Hi TGB

Welcome to the forum! I'm glad that you've been looking around for answers here and I'm sure there are many members who'll be willing to help you.

Right off the bat, I'm afraid that your CPU is quite underpowered, and unfortunately having a super-powerful graphics card won't make up the difference because most of the work is done with the CPU.

Now I might be mistaken since I don't know exactly which CPU you have, so could you please post your DXDiag results? (see this link)

Using High Quality Preview (rather than HD or Full HD) is usually sufficient to get a speedy response, however there are several other PD settings that can impact your previewing experience. Using/not using hardware acceleration and/or OpenCL, for example.

I know you've read "everything" and haven't found a solution, but it would be helpful for other members if you could list at least some of the things you've tried. That way we'll know not to ask you to try them all again. Does that make sense?

EDIT: Added link to Core 2 Wikipedia page, showing 2006 origin and 2011 retirement
EDIT #2: changed the link to point to the correct DXDiag thread

YouTube/optodata

DS365 | Win11 Pro | Ryzen 9 3950X | RTX 4070 Ti | 32GB RAM | 10TB SSDs | 5K+4K HDR monitors

Canon Vixia GX10 (4K 60p) | HF G30 (HD 60p) | Yi Action+ 4K | 360Fly 4K 360°

Hello optodata,


Thanks for the offer to help. I have attached 2 files - the DXdiag.txt file as requested and another file from Mediainfo that provides a summary of all of the media data on the photos and video clips in the file.

I have tried 3 different computers with different processors with the same results. All running windows 7 64 bit
1) my desktop Nvidia 780I SLI ultra, core 2 9450 quad processor at 2.7 Ghz, 8 GB DDR2 memory and the GeForce 780GTX card
2) my home laptop del inspiron with 2.4 Ghz i5
3) my office laptop del 2.8 ghz i7

I have tried previewing in all 5 of the video resolutions, both real time and non-real time without audio. I have tried with and without, hardware acceleration, open cl, and HD shadow files in all combinations. No significant difference noted.

Seems like the graphics card is never even being called on for processing during the preview - GPU-Z never shows more than a 2% GPU load and no more than 316MB of the 3 GB memory in use. The CPU does show nearly 100% utilization on all 4 processors as the video is being previewed. I though that PD relied on the GPU as well, especially for transition effects. Is that incorrect?

One other observation. I was able to run the same file in PD11 without the preview issues at the HD resolution in the desktop machine. I have seen a thread about a beta update for PD12 that addresses preview issues... - any chance this is related?

In a few other threads there was conversation about codecs that could be interfering with proper playback - anything to this? Sometimes other codecs get snuck into the system by some applications so how would I tell if that was an issue?

I understand that the desktop is not the fastest CPU out there by any means, however unless there were significant changes made to PD12 I don't understand why things ran faster in PD11.

Any help you can offer would be great. Not yet convinced that pure Horsepower (lots of $$) is the answer.

Thanks,

Todd

Quote: Hello optodata,

Thanks for the offer to help. I have attached 2 files - the DXdiag.txt file as requested and another file from Mediainfo that provides a summary of all of the media data on the photos and video clips in the file.

I have tried 3 different computers with different processors with the same results. All running windows 7 64 bit
1) my desktop Nvidia 780I SLI ultra, core 2 9450 quad processor at 2.7 Ghz, 8 GB DDR2 memory and the GeForce 780GTX card
2) my home laptop del inspiron with 2.4 Ghz i5
3) my office laptop del 2.8 ghz i7

I have tried previewing in all 5 of the video resolutions, both real time and non-real time without audio. I have tried with and without, hardware acceleration, open cl, and HD shadow files in all combinations. No significant difference noted.

Wow! you've done a lot of digging! Thanks for taking the time to document everything you've found

Very interesting that you're seeing the issue on these different machines. Do you know the model or generation of your i7 (Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Haswell)? I don't see anything unusual in your DxDiag results, and that's a good thing!

Seems like the graphics card is never even being called on for processing during the preview - GPU-Z never shows more than a 2% GPU load and no more than 316MB of the 3 GB memory in use. The CPU does show nearly 100% utilization on all 4 processors as the video is being previewed. I though that PD relied on the GPU as well, especially for transition effects. Is that incorrect?

PD uses the CPU far more often than the GPU, which is why I said earlier that having a super GPU won't make much difference. It's counterintuitive to find that out, and very disappointing if you've already spent the money. There are situations where having a subpar GPU will grind production to a halt, but having a top end card won't speed thing up as much as we'd all like

One other observation. I was able to run the same file in PD11 without the preview issues at the HD resolution in the desktop machine. I have seen a thread about a beta update for PD12 that addresses preview issues... - any chance this is related?

You can try the latest beta patch. It's a sticky at the top of the forum. The big speed improvement was seen by people with Haswell+Win8.1+GTX7xx systems, but your systems don't look like they had the 7-10 second delay in opening up the PiP designer or Pixelan windows. There are plenty of other fixes, so go ahead and install the patch if you're comfortable doing so. If not, a new official patch will probably be coming out fairly soon.

In a few other threads there was conversation about codecs that could be interfering with proper playback - anything to this? Sometimes other codecs get snuck into the system by some applications so how would I tell if that was an issue?

I'm not quite an expert on this, but the codec problems generally show up when a particular clip won't play at all. If you're able to import and play the clips, I believe that your codecs are working properly.

I understand that the desktop is not the fastest CPU out there by any means, however unless there were significant changes made to PD12 I don't understand why things ran faster in PD11.

Any help you can offer would be great. Not yet convinced that pure Horsepower (lots of $$) is the answer.

Thanks,

Todd

I think you hit the nail on the head. There definitely were significant changes under the hood when PD12 came out. In many cases, the editor is faster and more stable than PD11, but other people have found things to be aggravatingly slower. Some were just crazy, like the 7-10 second delay that ONLY appeared on top-end systems. Others are more subtle, like the difficulty in determining why it's so hard to get decent preview quality.

One thing I found is to try setting the priority to High(est) in task manager (not realtime). That seems to speed up some of the editing operations and may improve your preview. Using non-realtime preview is a good choice if you have a bunch of effects and want to see how they look. You can also highlight a range in the timeline and produce just that to see exactly what that looks and sounds like in the final production.

Other than that, I can't think of anything you haven't tried. Maybe someone else will have some ideas...

YouTube/optodata

DS365 | Win11 Pro | Ryzen 9 3950X | RTX 4070 Ti | 32GB RAM | 10TB SSDs | 5K+4K HDR monitors

Canon Vixia GX10 (4K 60p) | HF G30 (HD 60p) | Yi Action+ 4K | 360Fly 4K 360°

Todd,

A lot of people (including me,) have problems with Preview not playing smoothly.

There are operating system and software tweaks to speed things up- but that only goes so far.
(Turn off auto defrag, any auto d/l background tasks, turn off virus checker and block internet, turn off auto-indexing, close any unnecessary background tasks and so on.)

Installing an SSD instead of a mechanical HD, minimum 8GB ram and the more CPU cores and the higher your default CPU clock speed the better.

Even if you have the fastest system- PD will still be a quirky prgm to use. That's just the way it is in my experience.
The latest patches are helping to fix a lot of issues with the prgm- but it is far from perfect. (Still my favorite NLE though compared to the others I use.)

Rob
PD 14 Ultimate Suite / Win10 Pro x64
1. Gigabyte Brix PRO / i7-4770R Intel Iris Pro 5200 / 16 GB / 1 TB SSD
2. Lenovo X230T / 8GB / Intel HD4000 + ViDock 4 Plus & ASUS Nvidia 660 Ti / Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIZw3GPwKMo&feature=youtu.be

Ok,

Glad to hear I am not alone with the preview issues.

So what would be the best CPU for the job? A) 6 core xeon, b) 4th generation i7, or what? I would prefer to stick with intel vs amd unless there are compelling reasons...

Thanks,

Todd

Well- you are asking for the keys to the universe here. This won't be a short answer.

There is a price to performance ratio that I had to make a few months ago when I built a newer mini, cost effective video editing system to handle my NLE workflow. I use different animation, demanding creative type prgms in addition to PD. So whatever I built had to play nicely with all of them- quirks and all. See my sig for the two very different and non mainstream systems I have used for all my creative work. The Brix Pro is the one I use exclusively now. Here is a link to the test specs I did a while back: http://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/posts/list/32454.page

Now I am not saying these are the best systems for everyone- just the best for me and what I want to do at the moment.

I push all my equipment to their limits and eventually I will hit a wall with what I can do with it. But right now, no matter what I throw at the little machine, it is holding up very nicely.

Anyway- If I had to put together a newer system today I would skip the Haswell-E refresh and go straight to Broadwell with at least a 6 core CPU. An 8 Core would be better and of course it would be housed in an expandable case with a liquid cooled dual GPU. The AMD R9 295X Dual GPU liquid cooled card would be my top pick followed by the Nvidia 780 Ti. (The Titans are a bit too pricey for what you get and the Titan Z dual GPU card is twice as expensive as the AMD R9 295.)

As far as SLI and Crossfire goes- dual GPU has not from what I have seen from other users, been a benefit for PD. A dual GPU build would just be for the other prgms that I use- including of course games! The Nvidia G-Snyc monitor technology is something I was keeping an eye on since it takes the load off of the GPU card and the monitor does some of the work. However- at this point I am not convinced it would do much for video editing work and I am waiting for a really good 4k monitor to come out to replace my current ASUS calibrated ProArt monitor.

At the end of next year 2015-2016 I would like to build a Skylake system. DDR4 Ram, Intel E5 Xeon single or dual CPU workstation with one of the above GPUs or whatever newer cards are out. My end goal is full 4K and 8K video, 3D anim. render workstation.

The best single upgrade I did to speed up my systems, were to add SSDs as my main HD. I think everyone who video edits should do to this upgrade since they are now much cheaper and cost effective and the performance is well worth it.

To sum up- do not go chasing the rabbit down the hole. As I said PD has its quirks and a more expensive faster system won't, from what I have seen, give you the boost in performance that you would think it should. Price to performance should be your goal.

Rob
PD 14 Ultimate Suite / Win10 Pro x64
1. Gigabyte Brix PRO / i7-4770R Intel Iris Pro 5200 / 16 GB / 1 TB SSD
2. Lenovo X230T / 8GB / Intel HD4000 + ViDock 4 Plus & ASUS Nvidia 660 Ti / Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIZw3GPwKMo&feature=youtu.be

Rob,

Thanks for your thoughts on the ideal PD system. I will be making some changes to our setup in the near future.

When you mention that at SSD improves editing performance, does that require that the PD software and the subject media sources both be on the SSD? We are running a disk farm with lots of video that far exceed the capacity of the SSDs so its cost prohibitive to recreate a SSD farm of that capacity. Is just running a SATAIII high speed drive with look ahead chacheing enough? It would be real pain to have to move the subject material on and off the powerup SSD for each edit video.

Thanks,

Todd

Todd,

No need to change over everything to SSDs. Just your main C: drive with another partition on the SSD for the video edits. This will speed up your workflow, start up shutdown times and so on.

My setup partitions are as follows:

1TB SSD with a 275GB main C: partition that has my OS and all prgm installs. (175 GB has system/ prgm. installs. The other 100GB is left free for System Restore (this has saved me more times than I can count since I am perpetually tweaking and adding things to my system.) As well this allows the OS and my installed prgms. to utilize the 100GB as a cache. Just remember to turn off disk defrag / indexing and so on since SSDs don't need these features. (I highly recommend Samsung EVO SSDs and using the Samsung Magician SSD software to setup your SSD.)

The rest of the SSD has a D: partition with different directories for where I do my actual editing and working on my other creative files. I point the prgms to these directories to use them instead of saving edits on the main C: partition. I also have a smaller E: partition for misc. testing and tweaking kept separately from my more important C: and D: partitions.

Once done I offload to over of 11 terabytes of storage with a 3 redundancy backup. (3 copies of everything on removable mechanical HDs mostly 4TB Seagates.) For quicker manual or automated syncing I use a one click solution known as Allway Sync: http://allwaysync.com/index.html

Try it out and see if it fits your needs- the limitations for the free version is that it can't "process more than 40,000 files in any consecutive 30-days." I max that out that limitation in less than an hour so I bought the prgm which was very reasonable and the best sync prgm I have ever used. Incredibly powerful with lots of features for HDs, networks, ftp and so on - it can be a bit confusing to setup at first. I tried a lot of diff. syncing prgms and this was the best I have found.

Anyway- your needs may be different from mine so modify as you see fit.

Rob
PD 14 Ultimate Suite / Win10 Pro x64
1. Gigabyte Brix PRO / i7-4770R Intel Iris Pro 5200 / 16 GB / 1 TB SSD
2. Lenovo X230T / 8GB / Intel HD4000 + ViDock 4 Plus & ASUS Nvidia 660 Ti / Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIZw3GPwKMo&feature=youtu.be