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Editing with ProRes in PPro on Mac
Hi all,
I have some footage sent to us as ProRes 1080i 29.97. I want to edit as 1080p25 and keeping quality at max is paramount. Got a few options for conversion I know, none of which are totally ideal, (AE interpret footage>separate fields+ timestretch with pix mo – looking like best result over Fields Kit), but that part aside….
Regarding playback of the ProRes footage – CS4 won’t even playback one stream smoothly (I’m running media from a pretty fast 12 drive RAID-5 array) but after some reading I now know that is the ‘norm’ in CS4. So I’m doing some tests in CS5 trial and it will playback one stream of ProRes ‘ok’, but even putting a dissolve in, or even laying one stream over another grinds everything to a halt! Surely that’s not right? I have sequence matching clip settings and yet I’ve got the yellow bar before I even start. Tried to get smooth playback at ful, half even qtr res to no joy. Do I need Mercury Playback Engine fully working to play with ProRes to any real degree? If so a Quadro 4000 looks like the only option on Mac. Seems excessive.
Maybe I have CS5 setup wrong?…Any thoughts graciously appreciated.
You may ask – why not use FCP to edit ProRes? Well I can’t stand FCP tbh, plus I will be heavily treating/grading in AE, so want the flexibility of DLink with PPro and minimal rendering. My other alternative is to export out all rushes to another codec, but want to keep it lossless. Mainly used XDCAM HD422 or DvcProHD in the past which are so so, but any suggestions for a good solid lossless codec as an intermediate would be great. Can’t edit uncompressed HD as RAID is not *THAT* fast (shared storage over 1gigE), plus file sizes seem unnecessary when it’s sourced in ProRes anyway. Could copy all files to local RAID, but workflow wise that would be a pain.
Thanks for any input!
J.
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16 Replies
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You could try dropping all your files in the Adobe Media Encoder app and convert to Quicktime motion jpeg. There is always the option to replace the footage with the original when you are done with the edit, so in that case you could even go with H.264.
How many files are we talking about?
As far as the capabilities of Premiere in playing back ProRes, my guess is the Apple /Adobe cooperation on this couldn’t have been that great, but that’s just a guess.
After all, Prores is the playback engine in FCP, so I’m sure the Adobe implementation is more likely restricted.
Maybe Todd could shine in on that one.
Vince Becquiot
Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area -
I’m not familiar with any specific performance issues with ProRes codecs in Premiere Pro CS5. I haven’t used any of the ProRes flavors within Premiere Pro CS5 much myself, but I have used them within After Effects quite a lot. (I’m the person who has been writing most of the troubleshooting documents about ProRes in After Effects, so a search for ProRes and After Effects mostly hits my blog.)
The ProRes codecs are just like any other codecs within QuickTime as far as Premiere Pro is concerned; we rely on QuickTime to do the decoding and serving of the frames.
If you’re seeing problems with ProRes codecs in Premiere Pro, we’d appreciate a bug report that gives the details.
Oh, also, if you’re using Premiere Pro CS5 without the recent updates, note that there are some major performance improvements in the 5.0.2 and 5.0.3 updates.
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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Technical Support for professional video software
After Effects Help & Support
Premiere Pro Help & Support
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Any QuickTime video will not playback smoothly without the Adobe Mercury Engine. I recommend that if you are using cs5 without AME, then convert all footage (even other codecs) to Cineform AVIs. Get Cineforn Neoscene, it costs some money but the Cineform avis it creates plays like butter in Premiere.
The other option is converting to uncompressed AVIs, which would play just as good but would create very large files.
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Unless ProRes not playing back well is a Mac thing…I’ve not seen it. I have a video on Adobe TV where I edited ProRes on a WXP laptop in CS4…
I suspect the playback difficulty is in the conversion. If you need a CUDA card to play back ProRes on a Mac…that seems odd to me.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions, -
I think your problem is that no matter how fast your RAID is, you are accessing it via a 1Gb Ethernet connection. Try copying some clips to your local drive (preferably RAID), and see if there is an improvement.
-jeff
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Hi…
are you on a SAN with iscsi or are you just connected to storage via standard ethernet to a shared volume?
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Hi Guys, thanks for all your replies…
Jeff – yep, first thing I tried was to copy onto my internal RAID-0 and plays exactly the same – jerky.
Alex – Connected to a workgroup switcher on 1GigE which runs through to an Xserve also on 1GigE, connected to a big 12-drive RAID-5 box via iSCSi. Fibre channel or 10GigE connection would be nice, but cost to upgrade pretty huge at present.
And, yes I also think it’s pretty odd that a mac – that is built with Quicktime at it’s core – won’t playback what is a fairly light file type properly in Premiere. FCP on the same machine plays it no problem, infact about 4 streams of it all overlaid with no rendering needed. Mercury does sound great, but to lay out approx £1k on a Quadro (seems the only certified card on a mac now that GTX285 is discontinued) seems a bit steep just to get ProRes working.
Has anyone had any joy on a mac with CS4/5 playing back ProRes with or without Mercury? It would be good to know I’ll definitely get the workflow I want before investing.
Looks like h264 transcode in the meantime then! Fun and games…
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That is strange.
I’m doing a project on CS5 now with primarily ProRes HQ footage and it runs without issue.
A display card won’t help you decode video…it can help preview effects.
I wonder if CS5 being a 64 bit app has something to do with it? QT is still 32 bit, even in some QTX processes it falls back on QT 7.x… On Windows Adobe had to write their own QuickTime server application to get around the 32 bit limitation of QT, but I suppose Apple is less interested in allowing that sort of workaround in OSX.
It still seems strange to me…
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions, -
> Has anyone had any joy on a mac with CS4/5 playing back ProRes with or without Mercury?
For the past week or so, I’ve used ProRes 422 footage literally every day in Premiere Pro CS5 on Mac OS, in a computer that doesn’t have a card that gives the CUDA processing features. My standard test project—the one that I pull up whenever I’m just checking some feature or other in Premiere Pro CS5—has ProRes 422 footage in it. It works fine.
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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Technical Support for professional video software
After Effects Help & Support
Premiere Pro Help & Support
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Thanks for info guys. I wonder if my ATI card is the problem? (Radeon X1900T) It has caused numerous other problems in the past with GUI redraw and openGL stuff, but no – wouldn’t have thought it would affect QT playback. For ref – I am running Snow Leopard 10.6.5 and QTX + QT7Pro are both installed, as is FCP.
Tim/Todd – can you confirm that PPro CS5 *should* be able to playback (media drives being fast enough of course) 1 or 2 streams of ProRes @1080i/29.97 in the timeline without issue or a yellow/red render bar?
I’ll install CS5 trial on another mac running on HD 2600XT Radeons and see if same problem occurs. That said – I did initially try it on my Macbook Pro (Snow Leopard) which had an NVidia card and same problem. Don’t have any desktop machines with NVidia cards at the moment.
Any more info you have muchly appreciated.
Cheers,
Jim.
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