Home > Storage > PowerScale (Isilon) > Industry Solutions and Verticals > Media and Entertainment > Dell PowerScale: Adobe Premiere Pro Configuration and Optimization > Understanding DogEars
When enabled, DogEars displays several data points in real time while a video is playing in an application window. The data is overlaid on either the preview or playback window in the Adobe Premiere Pro application. To understand the data, and what it is revealing about the solution (including workstation, networking, and storage).
DogEars provide a wide array of metrics about video playback in Premiere Pro. Some of these metrics are only visible while the video is playing, others are always visible in the DogEars overlay. The metrics that are of most interest here are:
Dropped frames indicates the number of dropped frames. Obviously, the ideal number here is 0, although occasionally a single digit number of dropped frames occurs at the playback start.
Next is FramePrefetchLatency. This number is usually <30 millisecond during Premiere Pro playback. If it spikes high enough, FramePrefetchLatencycan be an indicator that the storage cannot sustain playback, and eventually Premiere Pro will start dropping frames.
However, FramePrefetchLatency is related to the InQueue and CPU Frames CompeteAheadOfPlay numbers. These two buffers fill up to slightly over 300 frames and stay there during playback. When playback starts, the FramePrefetchLatency is high (700-800 millisecond) while the buffers fill up, once they fill, the FramePrefetchLatency drops down. If Premiere Pro is unable to fill the CompleteAheadOfPlay and InQueue buffers, the FramePrefetchLatency never drops and it is clear that Premiere is struggling to maintain playback.