order the additional 8GB then.

Btw, what notebook are you getting with 16GB RAM capacity?

 

if you look through the adobe forums and dvinfo.net, you will see a lot of guys commenting that on a fairly modern system (quad cpu 2.0ghz, 12gig ram, 260 gpu, dual hdd 10k desktop) the first bottleneck will be storage. in fact most of them recommend at least a 4 disk array for fhd. ssd's are not in vogue with these guys due to the large amount of storage they need (but a lot are enthusiatic about ssd caching).
the thing about ppro and ae is that they use raw data on video edits. unlike other programs that convert files to a more usable media like prores or shadow files, ppro/ae reade off raw footage. because of this it does a tremendous amount of disk reading. add to this the effect of splicing, adding effects and transitions, and you will note a lot of disk activity, which the guys over at those forums say are actually more reads than writes.
ram is important. ive seen the benefits of going 4, 8, and 12gb. but like the experts in those forums say, after a certain point its storage that bottlenecks the system.

 

Oh I should mention even though I work with like 15 minute files when I use FRAPS its still over 40GB sometimes and it still loads all my files pretty much instantaneously. I use the SSD for projects that are urgent and it really does not seem faster to me.

 

it all depends what your trying to do with the videos.
i can easilly scrub through 1080p footage. the projects i do are also typically short 2-15 minutes. however i use many video layers (sometimes as much as 10); many effects such as multiple lens flares; coloring effects in multiple videos in a single shot, dynamically linked ae compositions with particles and 3d; complex transitions; etc. i can tell you with certainty that such a project taxes the system more than a single video timeline of spliced 1080p vids.
however with that being said, i think sony vegas and ppro work in very different ways and vicious' experience with vegas may not really reflect ppro performance given the same situation/parameters.

 

Sorry, this is for my desktop. I have a Lenovo X120e laptop.

Before I move to my new desktop tomorrow, these are my current numbers.
96GB + 96GB V+ 100
150GB usable. 28GB overprovisioned.

Darn good for just over $1 per gig.



I dug up my Intel X25-M bench on the same system:


It's now pretty clear why they feel somewhat similar for everything else.

 

if your still interested you could bench these:
Scratch disk in ssd, source file in hdd
Scratch disk in hdd, source file in ssd
Scatch disk in ssd, source file in ssd

with this:
ppbm5.com
and not any differences.

 

trvelbug,

That kind of information is available at the ppbm5.com results page:

See:
Benchmark Results


Basically, an SSD is equivalent to a 'fast enough' HDD.

 

yes imquite familiar with it since ppbm4. the list compares different platforms and it is difficult to isolate the effects of ssd/hdd, lest you end up drawing hasty conclusions.

the best would be to run the bench on the same system with the different disk configurations i listed.

 

I found one huge drive bottleneck today.

Not the video encoding but the sound encoding.

Doing a AAC encoding on my lossless source file on the SSD I can get 11-12x realtime encoding speed.

Doing it on HDD to same HDD is about .8x real time, and from one HDD to another is about 2.5x real time.

So the SSD is WAY faster for the audio encoding portion because its like a 40gb file being read and my cpu has the power to do it at 12x realtime but the disk does not.

Video Encoding, I tried HuffYUV, H264, and Lagarith and all of them are the same speed be it disk or SSD and I even had to re-encode the HuffYUV SSD test because the file from a 20 minute long video was 96GB in size and the SSD did not have enough space to finish the render.

Note: I could easily circumvent this bottleneck by instead of feeding my lossless video file into my audio encoder just export a .wav from my editor and feed that to the encoder instead so its not like the SSD gives me an advantage, but it did allow me to notice this and will help me streamline the process a bit more on future videos.

Edit: Just tested. Exported .wav from editor, took about 30 seconds. Then did disk to disk encoding. It was 66x Realtime took like seconds to do a 20 minute video so WAY faster.

 

thanks vicious
so a single ssd is faster than a dual hdd setup by a very long shot. definitely due to iops.

with regards to adobe premiere this is a generic disk setup guideline, made by har millard the maker to ppbm:
http://forums.adobe.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/2-2906955-31395/Guideline+Disks.jpg

 

Yeah faster, but just one video is almost 80-150GB of writes for me and now that I am starting a lets play series on youtube thats one video a day. Id never put that much data into my SSD, and again this was only for the sound file that I saw the speed boost, not the video encoding portion and I already found a work-around for that by making sure I work with the audio separately and just mux it together after my final encoding.

Now that I have disabled "include sound" on my video rendering portion it speeds that up a bit as well so it was a win/win.

I still have one more test to do and that is audio encoding on the SSD, even when I went disk to disk and got the 66x realtime encoding speed my cpu was 20% load so the disk is probably still holding it back.

 

i just did a run of premeire pro myself, and considering the complexity of the edit, i was getting very good render speeds.
i also checked cpu usage and it was close to 100% on all cores.
i remember now, that the low cpu usage on rendering i experienced in the past was actually with ae and not ppro.
of course this is ppro cs5 with all the new optimizations like 64bit and the mercury playback engine that can use gpu acceleration and uses preview renders for final render to further decrease export time.

 

Im tempted to mess with Premiere again since it will sync up with Photoshop & Audiiton and I use those two programs often. However every time I tried it it felt so cumbersome compared to Vegas.

More actions and time to do the same kind of tasks. Be it simply setting up my project settings or adding files to the time line.

Vegas you can just "match media settings" and poof its done. Same frame rate, resolution, and frame type.

For adding my files its a super simple drag & drop right to where you want them. For premiere everything had to be imported first totally a pain and didnt sync well with how I do things where I often may be adding files from new or random locations.

Have they made any progress on this in recent versions like adding drag & drop??

 

i would have never touched ppro before. it used to sluggish, crash prone, expensive, and practically useless when scrubbing on anything hd.

cs 5 ( and im sure 5.5) is a whole new ballgame however. it is 64bit, multicpu aware, and harnesses your gpu for both previews and rendering. its the smoothest nle ive ever tried. even with nested sequences that have 4 video layers, each with heavy color effects and cropping, plus ae transitions, i can srub/view previews.
ive used sony vegas before, but compared to cs5 it just feels so old.
give it a try, adobe has a 30day free trial for all their software.

 

I am a super advanced user, so I probably wont make use of a lot of stuff like the GPU acceleration etc because I render my stuff out manually with my own codecs.

I just hated the workflow, if that has not changed then I still would not be interested.

Vegas is multi core and 64bit as well so its not like adobe has anything it doesnt really.

 

well rendring is just one step of the process.
i myself dont do the usual cut and paste of clips. i usually work on more than one video layer, with an adjustment layer and effects/transitions to boot.
i also switch between ae and ppro a lot to get all those effects that can only be done in ae. i have multi nested sequences and compositions. across the 2 programs.
that kind of workflow just wont work with vegas pro when i tried using it.
well if your satisfied with vegas, good for you. but believe me cs5 and cs 5.5 is a gamechanger. especially for more complex edits.

cheers.

oh and yes, adobe products are expensive too.

 

I read somewhere that RAID-0 is now pointless because of the new SATA III SSDs. Well, here's my AS-SSD benchmark for incompressible sequential performance. These numbers should be important for Adobe people.

(288GB) 96GB x 3 Kingston V+100 = $300
250GB Intel 510 = $600
240GB Vertex 3 = $469

Kingston = 630MB read / 480MB write
Intel 510 = 470MB read / 310MB write
Vertex 3 = 495MB read / 270MB write

 

Very nice values superkang.
However i the reason most pros stick to redundant hdd arrays is that they need a lots of space and 1tb ssd are exceedingly expensive. Afaik only very few stick to raid 0 itslef since it provides no redundancy, so most opt for raid 10 or its equivalents (raid 6?).
Harm millard, the author of ppbm himself has advocated staying away from ssds because of the exhorbitant price and its "less reliable" tech as compared to an hdd array.

 

I don't trust RAID-0 either. In fact, I've designed my system based on the assumption that something will fail. I have 3TB drives x2 in a software RAID 1. Assets are kept on the big drives in addition to the smaller ones. OS drive images with all apps and preferences ready to be reloaded in 15 mins. And all of it is being backed up offsite.

I've had a number of hard drives over the years and I haven't had one fail (that wasn't my fault) since 2002. And those are mechanicals. I'd imagine that SSDs have an even lower fail rate. In any event, I believe I've got an acceptable risk / performance balance and I'd bet my current setup is more disaster conscious than most others. I understand your trepidation, however.

 

Personally im perfectly ok with using ssd's as an os/programs/scratch disk hencd my inquiries in this subforum.
I only do 720p videos however, and most dvinfo pros do at least 1080p and actually do 4k. For their usage and profession, i can see how an ssd may not be the best solution yet.

 

Speed is only such a small part of video work though.

Even the largest 250GB model you listed could get full soooo easy. Just one of my 30 minute episodes of duke nukem forever uses up about 150GB of space with the raw files. So that means I would fail an encoding job if I went much past that and I would never want to write so much data to a SSD since its what will make it fail prematurely.

Like I said before the HDD speed does not really seem to come into account for any level of high end editing the cpu will be the limit first anyways. So with speed benifits/restrictions out of the equation there is pretty much no reason to use SSD for video work. It's simply one scenario where SSD is not the right tool for the job.

More RAM & fastest CPU possible get priority over everything else.

Also I was using Adobe After Effects the other day and it seemed to have the same performance characteristics I was observing in Vegas.

 

Just out of curiousity why do you record your gaming? Surely it doesn't need to be 1080P quality too?

 

like i said before, it really depends on what your trying to do.
for the most normal nle tasks are bottlenecked by cpu, ram and gpu ( if your nle supprts video acceleration). howeve, the more complex the edit is, especially with many nested sequences and video layers, then storage performance does come in.
for the single layer that you do with no adjustments nor effects, it definitely wont be a factor.
and when i mention performance im not only talking about rendering speed/quality, but more so performance while editing the video in the timeline which is where more actual time is spent.

with regards to ae, ive always thought of it as cpu/ram limited. but when i did a simple 3d video with 50 layers of static images floating around, rendering was painfully slow and i had my cpu/ram at about 33% usage only(as compared to 80-100% when doing other ae comps). the hdd was thrashing a lot, leading me to believe that for this many layered comp it was actually i/o bound. so my theory is, the more layers/ sequences a project has, the more i/o limited it is.

 

he makes tutorials and walkththroughs to help others

 

I cant hit 100% cpu with many encoders just because they are not effiecent enough but they do not max out my disk. H264 seems to be the golden standard (or atleast x264, not sure about other H264 encoders) as it will pretty much always use every thread/core available to 100% unless you have something else in the pipe slowing it down (I dont mean a hardware bottleneck, I mean like a filter or some other pre-processing effect taking place before the H264 compression)

If I use too many avisynth filters I can do this but I normally just use a single undot so its not a problem. However for anime I have run like 12 filters at once and it did slow down the encoding process and limit H264 because it was not getting data fast enough to use the cpu all the way.

 

similar experience with me. when i use certain plugins in combination, i cant max out my encoding and timeline scrubbing can get slow. so under this circumstance it becomes i/o limited.

but from my experience, the most disk intensive work comes when there are many nested sequences and video layers as the example above- at least in ae. i have not used more than 6 video layers in ppro so i cant judge its effect here. but in ae, with 50 video layers(720p) plus around 8 or so adjustment layers and camera settings id did slow down a whole lot.

 

I think the way compositions work is basically it has to render it to render it and its going on disk if you dont have the ram for it so nesting a ton of compositions probably would add up to some very hefty disk work pretty fast.

But if you have too many you may want to analyze your workflow. I know a friend that does animation for a living and even in her largest projects she only has like 4 or 5 nested comps and they are pretty simple ones like animating a character in one comp and controlling the color in the 2nd and then the camera in the 3rd.

 

thanks for the tip vicious but for that particular project it had to be done that way.

i think i mentioned in a previous post, that the way ae (and prbably ppro) works is that when an effect or adjustment is made by a plugin it reads and writes every friggin pixel for every frame (source was maltannon.com i believe). with that in mind, i think its easy to see why disk performance can be a limiting factor especially in projects with multiple layers and adjustments.

 

This last part is true for the overall system. My comparison is only meant to highlight the differences in SATA III SSD compared to RAID 0 SATA II. So, if you were thinking of getting SATA III SSD anyway, a RAID 0 SATA II might be something to consider is all I'm saying. Plus, who doesn't want fast scratch disks?

RAM and CPU for sure. But that's a different subject.