I have been using Seagate Baracudas ST3000DM001. I get about 190mbps just straight off the Santa bus on a single drive. Even a copy operation between 2 of them sustained that speed.

OIC OK, you have three AVCHD going at once. Only a faster system--mainly the CPU--will fix this problem, if the playback is fine if you untick the little eyelet for two of the three tracks.If you just play one of the tracks, and leave the others "off", and the playback is fine, then it is basically the CPU.

Not all rendering cycles use the GPU, this is a big complicated topic.

I'm suspecting the CPU and the hard drives more and more; from what I can tell, playback is handled mostly by the CPU, and the GPU's advantage comes when you're rendering video.

I tried that GPU-X while playing Crysis, and the GPU definitely starts churning when handling data from that graphics hog. So my computer definitely uses the GPU. So maybe PP uses it only when rendering, and my bottlenecks are my CPU and hard drives.

I have another theory about why I'm getting these slowdowns. The project I'm using is a stage play, where three cameras basically recorded as long sequences that ran close to an hour. Since playing the files requires compression-on-the-fly, these files may require a lot more math than playing shorter sequences would. Also, they're three such files, running in parallel, so there may be some cycles wasted in evaluating the video streams lower on the timeline.

So I'm wondering about taking my files, and exporting copies in some less-compressed format that PP can play back with less hassle. After I settle on the editing, I can apply those edits to the original files, and then handle stuff like color correction.

Oh, @superset : That link deals with hyperthreading, and that's Intel-only.

Are you absolutely sure you have the correct sequence settings? Try a few different ones. Did you drag the file onto the create new sequence marker? It could be the CPU is the bottleneck but that seems pretty slow for a CUDA enabled system.

Well, I had a look at my system to try everyone's advice.

@sam_stickland : I'm not sure what I should be looking for in the Resource Monitor. I do know that, when I play a project in PP, the CPU use shoots up to nearly 100%.

@DrDave : The card name's in the supported-cards file, definitely, and hardware acceleration's turned on, and the sequence is marked for maximum quality. (The color line at the top of the sequence is a nice yellow.)

I'm starting to see some GPU use at 6% at most. I tried disabling my onboard graphics card in the BIOS, but that didn't seem to affect things. The NVIDIA control panel is geared more for games, and the special ticks for Premiere Pro don't seem to affect things very much.

My i7 will render 7 minutes of H264 footy anywhere from 5-20 minutes depending on the effects loaded (Neat Video is slow). Something is wrong there.

I had an AMD box running a quad and I swapped it out for a six core AMD part--a lot of the AMD stuff is backwards compatible, and it ran OK, not great but OK. But an Intel quad is much better for this. What your really want is hyperthreading with an i7, so you are running 8 virtual cores with optimation, or 12 cores if you get the six core i7.

Your memory loads during playback should not run at zero. They should run 20-35 percent. So the GPU is not being used (hence the zero). Make sure the two part process for activating CUDA is in place. Make sure you have the line for your card in the supported_cards text file, and make sure that when you load the Nvidia control panel that you have selected Adobe PP for use with your card. Also make sure if you have another card or on-board GPU that it is disabled, you may have to make a trip to the bios for that one.

Running task manager in the background, you might see spikes in the CPU, and if so this is a problem, but if the GPU isn't being used, you are going to see those spikes anyway.

havent used amd cpu for many years. Are they so much slower then intel? I have in my older computer a intel q8400 and it works fine.

@ Brian_Siano

"my CPU-- it's an AMD quad core, Phenom II 955, 3.2 ghz"

bingo, I didn't see this part.

Before you do anything you need to use a few tools to figure out where the bottleneck is. Download the free util GpuZ and fire that up and play some files. But the fact is, if you have CUDA enabled, that should not be the bottleneck. But check it anyway, you may not have CUDA working for some reason.

Check the drop down menu to see that Mercury Playback Hardware is showing. I figure you did this already. You then have two areas to look at: the CPU and your memory usage. If you aren't running a 64 bit OS with more than 6gb, then that is issue number one, and, while you can get by with a quadcore there is nothing that will chew through vid like an i7.

For me, the minimum is 12gb ram, 64 bit OS and an i7. You have to have CUDA, but even a basic card will give you enough GPU. My GPU usage runs around 20 percent--it is not a factor. 16gb ram is not necessarily better but it doesn't hurt if you want to use Firefox while rendering your video.

IMHO the disk speed is not important as long as it works at a basic standard. I mean, don't run it off a floppy. I'm using turtle WD green drives with no issues.

But you say you have the 16gb, the GPU, and a quad core should do it, so that is a pickle. Sounds like your CUDAS cores are not working or you have not allocated your memory properly in the Premiere settings.

I still recommend the i7 as the "fix it all" of playback problems, but make sure you are using all your memory. I'm assuming you are on 64 bit OS? But when I used a slower quad core, I was still able to play files back smoothly. You should just be able to dump AVCHD files on the timeline and play them.

I would also check that your sequence settings are correct. Just drag a clip onto the new sequence icon (not into the trash) and it will create a new sequence with the prooper settings. Could be you are resampling the vid and it is clogging the system.

I don't think you should be having any AVCHD playback issues with the hardware you have described. My secondary system is quite a bit older than yours, P6T mb and gtx470 gpu, 16mb ram and it runs AVCHD like butter.

One thing you might check is where you have PP storing your media cache files, in PP preferences you can select where the media cache files go but they default to the drive where the application is installed. There is also a "clean media cache" button in preferences. I relearned all this because 6 or 7 months ago I didn't have enough room on C drive to install CS6. Having less than 10% available on your system drive is likely to choke up things a little.

I noticed diminished performance the other day, and realised my drive was over 70% full. Moved some data to other drives, defrag and all is fine. Running i5 2500K water cooled/overclocked via mobo option with and GTX570 overclocked with MSI Afterburner. Hope you work it out, 670 should be running great. Bottleneck likely elsewhere, as suggested above.

@jpbturbo

Would it speed up work in Premiere if I were to convert my MTS files to this DNxHD format, and edit those?