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Editing 5d Mark ii footage in Premiere Pro

I am editing 1080p footage from a 5d mark ii in Premiere Pro CS5.5. Playback is very slow, even with no filters in place. The bar at the top of the timeline is always yellow and sometimes during playback, it will freeze on a frame while the player head keeps moving in the timeline and the audio keeps playing.

Here are my specs:

2010 MacBook Pro
8 gigs DDR3 ram
2.66 GHz Intel Core i7
Mercury Playback Engine enabled
Premiere Pro CS5.5
Using an external hd with Firewire 800 for all my media

I read that transcoding the footage using Cineform Neoscene makes the footage easier for Premiere to edit since the native 5d mark ii footage requires Premiere to calculate the "in-between" frames.

So should I transcode my footage before editing it in Premiere? If so, what is the best tool to do so and what should I encode the footage too? I am also concerned with losing quality in the footage when transcoding the footage.
 
No need to transcode. Just render the footage so it's green and easier to work with. Once all the footage is rendered, keep occasionally rendering to keep up with the playback!
 
Yep, Premiere edits h.264 .mov files just fine. I edit on a quad core i5 with 8 gigs of RAM with no issues (other than having to keep the timeline rendered fairly often once the project gets some size to it.).
 
Hmm, I wonder why playback is so slow. I even have the playback resolution at 1/4. All I did was overlap 3 clips with various opacity settings and it freezes during playback.

I know I can render the sections giving me trouble, but I am hesitant to do so because when I am editing, I like to move things around a lot and try different things. Having to constantly render will just take too much time. Every time I move something slightly I'll have to re-render.

Are there any settings in Premiere or on my laptop that I need to adjust for optimal performance?

Thanks.
 
Out of interest, are you plugged into mains power, or are you running off battery?

I notice when I'm running off my PC's battery, 1080p footage won't play back smoothly either in VLC, QT, or CS5.5 but when it is plugged into the wall the footage plays fine in all the above.
 
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