Premiere 6.5 within VMware

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Brad
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Premiere 6.5 within VMware

Post by Brad » Tue Jul 20, 2010 7:40 pm

Does anybody have any experience running Premiere 6.5 from within a VMware instance? Liz is currently on a laptop running Windows 7 64-bit. Her laptop manufacturer doesn't offer any XP-compatible drivers so I don't want to risk installing XP to another partition so she can run it that way. So I thought about maybe installing XP to a virtual machine, though to be quite honest I have zero practical experience with VMware, I just know how it works in theory. Does VMware basically use the drivers already installed in the native OS and just virtualize everything else? And assuming it does install and work okay, what about things like AVIsynth and things like that. Should it all work like normal (meaning, if it were running within a native XP install)? Treading into uncharted waters and wanting to see if anybody has any advice to give.
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Re: Premiere 6.5 within VMware

Post by Qyot27 » Wed Jul 21, 2010 12:07 am

I dunno about VMware, but Virtualbox (which I prefer partially because there is no freeware vs. for-pay version confusion, and because I've not had any real problems with it...but I've not done too much on it, either - and mainly use it to virtualize Ubuntu or Fedora under an OS X or XP host, rather than the other way around) relies just on the OS installed to it, plus its own set of compatibility drivers for things like Internet - any hardware interaction is subjective, based on how well they work with the virtualization software. If the hardware doesn't, the virtualized machine just has to emulate more pieces. I would imagine most virtualization programs work in a nearly identical fashion given the same circumstances.

Because it has to emulate the hardware, expect some level of a performance hit compared to running natively. Processors with Intel VT-x or AMD-V support can offload some of the burden to the real hardware, which should improve performance by a good amount, although I don't have any hard numbers (and I'm not in a position to test, either).
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Re: Premiere 6.5 within VMware

Post by Pwolf » Wed Jul 21, 2010 12:18 am

its not very good. i tried it when i switched to win7. it was easier learning premiere pro then trying to edit in a vm. audio and video playback werent synced correctly and video playback was choppy. terrible.

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Re: Premiere 6.5 within VMware

Post by Devolution » Wed Jul 21, 2010 8:50 am

last time i tried to edit something, i just installed a copy of XP on Microsoft VirtualPC, installed Premiere 6.5 and had at it. worked fairly well too.

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Re: Premiere 6.5 within VMware

Post by Qyot27 » Thu Jul 22, 2010 12:06 am

Another option that may be better performance-wise might be running it through Wine on a Wubi-based Ubuntu install. Wine does work with Premiere 6.5, as I was able to install, open videos, and render with it fairly well, although there was a noticeable lag** and the Export preview window didn't work, as I think it uses DirectShow instead of VFW (Wine doesn't support DirectShow yet).

There could be other bugs, but going through Wine will take you close to (or perhaps even faster than, as is the case for Windows builds of x264) Windows' own performance. The version of Wine I used in the test was from the WineHQ PPA, with the [admittedly, 32-bit version, although 64-bit would likely be fine too] of Ubuntu 10.04.

**Which is just a fact of life for me; this comp is 9 years old. On anything even middle-of-the-decade-recent that shouldn't be an issue. I also had desktop compositing effects on, turning that off would have helped too.


Wubi allows a user to install Ubuntu to a file stored on the NTFS partition Windows sits on, which also lets Windows uninstall it as cleanly as it was installed. However, the difference between what Wubi does and a VM does is that Wubi acts as a loopback device, allowing a user to directly boot Ubuntu on system startup instead of Windows. It's susceptible to the same fragmentation and volatility issues NTFS is (despite using ext4 or your filesystem of choice inside), but for all other intents and purposes it's a genuine dual-boot without the problem of partitioning. The loopback method and the file being hosted on NTFS do create a performance hit, but not anything like what a VM would.

It also means that Ubuntu cannot directly access the Windows partition like it can in a true dual-boot scenario. So this would require making sure all the footage and project materials are on an external drive or an already existing separate partition.
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Re: Premiere 6.5 within VMware

Post by chui101 » Fri Jul 23, 2010 3:45 am

If you run VMWare 7 in Windows 7 it offers direct-to-GPU video acceleration. (Previous versions basically used the CPU to render all the video stuff including overlay.) I'm not sure how Premiere 6.5 renders video to the screen, though, so YMMV.
I believe that most modern virtual machines do hardware virtualization of CPU and memory, and everything else has to go through a virtual driver at the level of the guest OS.

If you have Win7 Pro or above, you can download Virtual PC for free from Microsoft, and use that to install and run Windows XP.
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