Curt: the videos played fine in Bridge. I don't know why codecs would be an issue; they're installed onto the system itself, so if Premiere Pro uses a codec, shouldn't Photoshop be able to use it? And these are AVCHD from my Canon Vixia, MPG from my iPad and AVI from a Flip. Nothing offbeat.
Trevor: Task Manager and Resource Monitor show that PS and Dynamic Link Media server are using the most CPU and memory (when playing the vids). Only about 50% of the CPU was in use and about 3.5 of the 8 gb memory was in use, even though I manually boosted available memory in PS to 6 gb. So the machine isn't even close to being maxed out.
I edit videos on this machine often, and have never seen performance as bad as what happened in Photoshop. Now I'm on my ASUS laptop. Tomorrow afternoon, I'll test on my workstation, which has the same amount of RAM, faster hard drives, faster video card, and slower CPU.
