Lion users report better performance from Adobe Premiere Pro
I’ve been writing quite a lot about the poor timeline performance issues when using Premiere Pro CS5 & CS5.5 on the Mac and with the thread about the subject on adobe’s forum now reaching over 4000 views it seems to be a very widespread issue.
Since upgrading to Lion though I’ve noticed a marked improvement in the ‘laggy timeline’ issue, to the point which I’d say that the problem no longer exists. So what’s changed?
Well it’s hard to say of course, only the apple boffins will know the details but it certainly seems as though the code has been optimised in Lion to better support the way that Premiere is rendering the timeline. Here’s a quote from Adobe Employee ‘Wil Renczes’ which is taken from the adobe forums…
I profiled the code – the timeline drawing operation is performing the same set of steps on Win & Mac – we draw into an offscreen buffer & blit the contents to the timeline. On mac, the bulk of the time was being spent in the OS blit routine…
Upgrading an OS shouldn’t be taken lightly though, there are still going to be plugins and certain bits of hardware that are not supported by Lion.
One interesting part of the upgrade is that Lion comes with a driver for the Nvidia Quadro 4000 that’s newer than the latest available from Nvidia’s own website. The driver installed with Lion is 270.05.05f01 whereas the latest available from Nvidia is 256.02.25f01.
In addition to Lion improving Premiere’s performance Adobe have also released an update for Premiere Pro this week in the form of CS5.5.1, this update claims to improve performance with h.264 footage as well as including many other fixes.
That’s funny because after upgrading to Lion I saw a rather large drop in performance wich made me sad. After reading your post I do think that my problem is that I need to do a clean install of all my working apps. I think it’s been way too long since I did some house cleaning..
Thank you thank you for bringing this problem to light. I recently upgraded to Lion just because of this post and happy to see the lag issue gone completely. It made me realize just how much the lag issue was destroying my productivity. Editing is now fun again!