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Sick of poor Mac/Adobe performance – discussion
Back in 1999 Speed Razor with a Matrox DigiSuite card would scrub through a timeline like butter and output via SDI. If you scrubbed through a five second clip it would show you essentially 300 frames in an instant. It was the smoothest timeline scrub I had ever experienced.
Fast forward 20 years later on vastly superior machines and slow and choppy scrubs are the norm. Playback drops frames regularly.
Newish iMacPro 3GHZ 10 core, 64GB Ram, Radeon Pro Vega 64 with 16GB.
QNAP TVS 1282T3 NAS with about 1300MB sec read and write tested with black magic.
Is Premiere 2019/20 still being optimized for PC with Cuda cores?
I have tried Open CL and Metal with similar results.Very hesitant to upgrade to the new Mac Pro if Mac and Adobe cant get their act together.
Is there a preferred video output card that acts as an accelerator?
Black Magic UltraStudio 4k currently in use and I hate it.Looking forward to a discussion.
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8 Replies
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Cool story bro.
What kind of footage are you having problems with?
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The main key to butter smooth playback if you already have a fast computer is converting all media to an edit friendly codec like cineform.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tmprods
tallmanproductions.net -
I mean, no one has even brought up the fact that we’re dealing with exponentially more data. Not even as a figure of speech, either: 4K is quadruple the data of HD, which was quadruple the data of SD.
The upshot being: DV had a 25 Mbps data rate at 29.97p for 4:1:1 color, while my FS7 shooting UHD XAVC at 10-bit 4:2:2 with more advanced compression still has a data rate of 300 Mbps, not to mention the strain that decompressing that much larger amount of detail puts on the processor.I think you may be looking back with somewhat rose-colored glasses. When I first started my first real job as a post-production assistant in the 2000s, the performance of FCP was abysmal. Rendering left and right, transcoding to one of only a few formats that really would play back at anything close to real time, STILL having to go to an online house to actually finish a show in HD since FCP wouldn’t really play back DVCProHD in real time so you had to edit in SD and deliver EDLs to an Avid shop to finish. Capturing from frikkin’ TAPES? Don’t get me started on broken timecode capturing. Ugh. It was horrible.
Today, we have file-based workflows, practically automated proxy generation, format-agnostic NLEs, and mind-blowingly incredible camera capabilities for absolute chump change. My company’s FS7 setup cost under $10K, and it is unbelievably more capable than the $100K Varicam setups we shot when I was in my earliest days of real production jobs in the 2000s. And before that, as a kid, I used to tag along to my dad’s office, where they had a 40 BetaSP and DigiBeta deck machine room wired into three hardware edit suites where you had to set in and out points with actual buttons. That’s how I learned to edit–I’m probably the only person my age who remembers that stuff.
All that to say, the gentleman doth protest too much, methinks.
Also, try generating ProRes or DNxHD proxies, if you aren’t already. If you’re trying to decode h.264 in 4K in realtime, your processor is choking under the strain. Premiere will connect and disconnect them with a click of a button, and it’s usually just an overnight render.
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I am using Pro Res HQ 3840 X 2160 2997 on 1080 timelines.
Even single stream (un-rendered) drops frames and doesnt scrub very smooth on what was up to last month the fastest Mac you could use.A couple of Macs back I had the last G5 tower and had tweaked it as much as I could to make it perform and it did nicely till the OS killed the ability for me to use a hacked driver on a NVidia 1080ti (cuda). It scrubbed smoothly.
I will venture to say it was smoother on 1080p than my high power machine is on UHD.
I would be interested in hearing from PC users and how much better/smoother it is editing with Cuda cores instead of our metal.
Just as a little more throwback, the Speed Razor software on a super fast (for 1997) PC was playing back dual stream DCT via SDI without dropping any frames and zero compression artifacts thanks to the $15K Matrox Digisuite boardset. It was a beast of a machine back in the day and outperformed every other NLE on the market by leaps and bounds. That was a $35K machine back in the day.
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[Dan Powers] “I am using Pro Res HQ 3840 X 2160 2997 on 1080 timelines.”
Perhaps you can do a test and create cineform proxies of some of that media. I work on a very similar specced imac and I use cineform proxies for 4k media that’s usually a combination of RED and Sony FS7 and Premiere works without so much as a hiccup.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tmprods
tallmanproductions.net -
I mean…ProResHQ at UHD rez is 707 Mbps per UHD stream, according to Frame.io. According to AJA DataCalc, it’s about 123 MBytes/sec, which would be well within the read/write speed you mentioned.
However, you didn’t specify how fast your connection to the QNAP is, nor how many streams of video you have on your timeline. So if you’re running Gigabit Ethernet, two streams of ProResHQ at UHD would max out your bandwidth, right out of the gate. Dropped frames would be expected. Not so much if you are on 10GbE, unless maybe Jumbo Frames aren’t properly set. If you’re attaching directly through Thunderbolt, sometimes the speeds are not nearly as advertised, either.
Did Bob Zelin set up your QNAP? Have you given him a call, if so?
If you are connected via GbE, try using something like ProResLT or ProRes Proxy, or a lightweight Cineform flavor as Greg suggests. That would cut the data rate, assuming that your network is the bottleneck, here.
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Its funny, my last project had a slew of 6K/7K/8K RED files and managed to do the assembly in RAW for the first few days but eventually had to proxy once we got to about 1.5 hours of timeline.
The most irritating clips to ruin all that were the GoPro and Sony A7IIs files.
They were using so many for b-roll that I had to just proxy the whole lot.
Mac Pro D700/64GB with a slew of RAIDs from OWC, Pegasus and GTECH.
I think next time I start charging for that stupidy 🙂 -
I am going to do a CineForm test this morning. I hate committing to a format/codec that may or may not be around in a few years. But I will research it and see how it goes. Thanks!
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