Video: Adobe CS4 Premiere AVCHD Playback Trick
December 7th, 2008 by jeremychoneAdobe CS4 Premiere is not very well optimized for AVCHD editing/playback. Adobe points at the format, and users tend to point at Adobe. Personally, I think that the software is a little heavy, but I think that Adobe could make an effort to optimize it (other AVCHD players, such as the ImageMixer coming with the Canon HF11, are playing the .m2ts or .mts files just fine). See Adobe Forum on the AVCHD Playback.
However, I did find an [obvious] trick (on Windows) that makes the experience much better.
Just upgrade the priority for the process “ImporterProcessServer.exe” from “normal” to “high” in the Windows Task Manager. Simple, but it does make a nice difference (at least for me).
I still hope that Adobe will optimize their AVCHD playback/editing in a future CS4 update (it would show that they are listening).
December 8th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
Great tip. The AVCHD codec in CS4 feels just like the Mainconcepts codec for AVCHD in CS3. Slow and jerky. But this tip really seems to have helped. Don’t even know what the ImporterProcessServer is - but it takes up a bunch of memory and CPU time.
December 9th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
@David it seems that the ImporterProcessServer is the process that encode/decode the movie for the CS4 Premiere editing/playback.
January 14th, 2009 at 2:41 am
only small help. almost not see beter work.
January 14th, 2009 at 12:17 pm
@ivomir, agree, small help. I am kind of sad that Adobe is not working on solving that. ImageMixer Player plays the same file very well (on the same laptop).
January 27th, 2009 at 9:21 pm
I’m on a Mac using 10.5.6 and so I don’t think there’s anyway to change cpu or memory allocation there. However, same problem with avchd where it crashes the ‘ImporterProcessServer’ and then I have to exit Premiere and try it again. This is just when playing from the source monitor in Premiere.
February 23rd, 2009 at 3:10 pm
I would like to see these problems fixed in the next update myself.
June 10th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
@Paul V
You can change process priority in Mac OS X. Do some research on using the command “renice”. See this for example:
http://forums.macrumors.com/archive/index.php/t-126007.html
There are probably graphical utilities that do that but I haven’t gone looking for any so I’m not sure.
June 19th, 2009 at 7:53 pm
Worked for me - Thank you for the tip!
March 6th, 2010 at 9:22 am
Wow! I also have an older cpu and I’ve been editing hdv with Premiere CS4 and upon changing the cpu priority to high I also noticed a marked difference! Thanks for the tip!