Cameratown by Ron Risman

My ASUS G73JW-ROG Notebook Review

Ever since the launch of Premiere Pro CS5, I have been loving its ability to play native Canon DSLR footage real-time from the timeline without first having to transcode the footage to another format or create lower resolution proxy files. However, this real time playback often comes to a halt the minute you start layering video tracks or adding transitions or effects. Yes, we have all seen video demonstrations showing Premiere Pro CS5 running multiple Picture-in-picture tracks in real-time, but none of these videos truly show a full edit in progress. They're usually just a few tracks combined for a simple demonstration. After watching these demonstrations we start to wonder what type of PC or card we need to purchase to get our computer to run CS5 that smoothly. This is where the problem lies. There's very little solid information online, at least in one place, that helps guide us to getting the right configuration.

Sure, if you run out and spend $4k-5k on a workstation I'm sure that will do the trick, but for the rest of us on a tighter budget there just has to be a way to get better performance out of Premiere Pro CS5 without spending a fortune. This is why I decided to take myself on this journey - to discover how to get a computer up and running that was optimized for nVIDIA cards with CUDA GPU technology.

Ever since the introduction of Premiere Pro CS5 I have been using it on an Intel Core 2 Quad CPU (Q6600) running at 2.40GHz. The system has 4GB of memory installed, Windows 7 Professional 64-bit O/S and running off of an internal 500GB 7200rpm hard drive. With this configuration I could get Premiere Pro CS5 to play back Canon 5D/7D files back in real time on the timeline, but only when the edits were fairly simple. Once I started layering tracks, adding slow-motion fx, and adding titles or overlays the playback started to stutter, making precision edits very difficult.  read more...