it’s not me, premiere pro. it’s you.

I’ve experienced some stuttering playback issues inside Premiere Pro for a while now.
Ever since I started using my new Nikon D7000, as a matter of fact.

When playing my D7000 footage inside PP, the audio plays fine but the video playback becomes choppy after a few seconds of play.

I put up with it for a while.

But while editing my latest project, it became a real annoyance.

I just attended an Adobe “Tips and Flicks” workshop in DC where I heard over and over again: “With Premiere Pro, it can handle any footage you throw at it! No need to transcode before you edit like you have to do in Final Cut. Just pull your footage in and Premiere Pro can handle it!”

Um, yeah. This footage is nothing strange. And Premiere Pro is acting like a fat kid trying to keep up with a track athlete.

I surfed around on the Adobe help forums. Some other people had posted similar problems. This guy responded to many of those by basically saying “you have a crappy computer or you’re stupid or both.”

Wow. He looks exactly how I pictured him.

Here are some of his replies:

“My experience is that people that complain about choppy playback have either outdated hardware, or are using very esoteric formats, and/or have a system with a lot of crap on it, that seriously gets in the way of editing. You are definitely not in the first category, I don’t know the origin of your clips and the codec used, so you could be in the second category, but most likely you have a polluted system.”

“OE seems most likely. OE is Operator error. You did something wrong. Your computer is setup wrong, your disk configuration is wrong, your source marerial is wrong, your project settings are wrong, your video driver is wrong…”

Totally unhelpful and arrogant. I’d like to kick him in his render engine.

A few more days between my tech guy and Google and I found this little link.
http://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/kb/nikon-d7000-footage-stutters-playback.html

It basically says PP thinks footage from a Nikon D7000 is something other than it is, so it does an awful job of decoding it. Change the extension from .mov to .mpg and it should work fine.

I tried it, and it worked.

On one hand, I’m grateful it worked.

On the other hand, good Lord, Adobe. Are you serious? I have to change the extension on my footage because the “program that can handle any footage you throw at it” thinks my dolphin is porpoise?

I had to check twice to believe this is an official solution from Adobe. It is! And apparently not an issue they felt needed to be fixed in CS5.5.

I want to love you, Adobe. I really really do. But sometimes you make it hard, when that brand new Final Cut Pro X program is smiling at me from my desk drawer.