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Fulldome Video 4k workflow frustrations
Hey, I’m kinda new to Premiere. I spend most of my days cutting with Avid MC but I’m currently about to start a full dome planetarium production and I’ll be using the Adobe suite to complete the project. I’ve done one fulldome show before on Premiere but we were super rushed and unfortunately I didn’t get to do enough research before the project which, as you might assume, lead to lots of headaches during post.
the main problems I ran into were sluggish playback of the sequence and an export error “Error compiling movie. Unknown Error.” Luckily the show was only being produced at 1200×1200 resolution (for those that don’t know fulldome masters are in 1:1 aspect with a fisheye image in the center) so the playback issue wasn’t a huge deal. The export error seemed to be totally inconsistent and after enough restarts and fails I eventually got my export to work.
This new show needs to be a 4k production (4096×4096) and so I would like to get these issues sorted before I get started. My computer specs are as follows:
OSX 10.11.1 (installed on 120gb SSD drive)
3.5gh intel i7
NVIDIA GTX 670 2048mb
32gb DDR3 Ram
3TB ST3000DM001 (internal drive for video/media)
Premiere Pro CC v9.1.0most of the media I’ll be dealing with will be in image sequences. PNG, Jpeg, Tiff, and bmp.
I guess I’m trying to figure out what my best workflow should be to try to avoid the errors I ran into last time around. I brought in a test shot which is a 4k jpg sequence of 2789 frames at 30fps. I made a sequence from the shot after I imported it to Premiere and, as one would expect, the playback at full res was unbearable. I dropped it down to 1/16th and it was still really sluggish. I thought about trying to make proxy h.264 video of all the footage at 1200×1200 resolution to try to cut back on the computing required to playback the video. I tried a test of this with the same shot but, when I tried to convert it in Media Encoder I got the “Error compiling movie. Unknown Error.”
Does Premiere not play nice with Image sequences? Any suggestions?
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11 Replies
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[Orion McCaw] “Does Premiere not play nice with Image sequences? “
It does if your computer is up to snuff. One drive will not spin fast enough for big image sequences. Let’s say you’d have 4K TIFFs that are 50 megs a pop and you want to run that 30 fps. 50 MB*30fps =1500 MB/s so you would need a drive that can spin as fast as that to view an uncompressed image sequence. You need a fast RAID.
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Ahh okay, thanks for the help!
Is that my only option or are there any other ways of getting around this?
would the “Error compiling movie. Unknown Error.” be cause by this same issue?
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Hi…
What’s the estimated run time of the project?
Alex Udell
Editing, Motion Graphics, and Visual FX
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It will be just under an hour in length
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Hi….
Well, if it was shorter format, I was thinking maybe After Effects might be a better choice…..with it’s RAM preview and all. But if it’s an hour, that’s not gonna work.
You and Tero are on the right track. Flipping the footage to a stream from an image sequence may be a good bet.
Not sure about the error compiling movie issue.
If you can’t get it tow work directly in AME….then After Effects might be a good bet, as it handles Image sequences pretty well.
H264 is a good choice as it’s low data rate for smaller files, and file sizes overall. Since it looks like you have a good graphics card, Premiere ought to be able to handle the the decode ok.
You might consider the GoPro Cineform codec as well. Adobe touts this as their finishing codec. Lighter compression than H264 so the files will be larger, but should still playback from your drive. This codec also has optional alpha channel support. So if you’re layering image sequences with alpha, flipping them to this will let you maintain the alpha.
I just flipped 30sec of 3840 x 2160 ftg to Cineform.
My OLD 1,1 8 core Mac with ATI gfx (meaning Mercury Playback Open CL), seemed like it could play it back at 1/2 res or lower in the source viewer and the matching sequence. This is coming off a single internal SATA 7200 RPM drive for media storage.So I’d do some tests….but that should help.
Alex Udell
Editing, Motion Graphics, and Visual FX
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Transcoding to an indermediate format like Prores/DnxHD/Cineform might help BUT the bitrate on 4K stuff will still be pretty big. You’d still want faster storage to deal with it.
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Tero…
If you had a single SSD dedicated for media and attached via SATA….you think that would be sufficient?
Alex Udell
Editing, Motion Graphics, and Visual FX
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Examples: Retail Automotive Motion Graphics Spots
Example: Customer Facing Explainer Video
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Wouldn’t a single SSD be less cost effective to hold all the media that I would need for an hour long 4k show?
When you say “flip” to a different format such as cineform do you mean as a proxy or do you mean as a permanent switch?
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In your case…
a permanent switch…
you’d no longer be using the image sequences…
you’d change them to this before editing with the files…
Alex Udell
Editing, Motion Graphics, and Visual FX
Let’s Connect on Linkedin
Examples: Retail Automotive Motion Graphics Spots
Example: Customer Facing Explainer Video
Example: Infotainment & Package editorial -
[Alex Udell] “If you had a single SSD dedicated for media and attached via SATA….you think that would be sufficient?”
For performance? Probably. But I would personally want some redundancy on my work drive. The SSD can break and when it breaks all your stuff is gone.
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