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Can scrubbing avchd (h.264) footage be better?
I’m noticing two things while scrubbing my footage (avccam footage shot on the Panasonic AF100):
1. The audio turns into chipmunk mode. While going fast forward or rewind, the audio dialogue turns into chipmunk mode and I can’t understand what’s being said. Is there a way to change this? For example in FCP, you can go forward at 1.4 or 2x speed or something like that and the audio does some sort of strange dropping of frames, but you’re still able to catch what’s being said.
2. I don’t get actual scrubbing on the video. It’s more like watching rewind or fast forward on a DVD. I’ll see a still frame and then a couple of seconds later see another still frame and then a few seconds later see yet a different still frame. With FCP, the scrubbing was way smoother and I could scan my footage very quickly to find what I was looking for visually. Is this due to having h.264 footage? Is this the downside of letting PP edit native codecs?
-Trevor Ward
Red Eye Film Co.
http://www.redeyefilmco.com
Orlando, FL -
31 Replies
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When you understand the temporal compression scheme of AVCHD, H.264, MPEG-2, etc. you start to realize how hard it is for scrubbing this kind of footage at all. I generally prefer, JKL manipulation and/or taking down the playback resolution in order to scrub footage more effectively. Most importantly, I’ve been recommending people use the thumbnails in the bins and use the hover scrub functionality. Make the picons big and if you’re using video i/o hardware, it should go out the video spigot as well.
Dennis – Adobe guy
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Dennis does well to answer your second question. In regards to your first, Adobe is well aware of the audio scrubbing issue but I would still cast your vote for it as a feature request (Adobe places more importance on features based on the number of requests)
In the mean time you can use shift+J or shift+L to scrub in smaller speed increments.
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I DO understand h.264 encoding. Still doesn’t help me. And I DO use jkl. I’m not sure that that makes a difference in scrubbing performance over some other method of playback. Bin scrubbing isn’t helping me go back and forth during a long interview or long take. It’s a nice feature, but isn’t helpful for actual editing. Changing the resolution from 1/2 to 1/4 seemed to make a minor change, but still very jumpy scrubbing.
I’m looking for a solution or someone to tell me it’s not going to happen due to it being h.264 footage. if the solution is a big fast machine with tons of ram, then that’s my solution. If the solution is to transcode then that’s my solution.
but so far, the notion of “edit anything” is still just marketing buzz to help sell software but still a couple of years away due to everyone not fortunate enough to afford the fastest, most expensive gear.
-Trevor Ward
Red Eye Film Co.
http://www.redeyefilmco.com
Orlando, FL -
Hey Trevor,
Well you can edit just about anything on the timeline and it’s definitely not marketing buzz. That said, I agree that H264 scrubbing is challenging on most systems. Don’t forget to try the hover scrub method I outlined in my previous post.
Perhaps you can outline what your system is and I can comment on whether boosting something would be beneficial. One thing I can definitely say is that any 64-bit application benefits from more RAM. If you have 8GB, double it. Even if it doesn’t help you, it will benefit in overall performance.
Dennis
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MBP, 2.5GHz i5. 4GB RAM. Scratch disk and date files on FW800 RAID.
So, it sounds then, that really, h.264 scrubbing isn’t going to be great for me. So either I conform all my footage to a more edit friendly codec or just suffer with poor scrubbing.
(Sorry for my attitude. But I went to CS6 from FCP reluctantly. I am not thoroughly satisfied with CS6 so far. Some things I like. I’ve always liked AE. I like the integration of AE and PP. But PP is still lagging in fine performance and user experience. One of the reasons I made the move was in hopes that PP finally was ready for prime time. I was hoping the promised workflow was better. Granted, I like that I “can” edit any footage. But in reality, it’s a bit cumbersome. Is it worse to transcode all my footage first? I didn’t like that either. Never seemed to make sense. So that attitude comes from the feeling that I got sold a bundle of goods that isn’t what it was hyped to be.)
-Trevor Ward
Red Eye Film Co.
http://www.redeyefilmco.com
Orlando, FL -
From looking at your system I would say its under powered for CS6. 4GB of ram is very small and playing HD video off a fire wire drive creates a real bottleneck.
I can see why you are not happy with your experience. Your machine does not give the Adobe Mercury Engine the power that it needs to work with HD.
FCP is designed around all clips being Prores. PrP is designed to play clips natively. That part of why you are having such a frustrating time I think.
Tom Daigon
PrP / After Effects Editor
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com
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HP Z820 Dual 2687
64GB ram
Dulce DQg2 16TB raid -
I understand your frustration.
Changing from FCP to Premiere Pro does require a certain amount of understanding about what your’e gaining and giving up. FCP worked reasonably well with 4GB of RAM for two reasons: 1) Everything was ProRes – an intraframe codec designed for Apple 2) It could only use 4GB of RAM anyway, so more was superfluous.
Premiere Pro gives you the ability to save a lot of time by not transcoding. In return, as a 64-bit native app, it expects more RAM in order to do it’s job. Lets face it, generating blended frames from a LongGOP stream is computationally more intensive than 30 still pictures per second. I think at this point, investing in max’ing the RAM in your MBP would go a long way you making a final decision on whether Premiere Pro is right for you. Even if Premiere Pro doesn’t work out for you, the 16GB of RAM will be well used by any 64-bit applications in the long run.
Also, you still haven’t told me whether hover scrub could potentially meet your need.
Dennis
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Ok. I will try maxing out the ram to see if that makes a difference. Also, I can try putting the scratch disk and video clips on the USB 3.0 hard drive to see if that makes a difference. Sounds like it has more to do with RAM and computing power than throughput of the hard drive since h.264 files are relatively small and I’m only talking about one stream.
No, bin scrubbing won’t really do what I need. I’m needing to play, fastforward, pause, rewind, play clips as I make selections.
-Trevor Ward
Red Eye Film Co.
http://www.redeyefilmco.com
Orlando, FL -
Okay, good luck with the RAM.
Remember, your system is only as good as the weakest link and even the HDD can be an issue too.
As for Hover Scrub – check this out before you dismiss it because JKL are all in there: https://library.creativecow.net/harrington_richard/CS6_Hover-Scrub/1
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According to your system specs, your machine is heavily underpowered for what you want to do with it, as Tom mentioned. The Macbook Pro i5 processors are all dual cores. And RAM… 4GB RAM is MINIMUM, not even recommended.
The mantra isn’t “edit anything” on any machine. That’s just nuts. Decoding AvcHD is pretty processor intensive, more so when you are trying to play it back at 5x normal speed.
Transcode your footage if your machine can’t keep up, or get a faster machine that can. If you try using the same workflow that you were using with FCP7 (eg. transcoding to ProRes and editing in ProRes), you will realize that PPro mostly outperforms FCP7.
What sort of user experience? You cannot expect 2 different softwares to work the same way. There will be some parts of every software that is better, and some parts that is worse. And much of it is about getting used to how another software does things. FCP7 was quite a slouch at rendering, and real time performance wasn’t great. Waveforms was pretty slow too, and it crashed quite often when you work with multicam because of the 32 bit architecture.
Premiere Pro is pretty blazingly fast when you try to do some of the same things that you were doing in FCP7. The real time performance is just astounding. I had 5K RED RAW playback over a cross dissolve and a gaussian blur in real time at half rez in a 1080 timeline. No rendering, no Red Rocket. And back in the day, we used to spend an hour doing a full debayer for a minute of 4K footage. The new trim tools beat what FCP7 had to offer, but they take a while to get used to. Rendering is much faster too, as all the cores are in use. There’s also a bunch of really great shortcuts in Premiere, and you need to spend some time to map them. Auto pitch adjustments during fast forward and rewind? That’s a big feature request.
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