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Playing footage smoothly in Adobe Programmes?

F

FilmmakerG

Hey

I'm having trouble editing anything I shoot because it does' play at all smoothly in After Effects or Premiere. I thought it was my computer but then I edited some footage which was full HD but only 25fps. I think it must be because there are twice as many frames to render?

Anyone know anything I can do about this?

Thanks
George
 
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Well you're not giving us very much information to go on here..

But first, I must make this point very plain... After Effects is not designed to let you play footage smoothly. The best you can hope for in AE is realtime playback of a tiny segment of your timeline, the length of that segment dependant on the amount of ram you have available.

What format is the footage in that's giving you issues? Does ANYTHING work smoothly?

It sounds to me like you're probably trying to work with footage that's too much for your computer to handle, either processor speed or disk speed & transfer rate.. Proxy files might be the best solution for you.
 
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The format which is giving me issues is 720p MP4 h.264 footage shot on a Samsung camera. However it will play 1080p .mts files totally fine which are much larger which doesn't make sense to me.

I've looked into proxy files before but I don't understand them.
 
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I have this problem in sony vegas. I think it must be my processor, makes syncing hard. My solution is to render as I go. I have found that after I render something, it will play back smoothly in the program (that is, until you start putting more effects etc on it).
 
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Will Vincent said:
h.264 takes more processor power to decode than mpeg2. You really shouldn't be editing an h.264 file directly anyway, it's better to work with a more edit friendly format.
Click to expand...

Dont ignore this post!

h.264 is not easy even on modern computers. Use cineform neoscene intermediary codex for working with footage. Remember you processing usage goes up for every stream (read that as layers in AE)
FYI: Intel demostranted there new gen mulit core CPU's using AE and cineform just last week, so it is still cutting edge...

FYI: This is just me barfing up what I read elsewhere.. Im still SD only :(
 
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wheatgrinder said:
FYI: This is just me barfing up what I read elsewhere.. Im still SD only :(
Click to expand...
Be that as it may, what you're barfing up is good information. ;)

And yes, I agree cineform is really one of the best options available. Cineform Neo is really inexpensive, and lets you edit HD footage in a lot easier to deal with format that the processor can handle than h.264 or mpeg2.

As for whether to upgrade your computer or RAM? Hard to say since you didn't post your computer specs.

However, minimum I'd try to work on HD footage with would be a single core 3GHz, or dual core 2GHz or faster cpu, and 3 or more gig of ram.
 
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What is Cineform Neo, and how would I get it?

As for my computer specs, they couldn't really be much worse. It only has half GB of RAM as it is an oldl one form my Dad's company. (I'll now get loads of replies saying 'no wonder it doesn't play smoothly)
:)
 
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FilmmakerG said:
Wow that looks good, I'm downloading a trial now so I'll get back to you within a few days to tell you how it went.

Thanks for all the advice :)
Click to expand...

It sounds like you're well below the recommended minimums for cineform, so it might not totally fix your problem, but I've been very happy with the software, and support from the company. :)
 
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