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2008 Mac Pro and Red r3d playback
We have 3 2008 8-core systems and 1 2010 12-core system.
They all have playback issues with red footage in Adobe Premiere CS5.5 and CS6.
It plays, but lags sometimes. Even if playing back at a low quality.Would a second graphics card or graphics card upgrade help the playback?
If so, any recommendations on cards?Brandon Morris
Co-owner/Creative Director
http://www.fugostudios.comRED Scarlet, Canon T2i, Panasonic HPX-170
Nikon Primes
Mac Pro 12-core 64GB RAM (2011)
Mac Pro 8-core 12GB RAM (2008)
Mac Pro 4-core 8GB RAM (2006)
13″ Macbook Pro (Mid 09) 8GB RAM Lion -
6 Replies
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If you already have a graphics card that Premiere Pro can use for CUDA, any version of Premiere Pro pre-CC won’t utilize a second graphics card.
The RED decoder (like all video decoders at this point) runs on the CPU. The RED decoder runs on one core for one stream of footage. Your other cores may be doing other stuff, but since the RED software decoder is single-threaded, thus the clock speed of the CPU is more important than the core count when it comes to playing back RED R3D footage.
A solid GPU certainly makes a big difference as there are lots of color space and interpolation and scaling operations that the GPU picks up under CUDA so the CPU can concentrate on the decoding process…but if you already have Adobe-compatible GPU cards, then it’s likely bottle necking at the CPU.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,Adobe Certified Instructor
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it will playback okay raw, but if i add a plugin like colorista it begins to lag. is that still a cpu issue?
Brandon Morris
Co-owner/Creative Director
http://www.fugostudios.comRED Scarlet, Canon T2i, Panasonic HPX-170
Nikon Primes
Mac Pro 12-core 64GB RAM (2011)
Mac Pro 8-core 12GB RAM (2008)
Mac Pro 4-core 8GB RAM (2006)
13″ Macbook Pro (Mid 09) 8GB RAM Lion -
Does it also lag if you add the Adobe 3 way color corrector?
Colorista uses OpenGL so it does get some GPU boost…but it’s different than CUDA accelerated effects…
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,Adobe Certified Instructor
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All of the testing I have done with the Red One codec and Scarlet version, R3D multithreads great in Adobe. However Red Giant plugins/fx do not as of last I tested or heard. The Colorista is going to slow your performance down at the CPU if you use it. I suggest making that the alter part of your workflow.
Eric-ADK
Tech Manager -
How do you determine RED codecs are multithreading a single stream decode? Premiere Pro multithreads its operations of course…
Adobe has some special stuff they do with several formats, shuffling frames and so forth, but the actual decoders are pretty serial animals…it’s why they aren’t jumping to GPU very quickly…and why in the testing I’ve done, CPU clock speed increase trumps CPU core count increase for specifically decode/encode. The processes of interpolation, color conversion, scaling, etc, all need to be done to present the video visually, and many of those processes are multithreaded (and GPU-based in ideal circumstances), but those processes are after the decoding operation.
I have noticed that RED decoders will spawn multiple iterations when I check the running processes, however…each running on a separate core, but I’ve never seen one clip using more than one process at a time. (It’s what keeps RED Rockets selling).
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,Adobe Certified Instructor
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…talked with Eric a bit on the phone to satisfy my curiosity.
It does appear he’s seeing the codec multithread on the CPU…so if nothing else, Adobe is working some magic there.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,Adobe Certified Instructor
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