DSLR, DHxHD and all that – chosing new HD setup.

[Shane Ross]

Offlining in DNxHD36…onlining in DNxHD145. You are aware this is the ADOBE forum, right? Not Avid. How do you intend to do this offline/online? Adobe really isn’t built for that…the media management is not all that good.

Is there an offline/online workflow for Adobe?

Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Ben Edwards]

Full spec is i5 3550 (which is supposed to outperforms a lot of the i7s as it is 3g CPU. Ime using the avid DHxHD 35 codec (4.5 MB/s) so thought HD should be be a problem. Currently HD is delivering 85 MB/s. I have done the CUPA hack. Its a 550 Ti.

I am going to get a extra 8GB, someone told me there is no point in going to 24 as I need to double memory to make and difference.

In terms of HD I was going to get a pair of Seagate Barracuda drives but I am woried about there reliability. I have had one die and I have heard lots of thers who have had problems. Also seagate has reduced warrante to 1 year. I am also not sure if it is better to rid0 them or put different things on each.

Regards,
Ben

—
Ben Edwards – Freelance Picture Editor
https://www.funkytwig.com

i5 550, Windows 7 / Mac Lion, Nvida 550 Ti, 8GB Mem

[Ben Edwards]

Thanks for the reply, what I am finding very difficult is that PP seems to use pixie dust not science. Normally I can see where the bottle neck is and work out what needs upgrading but PP has low CPU and disk utilization and memory is not topping out. Kind of drives me nuts.

—
Ben Edwards – Freelance Picture Editor
https://www.funkytwig.com

i5 550, Windows 7 / Mac Lion, Nvida 550 Ti, 8GB Mem

[Ryan Holmes]

[Ben Edwards] “PP has low CPU and disk utilization and memory is not topping out.”

This is because Adobe utilizes your GPU (i.e. video card) to do most of the heavy lifting. It doesn’t tax the CPU until exporting. RAM is still important though. The more the better. However, playback, realtime effects, color correction, etc. happens on the GPU. This is part of the Mercury Playback Engine – https://www.adobe.com/products/premiere/mercury-playback-engine.html

Others will disagree with me, but I don’t like relying on hacked gear when I’m trying to make a living from it (cameras, computers, video cards, you name it). I need it to be stable, robust, and rock-solid. Hacking a GPU (while it works, friends of mine on the Mac side do the same thing) seems like asking for trouble. what I would do (and what I do in my environment) is spend the $$$$ for a qualified, tested, proven card. Since you’re a Windows user there’s almost 24 different qualified cards, so your chances of finding one that meets your price point is pretty good. Adobe lists them all on that link above.

My order of importance for your problem:
(1) Qualified GPU
(2) More RAM
(3) Clean off space on your hard drive or buy some new ones (anything over 50% full will take a serious playback speed hit)

Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
vimeo.com/ryanholmes

[Chris Borjis]

[Ryan Holmes] “Others will disagree with me, but I don’t like relying on hacked gear when I’m trying to make a living from it (cameras, computers, video cards, you name it). I need it to be stable, robust, and rock-solid. Hacking a GPU (while it works, friends of mine on the Mac side do the same thing) seems like asking for trouble.”

I totally agree with you there and I did read on a forum where the “hacked” get a non certified
gpu to work was causing someone all sorts of issues.

[Dennis Radeke]

Hi Ben,

Not sure how you’re bringing in DNxHD into Premiere Pro but I’m guessing it is through a QT wrapper because we don’t support native DNxHD in CS6.

When you’re bringing DNxHD through QT, you’re utilizing a 32bit process instead of a 64bit one. That hampers the performance and probably why things are not working as you would expect them to.

There is no pixie dust and Premiere Pro typically just works with codecs without any difficulty. However, because Avid licenses DNxHD and it is propietary, Adobe does not support that in its native MXF wrapper which would be the right way to do it.

Dennis – Adobe guy

[Gary Huff]

[Dennis Radeke] “There is no pixie dust and Premiere Pro typically just works with codecs without any difficulty. However, because Avid licenses DNxHD and it is propietary, Adobe does not support that in its native MXF wrapper which would be the right way to do it.”

Given this situation, it seems like, ideally, if you’re unhappy with the performance of native AVCHD or H.264 video, perhaps transcoding to AVC-I or even DVCPRO HD in the P2 MXF wrapper format would be the way to go?

For the most part my footage is playing fine under Premiere CS6 (MacBook Pro Early 2011, 16GB RAM, Crucial M4 SSD and footage resides on a striped G-RAID Mini that is hooked in via eSATA and is rated at a 500MBps read speed), but it seems to easily get bogged down to the point where playblack lag creeps in, requiring a restart (for instance, I used the volume controls on the keyboard to adjust the audio level output to my speakers and it immediately caused Premiere to start lagging on playback and required a restart, which fixed the problem).

I’m editing AVCHD and it seems like I could alleviate a bit of frustration with that by transcoding to AVC-Intra MXFs.

As a side note, does this 32-bit process extend for EVERY file that has a .MOV extension? So AVCHD is typically .MTS, which I would assume is processed at 64-bit, but does that mean the H.264 files off a Canon DSLR in the QuickTime file extension wouldn’t get that treatment?

[Ben Edwards]

Thanks for that, shame Adobe does not have an intermediate codec. Is there one of the camera formats listed in Media Encoder I should use rather than the Avid one (my research seemed to show the Avid one was a good choice, but advice from Adobe would be good on this).

I have previously worked in it (over 15 years) and generally it is possible to work out where bottlenecks are by looking at system utilization. I am not close to maxing anything out (memory/cpu/disk all generally under 25% utilization) so I have no clue which bits to upgrade. This is where the joke about pixie dust comes from. I am currently a student doing a MA so cant afford to waste money on unnecessarily upgrading. I have just upgraded to 12GB and got 2*2TB Barracuda drives and a RAID0 enclosure.

My system is:
Gigabyte GA Z77-DS3H Motherboard
12GB Memory (1600 but cant seem to get it to work over 1333, still looking into this).
Nvida 550 Ti GPU (I know it is not supported but read favorable reviews).
i5 3550 (When I looked at benchmarks it seems to outperform a lot of i7 processors so I thought it was a good choose).

I realize to do DSLR and other long GOP formats I need a very powerful machine so thought the intermediate codec was the way to go.

Any advise would be good, you do student discounts so advise on student systems would be good. I did look at the system requirements on the Adobe site for Premiere Pro at https://helpx.adobe.com/x-productkb/policy-pricing/system-requirements-premiere-pro.html and I am superseding them all except the GPU bit. Is the GeForce GTX 285, GeForce GTX 470 or GeForce GTX 570 likely to give me significantly more performance.

Is this the type of thing I would be better talking to suport about rather than using forums?

Ben

—
Ben Edwards – Freelance Picture Editor
https://www.funkytwig.com

i5 550, Windows 7 / Mac Lion, Nvida 550 Ti, 8GB Mem

[Gary Huff]

Ben, you might test out Adobe Media Encoder to transcode into either DVCPRO HD or AVC-Intra into their MXF formats. I’m considering trying that out myself.

[Dennis Radeke]

[Gary Huff] “AVC-I or even DVCPRO HD in the P2 MXF wrapper format would be the way to go?”

AVC-I is heavy – meaning the CPU has to work harder to decode it so it’s not my first choice, though the quality is very good. P2 is great and Intraframe. I also like OP1a MXF (Sony XDCAM)

[Gary Huff] “As a side note, does this 32-bit process extend for EVERY file that has a .MOV extension? So AVCHD is typically .MTS, which I would assume is processed at 64-bit, but does that mean the H.264 files off a Canon DSLR in the QuickTime file extension wouldn’t get that treatment?”

Good question. We knew we needed to work around QT in the case of DSLR cameras (particularly the Canon’s) and so we created an H.264 decoder that works outside of the QT one enabling us to have 64-bit performance on H.264.