Activating component?

[peggig]

I finally upgraded to PRE 10, 64-bit version. It seems to render much more slowly than PRE 7 or 8. I turned of timeline scrolling, but that didn't help much. It may be because I only have 4 GBs of RAM installed, but I do have an 8 GB flash drive that I have designated as a ReadyBoost device. I've been told that's the equivalent of adding more memory, but I wonder if it really works.

My other big complaint so far is that, every time I launch the program, I get a message box that says "Activating Component." Then I get another message box that says "Do you want to allow the following program to make changes to this Computer? - Program name: Microsoft Register Server" After I click OK, the same message box pops up again. After I click OK again, the video clips start loading into the project.

Has anybody else had this issue? I searched the forum and couldn't find any other references to this bizarre behavior. I'm using Window 7, 64-bit, and I've never seen this behavior with any other programs. Any ideas on how to get rid of these annoying pop ups?

Thanks!

[Steve Grisetti]

Are you installing the program as an Administrator? It almost sounds like some components are not installing.

As for the program's performance, simply running the program at 64-bit rather than 32-bit on Windows 7 doesn't necessarily mean the program will run significantly faster. A lot depends on your hardware. What kind of processor do you have an how fast is it?

And what format of video are you editing? What model of camcorder did this video come from?

I can't honestly say that, on my dual core system with 4 gigs of RAM, I'm seeing Premiere Elements 10 64-bit working significantly faster than it did when I had the 32 bit OS. Where you should see the biggest boost is when you're editing intensive formats, like AVCHD, on higher performance computers, like i7's with 6 gigs of RAM and more.

[peggig]

I installed it using an Administrator account. I have an Intel Core2 Quad proc, running at 2.4 GHz, with 4 GBs of RAM and an 8 GB flash drive dedicated to ReadyBoost.

The video is HDV, from a Canon HV40. I've previously used the same video files for a project in PRE7, and didn't have any problems.

I did not uninstall PRE7 before installing PRE10. I was told this would not cause any problems, but I suppose it might. I wanted to keep PRE7 as a fallback because, when I upgraded to PRE8, it was so buggy I had to revert back to PRE7. I was very leery of upgrading to PRE10, but I finally did because it's supposed to be designed to take advantage of a 64-bit system.

[Steve Grisetti]

No need to uninstall version 7. It won't interfere with version 10.

Though I'm surprised to hear you're not seeing at least some improvement in moving up to the 64-bit version of the program.

An expert will have to tell us is upping your RAM will make a difference.

[peggig]

What surprises me is that I got a performance boost with PRE 7 when I upgraded to 64-bit Windows, but PRE 10, which is made for 64-bit, is much slower than PRE7 running on the same system. I really expected to get a performance boost with a 64-bit program on a 64-bit system.

Unless I can figure out what the problem is, I'll have to go back to PRE7 again. I hate wasting money upgrading, only to have to revert back to a previous version, again.

Maybe I need to uninstall PRE10 and re-install it. But, unless I can figure out what I need to do differently, it doesn't seem like that would do much good.

[Chuck Engels]

Hi Peggig,
What kind of performance are you referring to?

The 64 bit system isn't going to help a lot without more RAM, 64 bit systems are able to take advantage of more than 4Gb of RAM. So unless you increase your RAM you may not see any difference, or as you have noticed it may even be slower. Increasing the RAM from 4 - 6 or even 8 GB should make a difference in some aspects of the program.

[peggig]

Does using an 8 GB flash drive dedicated to "ReadyBoost" help? I was told that's the equivalent of adding more RAM, but it doesn't seem to be so.

[Bob]

It sounds like you may need to run PrEl 10 as an administrator. Running a program as administrator is not the same as running the program under an administrator account. Right click on the icon or Start Menu item that you use to launch PrEl 10 and select "Run as administrator" from the popup menu. When PrEl 10 starts, do what you did to get the popups and reply to them if they appear. Exit the program normally. You should only have to do this once. The next time you launch PrEl 10, start it normally. If the problem was due to permission levels, you won't get the popups again.

It's not clear why your performance is poor. It could be related to the amount of RAM installed, but it could be something else too. A program called "Process Explorer" can help determine that. Process Explorer is like "Task Manager" on steroids. It can be download from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653. At the bottom of that page is a link to run Process Explorer directly from the web page if you'ld rather not download and install it. Either way, run Process Explorer and select "View>System Infomation.." from the menu or press Ctrl+i. Select the "memory" tab in the window that popped up to see your physical and virtual memory usage. For now, look at the lower left side for the section labeled "Commit Charge (K)". In that section, look at the "Peak" value listed there and compare it to the "Total" value listed in the "Physical Memory (k)" section just below. If the Peak value is close to or greater than the Total value, you could benefit from additional RAM. Peak value is a "high water" mark so you should do your check after you've been logged into windows for a while and have run your programs a while. Be sure to have run Premiere Elements 10 rendering some of your HDV projects first.

ReadyBoost is not the equivalent of RAM and may not be helping much. See this article: Understand ReadyBoost and whether it will Speed Up your System

[Peru]

ReadyBoost is not the equivalent of RAM and may not be helping much. See this article: Understand ReadyBoost and whether it will Speed Up your System

It's more of a gimmick, really.

[peggig]

Thanks, Bob. That's a great system tool! My total physical memory is 4,060,784 and my peak commit charge is 3,469,808. It doesn't seem like memory is the issue.

One thing I notice is that PRE10 often uses over 90% of the CPU. That's not good. Maybe my CPU is too slow. It is an older computer. (It was state of the art four years ago.

[Steve Grisetti]

A quad core system is still faster than most off-the-shelf computers these days, Peg.

When did you last run a registry cleaner, do a disc clean-up and defragment your drive?

By the way, your maximum commit peak charge is, I believe, limited by the total amount of RAM you have. In other words, you may only use 3.5 gig of RAM, but that could be because you only have 4 gigs of it. If you have 8 gigs of it, you may find the program actually taking advantage of at least 6 gigs of it.

With your processor and a 64-bit version of the program, you should be seeing truly stellar performance!

[Bob]

Just a clarification. Commit charge refers to virtual memory not RAM. When virtual memory is committed, it is guaranteed to reside in either physical memory (RAM) or in the system pagefile(s). The maximum amount of virtual memory that can be commited is the sum of the RAM and the size of the pagefile(s) -- minus a small amount of RAM reserved for the operating system use. This is called the Commit Charge Limit. Peak Commit Charge is limited by the Commit Charge Limit and can be much higher than the amount of RAM.

There is no one measure that can determine the amount of RAM you need with certainty. Peak Commit Charge is a very rough indicator. If Peak Commit Charge is close to the Commit Charge Limit, you need to increase the amount of system virtual memory by adding additional RAM or more pagefile space. Otherwise, you risk crashing the application or system. If the Peak is greater than the Total Physical Memory, the commited memory cannot be held entirely in RAM. Peak usage doesn't tell us how many of those commited pages need to reside in RAM at the same time. But, the probability that the system will need to transfer virtual memory pages in and out of RAM will increase. Paging involves reading and writing to disk and is slow compared to direct RAM access and can slow the system down.

A possibly better indicator might be the Physical Memory Available. Available memory is not unused memory. The operating system will use Available Memory as a cache to speed up processing. If the available memory is needed by an executing process, the operating system will reduce or even eliminate the cache as necessary. If the amount of Available memory is consistently small you are using most of your RAM and slowing the system down -- you'll need additional RAM.

[peggig]

Bob, I forgot to thank you for the advice to run as Admin. I did that, and I no longer get the popups for Register Server. One really annoying problem solved! Thank you!

Steve, I run Disk Cleanup and Defragment my hard drives regularly, but I don't have a registry cleaner. I used to use RegClean, but Microsoft no longer supports that, and I don't have it installed on this computer. I just checked the Microsoft download center, and they they warn against using any registry cleaners on Windows 7. I never had any problems with RegClean, but I never ran it on Windows 7, either. Do you have a good one that works well on Windows 7?

Bob, my commit charge limit is 8,119,716 (perhaps because of the ReadyBoost drive), which is more than twice my peak commit charge, so paging doesn't see to be an issue. My available physical memory, at the worst peak usage, is about 1,350,000, so it doesn't seem like I'm running out of memory. When rendering the timeline, my CPU usage goes up to 100%. It doesn't approach that when doing anything else, but I still get an unacceptable lag when dragging clips on the timeline. When I play the video in the preview screen, it often stutters or the video freezes while the audio continues to play. Even when I drag the divider on the timeline up to display more tracks, I have to wait until the screen changes catch up with the mouse. This didn't ever happen with PRE7. It's really strange.

My GPU usage is always below 25%. I wonder if there's some way to get PRE10 to take more advantage of the GPU. Might that solve the problem?

[Bob]

Thanks for letting us know that running as administrator solved the problem. Glad I could help.

As for your performance issue, I agree that RAM doesn't appear to be the problem. CPU usage up to 100% while rendering is also not a problem. Rendering and encoding is very CPU intensive and PrEl 10 doesn't hand the task over to the GPU like Premiere Pro CS5 and CS6 which have the GPU accelerated Mercury Playback Engine. Without GPU acceleration, rendering speed is limited by the CPU speed and PrEl can use as much CPU as it can get. 100% is excellent, it means you aren't being bottlenecked by other system factors. PrEl 10 does use some OpenGL CPU acceleration, but it's usually not a signifcant factor in rendering/encoding.

Lag when dragging clips on the timeline and stuttering or the video freezes is usually an indication that PrEl is not getting the resources it needs or something is slowing it down. It's not uncommon for this to happen on an underpowered computer when working which high definition video -- especially with AVCHD. But, you're working with HDV and PrEl 7 handles it fine. Do you have auto-analyze turned off in PrEl 10? Having that on can cause this problem. Does your project preset match your video type? Is there a red line above the timeline? Are you using external drives with this project? What type of video card to you have and do you have the latest video drivers installed. DirectX and Quicktime should also be at the current version.

[peggig]

How do you turn off Auto Analyzer in PRE 10? I looked that up in Help and it said:

1. Select Edit > Preferences > Media-Analysis
2. Deselect Analyze Media For Smart Tags Automatically.

But there is no Media-Analysis tab on the Preferences property sheet in PRE10. Theres a Media tab, but there's no option on that tab for "Analyze Media for Smart Tags." The only options avaliable are "Disply Media Timecode in SourceFrame Rate" and "In/out Points Show Media Offset." (Both are checked, but I have no idea what they do.)

I'm using an internal hard drive, which is dedicated to video projects. I keep everything else on a separate drive, and I always archive projects on an external drive when I finish them, so I only have the current project on my dedicated video editing disk.

My video card is an nVidea GeForce 9500 GT, and I have the latest driver installed. I also have the latest DirectX and I just ran Apple Software Update and there were no new updates listed for QuickTime.

There's a red line over the timeline until I render it. In PRE7, it was not as slow before it was rendered, but maybe I need to render it more often in PRE10. It always takes a long time to render, though, so I don't render it after every edit.

The performance does seem to have improved somewhat since I ran it as Admin and I stopped getting the register component messages. That may have been part of the problem. I'll have to use it some more before I can tell how much the performance has improved.