# Lightroom 4 video performance is not good, how to improve?



## ewlung (Mar 12, 2012)

Hi,

I upgraded from LR3.2 to LR4.0 this weekend and I am happy with the video management support.

But, I found the playback performance is quite bad, some times choppy.

Here is the detail of my PC:

- Windows 7 Professional 64 bit
- Intel Core i5 660 3.33 GHz
- 8 GB of RAM
- Sapphire Videokaart PCI-e Radeon HD5450 1GB 1xDVI/HDMI
-  Monitor is 24" from Samsung

Video files:

- AVCHD 1920x1080
- File extension: .mts
- Camera: Sony NEX-5

All videos are stored in a centralized NAS with 1GB wired ethernet cable.

The Windows OS is pretty clean, I don't install much apps because I use this mainly for Lightroom and Ulead video app.
Antivirus is from Microsoft.

So, is there any way to improve the video performance? Especially in playback?

Or is the bottleneck is the PC hardware?

Or the 1GB wired ethernet is not fast enough for AVCHD full HD?

Is there any special configuration for video? I did not configure anything in LR4 except importing my catalog from LR3.2.

I think LR4 will playback to the maximum screen area of the playback Window. Is there anyway to specify the playback screen area size? I was thinking if I could set it to smaller, like 1024x768 or something, that can improve the performance.

Thanks.


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## ukbrown (Mar 12, 2012)

Put the video on local disk and tell me if it performs better, Local storage as a rule is usually faster than most NAS devices can deliver over the wire.


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## ewlung (Mar 12, 2012)

ukbrown said:


> Put the video on local disk and tell me if it performs better, Local storage as a rule is usually faster than most NAS devices can deliver over the wire.



I tested by storing it locally and I don't see much different.

The local one seems faster when "loading audio", but when fully loaded they played the same.


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## Victoria Bampton (Mar 12, 2012)

You could try enlarging the video cache too (Preferences dialog > File Handling tab), and play HD video at draft quality (View menu > View Options > Loupe tab).


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## ukbrown (Mar 12, 2012)

OK, next comparison, if you play this video outside of LR does it play OK


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## ukbrown (Mar 12, 2012)

Oh and turn off antivirus.  I am not too sure how much of the video display is done via LR, or by the codes you have installed, but if it plays OK from the OS (Media PLayer, not the Ulead software) then LR is not doing something right.  I have HD videos from my canon that play fine in LR


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## kptchuck (Mar 14, 2012)

ukbrown said:


> OK, next comparison, if you play this video outside of LR does it play OK



I am having the same issue.  Quite choppy near the beginning of the video, then gets better later in the video.  Even when replaying, it is choppy at the beginning.  AVCHD is from an Olympus E-P3, on an external disk accessed over Firewire 800.

Video plays fine with VLC.

I'll check the video cache increase tomorrow.

-Chuck
LR4, OSX 10.6.8, 8GB RAM


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## ewlung (Mar 14, 2012)

ukbrown said:


> OK, next comparison, if you play this video outside of LR does it play OK



A bit better outside of LR. But, I can play it in smaller window too, which is much better than LR.

And to Victoria, the play mode is already set to draft quality and the cache should be enough for 3GB as I still tested few small movies.

If I need to upgrade my hardware, what would it be?

I don't think the RAM, because 8GB is more than enough ...

Processor or GPU? Does LR utilize GPU for video rendering?

I chosen those processor and GPU because they are silent!


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## Victoria Bampton (Mar 15, 2012)

kptchuck said:


> I am having the same issue.  Quite choppy near the beginning of the video, then gets better later in the video.



That's an interesting bit of info.  What happens if you leave it open in Loupe view for a bit longer before starting to play the video?


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## ukbrown (Mar 15, 2012)

So in summary it's not playing that well anywhere on your system.  Now I have a really crap graphics card, 6gb RAM and a 3 year old early model quad core.  Your setup should proverbial all over mine.  I can play HD video from my 7D externally no problem.......most of the time, any antivirus, diskeeper, anything reading and writing from the disk.

What size are these video files in GB and how many minutes of video is that.  8 seconds is about 50MB on mine anything that slows my PC down in reading the disk makes it choppy.  Maybe it is the same for you.  Do you have two real physical disks internally, not firewire or anything like that.  If you are on the same disk as your system disk etc, then this could also affect it.


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## luccombelad (Mar 20, 2012)

The performance of LR4 is very frustrating. I store my photo's on an external Firewire® drive. I'm using a very fast IMac, and since upgrading to LR4 the performance has been pants. It's got to the point where I don't want to develop my photo's in LR4 at all. Like most upgrades, LR4 has been rushed out under the motto "Let us deal with issues Post Implementation".  When will I ever learn to wait for several months before purchasing an upgrade......


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## Victoria Bampton (Mar 20, 2012)

luccombelad, I feel your frustration!

Couple of things you can try:

1.  Turn off the secondary window if it's open
2.  Try a few photos in a clean catalog and see if that's better.  If it is, you can try exporting your working catalog to a new catalog and rebuilding the previews.  That's helping a lot of people.  That one warning with that is that Publish Services don't go along for the ride when exporting as catalog.


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## luccombelad (Mar 21, 2012)

Victoria Bampton said:


> luccombelad, I feel your frustration!
> 
> Couple of things you can try:
> 
> ...



I'll give it a go Victoria. Yesterday, I was tearing my hair out. I was staring at spinning wheel most of the day, could you hear me swearing in Southampton?

Laurence
http://www.flickr.com/photos/laurencedbaker/


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## LouieSherwin (Mar 21, 2012)

Hi Laurence,

I am guessing that you are speaking of the "spinning beach ball of death". Is appearing when you switch views or modules? If so this is the symptom of a bug introduced in the LR4 SDK that can be triggered by some plugins. Specifically, I discovered this in Any Tag but it could be in any plugin. John Ellis has released new versions of all of his plugins the implement a work around. 

If you have the symptom described above and you have some plugins installed, disable all your plugins and restart Lightroom. If the problem goes away as it did for me then one of you plugins is triggering the bug.

You can find more information about this on the Lightroom SDK Forum: Curious severe bug in LrLogger describing the problem and a workaround.

-louie


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## luccombelad (Mar 22, 2012)

LouieSherwin said:


> Hi Laurence,
> 
> I am guessing that you are speaking of the "spinning beach ball of death". Is appearing when you switch views or modules? If so this is the symptom of a bug introduced in the LR4 SDK that can be triggered by some plugins. Specifically, I discovered this in Any Tag but it could be in any plugin. John Ellis has released new versions of all of his plugins the implement a work around.
> 
> ...



The only 3rd Party Plugins I have are Jeffery Friedl's. He's normally very good, but not even Jeffery can anticipate every scenario. I'll try the plugin turn off option, as I'm becoming very frustrated.


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## Victoria Bampton (Mar 23, 2012)

I don't blame you.  The performance issues are undoubtedly very frustrating for all those affected.  The good news is they are working on a fix, so hopefully you won't have to put up with it for too long.


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