9.5.3 Driver Eats My RAM – PPro CS6

[Carl Schuurbiers]

Hi Joshua,

I’d say that in my situation FCP7 has about 2 frames delay and Pr6 about 5 frames, quite a noticeable difference.

BTW: I realise that my points 2 and 3 should really be directed at Adobe. I already made feature requests at Adobe, but maybe it helps to get the point across via this way as well.

Thanks for responding,

Carl.

[Ray Tragesser]

Hi Joshua,

One more thing to add about the delay between the program monitor and the BM output. I can deal pretty easily by looking at the SDI monitor for playback, but what is a real drag is the source monitor. If I load up an audio waveform in the source monitor to do some visual editing, the delay between what I see on the screen and what I hear and how that interacts with each other is not very pleasant to work with. I happen to have a Yamaha 01V digital mixer next to me where I have programmed in some delay offsets to dedicated recall buttons, but it slows the process down. It would be great if you could get the frame delay closer between the output of the BM card and Program viewer. So I am guessing you would need to delay the program and source viewer to match the hardware processing of the BM hardware?

Looking forward to more improvement to CS-6. For my particular workflow CS-6 is 1000% better than the CS-5 series in terms of 3rd party I/O integration with BM.

Thanks
Ray T

[Alan Peil]

Yes, native DV footage mostly (encoded from Beta).

[Bo Higbee]

MY PC:
Intel mobo 965 chipset, Q6600 cpu @ 2.4ghz, 8GB ram, Palit OC’d GTX560 1GB ram, Raid 0 (260~300m/sec), Decklink SDI out to a BMD HDLinkPro box which outputs to HDMI monitor. Workflow is HDV aquisition via firewire – edit with output to BetaSP and files.

EDITED 7/25/12 … I use the NVidia ‘CUDA CS5.5 GPU “hack” and have both Premiere Pro CS5.5 and Premiere Pro CS6 installed with the updates.

I use an AJA D10CE SDI converter box to make component NTSC and use audio out from HDLink Pro thru an adapter to get audio to BetaSP deck….. don’t ask – it works fine.

NOTE: I have no issues in Premeiere Pro CS5.5 using Decklink drivers 9.5.3 … only that PPro CS5.5 won’t let me choose MY AUDIO OUTPUT preference which PPro CS6 does.

THE ISSUES are using Premiere Pro CS6 with the Decklink 9.5.3 driver.

ISSUE 1 – REVERSE FIELD dominance using DV clips on CS6 NTSC or DV timeline. I must got into each clip and click “reverse field dominance” setting to keep my eyes from getting pulled out of my head looking at my 27″ picture tube program monitor during playback. No problems with CS5.5 using BMD’s ntsc or DV templates… just a BIG problem in CS6 as there are no BMD DV templates … only MS DV or Adobe DV settings. *(No issues in PPro CS5.5 with this)

ISSUE 2 – Caching, caching, caching, timeline pausing, churning & freezing …. CONSTANTLY !! using Premiere Pro CS6 and driver 9.5.3. Basically driver 9.5.3 is un-usable in CS6. *(no issues in PPro CS5.5)

ISSUE 3 – … well driver 9.5.3 fixed the closed captioning problem in CS6, but with the caching problems you’ve got to go back to driver 9.5.2 so you can work, BUT you have no CLOSED CAPTIONS ! …. see the problem here? *(no issues in PPro CS5.5)

ISSUE 4 – using PPro CS6 and driver 9.5.3 … big color offset problem with motion video! This is NO problem using same driver in PPro CS5.5 … only withing CS6.

HERE’S THE PROBLEM: Imagine a white Chevy Van traveling in daytime left to right across your screen at 25mph in a medium wide fixed (no pan) shot using a Sony V1U camera set at HDV 1080i. Suck the footage into PC using firewire …. In PPro CS5.5 using driver 9.5.3 the red chroma smear of the tail light lenses trails just slightly behind the tail light lens and appears as a normal chroma lag – EVEN when you pause timeline and do a frame grab. It’s normal.

BUT !!! … now do the same thing with PPro CS6 and driver 9.5.3 and the red chroma lag of the tail light lens is IN FRONT OF THE TAIL LIGHT by about ONE FRAME !!! …. doh !@#$!!

To get this CS6 FORWARD chroma to look correct in your edit window you must go up to the program window display and set it to DISPLAY SECOND FIELD !! …. but after doing that to straighten out the chroma in the edit window … doing a frame grab at this point will result in a frame grab still exhibiting the FORWARD or advanced chroma in front of the object in motion !!!
…. go figure THAT one out.

Now my days wayyyyy back 20+ or more years ago when I had a Commodor Amiga 2000 video Toaster taught me that you can’t get a FULL chroma sample in a frame grab in one or two fields, but rather must use 4 fields to get a total chroma sample for the field or frame your working on.

Using the above thinking I will deduce that driver 9.5.3 is looking at luminance from one field, but is getting it’s color sampling from THE WRONG FIELDS … way out in front of the action.

As a further note about audio being in sync with BMD hardware or not – as mentioned in this thread … I want to be able to MAKE MY OWN CHOICES how and what I use as an audio output to my decks. I don’t wish to be tied to the archaic notion that one must use “the harware we sell you” mentality.

This is what gives Premiere Pro CS6 such a great free-ing experience that we’ve never had prior to CS6. We can within Premiere Pro CS6 choose what we want to use as output hardware both for video and audio.

I want to choose my output hardware as MY NEEDS dictate.

We are now in a file based media world and archaic notions used during the tape based days that you must use “OUR HARDWARE” are over …. bigtime!

Remember the old fixed “rigid” hardware like the Digital Perception DPS 2500 capture board …. or the Video Factory box? … old, dead relics from the past that could not adapt.

Thanks for listening.

[Bo Higbee]

Regarding audio hardware selectivity … it just dawned on me ….

In the Blackmagic Media Express program we need the ability to select our own audio output hardware just like we now have in Premiere Pro CS6.

With this feature it would add huge benefits to those who do live events multi media productions as well as solve some connection issues in the video edit studio.

eom.

[Bo Higbee]

… maybe just add a switch in the control panel drivers panel to select which audio device will be used with the video hardware.

[Bo Higbee]

Discovered another driver 9.5.3 issue in PPro CS6 …

If you render out a 20 minute or so NTSC clip in Sony Vegas Video 11 (64bit) with Closed Closed Captions using their 10bit YUV codec so you get embedded captions in the video (as you can’t render to BMD codec and get embedded captions) and place that rendered clip on a PPro CS6 Blackmagic Design NTSC template timeline … after about 5 or 10 minutes of playback the clip will come to a chugging, churning halt freezing my Premiere CS6 program …. and my drives are sitting here still caching after I crash out of the Premiere playback.

With Premiere shut down and looking at my desktop my drives just sit and churn for no reason and I must re-boot the PC.

[Bo Higbee]

Let me see now ….. the silence here is deafening.

… enough of the PMS … let’s get ‘er fixed.

eom.

[Joshua Helling]

Hey all,

Good news, we’ve found the memory leak in CS6 for both mac and PC and the updated drivers are going through QA now. In the mean time, if you guys would like here are a couple of seeds for you to try out and see if it helps.

Look forward to hearing your results on this.

PC:

https://seeds.blackmagicdesign.com/DesktopVideo/DesktopVideo_9.6.1a9.zip

MAC:

https://seeds.blackmagicdesign.com/DesktopVideo/DesktopVideo_9.6.1a9.dmg.zip

As I mentioned these are still going through QA, but if you’d like feel free to download these and give them a go.

Sincerely,

Joshua
Director of Support
Blackmagic Design Inc.

[Bo Higbee]

USING BETA DRIVER ver. 9.6.1a9

WHAT WORKS USING PPro CS6
Using a BMD preset NTSC timeline with DV footage – NO reverse fielding issues. NTSC 608 closed captions work. Scrubbing 1080i footage is MUCH better now on my lowly Quad core 2.4Ghz Q6600 box and actually do-able now.

HOWEVER:
Problems remain using (Adobe) DV preset with DV footage and going out to SDI via ntsc converter box …. BMD needs to make a DV preset for PPro CS6 using BMD DV codec as there is still a REVERSE FIELD issue using DV footage on a Adobe DV timeline using SDI output to NTSC monitor. (since there is not a BMD DV timeline preset anymore within CS6.)
… this REVERSE FIELDING of DV footage is also affected by how you have GPU set – either in software mode or hardware mode…. changing settings causes additional issues to the REVERSE FIELDING of DV footage on a DV timeline when outputing to NTSC via a Decklink SDI card to a NTSC converter. (Note: I use the GPU Nvidia ‘Cuda “hack”)

If you just put DV on a BMD NTSC timeline (as that must be the future until DV format dies) then there is no issue that I can see and possibly no use for the Adobe DV preset even.

AS REPORTED ON MY POST OF 7/19: WHITE VAN TAILIGHT chroma smear IN FRONT OF MOTION is still there when doing a frame grab …. but further investigation shows it happens even when using XDCAM HD422 non BMD presets too … so I guess that is Adobe’s problem.

* I STILL WANT SEPERATE AUDIO HARDWARE CONTROL in BMD driver control panel so I can select my own audio hardware for monitoring … or at least within Media Express for playout.

** Maybe make a new version of the Decklink SDI card with audio out jack … something like the original Decklink PCI card (which doesn’t work in 64bit)

For my system config see my post on 7/19.