HS Animation in PPro CS5

[Buck Wyckoff]

Just fixing my Subject to clarify.

[Kevin Monahan]

It’s difficult to discern your question here. Can you be more concise? Is it which codec you should use for playback?

Kevin Monahan
Sr. Content and Community Lead
Adobe After Effects
Adobe Premiere Pro
Adobe Systems, Inc.
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[Buck Wyckoff]

I thought it was clear. Animation sequence images for an HD project cannot be viewed and worked with in realtime. So what process, from an animators POV would get the job done?

Thanks.

[Kevin Monahan]

Ah! Sounds like you need better performance to playback a TIFF sequence at HD quality.

There’s a number of ways to get better performance. It sounds like you have good drive and CPU speed. To get the best performance from Premiere Pro 5 and to use the Mercury Engine’s hardware support you’ll need a certified video display card. Do you have one of the supported NVIDIA cards at the bottom of this page?

https://www.adobe.com/products/premiere/systemreqs/

If so, that would give you the performance you need for an HD TIFF sequence.

Still have trouble playing back? You can lower the resolution of the source and record monitors.

Finally, make sure to update to Premiere Pro 5.0.2 for the latest CUDA support.

Hope that helps you.

Kevin Monahan
Sr. Content and Community Lead
Adobe After Effects
Adobe Premiere Pro
Adobe Systems, Inc.
Follow Me on Twitter!

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[Buck Wyckoff]

Thanks for your response. I’ll look into these issues. The following is a response I just made on the Matrox forum. I include it here because I detail for things about my system that may enlighten. Thanks again.

Thanks for the input. Being a 10 year Velocity guy, I’m still learning the ropes with Premier. The main difficulty for me is knowing what aspect of Premier is being handled by software (Premier/Matrox/OS) and hardware (PC/Matrox) in any given situation. When I have a performance problem, it’s tough to know what is responsible.

This morning, I forced my entire timeline to preview render and it plays in realtime, though there are a few quality issues. I’ll have to look into what I can do with preview render settings.

I guess I’ve always rendered image sequences, tga for decades, but I do tiff now, 24 and 32 bit, depending. A recent article talked about this and suggested what I feel as well. A video format render is dangerous because if it is interrupted for any reason you lose the entire effort. An image sequence render saves every frame and you can always pick up where ever you leave off.

Lately, my SD animation projects in Premier worked with the raw images without preview rendering or anything. I can play two/three raw still-seq clips stacked on video layers in realtime with two/three 32bit stills layered up as well.

Anyhow, for HD….

I generated an MJPEG in Max by playing my pre-rendered tiff sequence as a background ifl, basically using Max as a tiff collector into a MJPEG. I went well, though I did see a quality drop (I had it set to 100 quality).

Premier isn’t liking it. It starts to play and quits. The interface is sluggish to respond to my moving the CTI and playing again. When it does, it consistently stops at the same near halfway point on the clip. It was a 301 frame tiff sequence (1.74GB) and turned into a 112.7MB avi.

My system may have something to do with it. It’s a Sager Notebook. That is a 12 lb. monster with 3.2GHz quad-core processors. Not mobile CPU’s. 12GB RAM. The internal SSD Raid and external eSata G-Raid are giving me great performance. The main problem with this form factor is the inability for put a monster graphics card in it. I did get a NVidia GeForce 280M. Pretty great, but nowhere near what I could have in a desktop system.

I would have thought the hard drive was my playback bottleneck, but someone else posted that Mercury engine playback on the graphics card was the critical component for realtime HD playback. I may need to give Boxx a call.

Anyway, thanks for the response and let me know if you think of anything else that will let me get through this with what I have.

Regards,
Buck Wyckoff
Buckward Digital

[Shawn Miller]

Hey Buck,

Have you tried outputting to an 8 bit TIFF sequence? Unless I’m going to After Effects for compositing and VFX, I never send 16 bit image sequences to Premiere Pro… not even CS5, since 95% of the live action footage I cut with animation is 8 bit 4:2:2… and destined for Blu-Ray or DVD (YMMV).

Thanks,

Shawn

[Buck Wyckoff]

Ah, that whole tga / tiff bit confusion….

I am using 24-bit tiff, 8-bits per channel, 32 bit total when I add the 8-bit alpha. But tga in MAX is referenced as 16, 24, or 32 bit. Confusing as they both ask the same thing in different ways, except tiff goes beyond 8 bit in each color channel. I tend to reference tiff the way we did in 1990.

I agree, 8-bit is all you need for standard video work. Anything else is a waste.

[Dominic Osborne]

Well, rendering out your animation should be as an image sequence, yes – otherwise if there was a crash mid-render, then you’d lose the whole sequence as you say.

However, once you have those frames, if you need to work in real-time, then there’s no issue converting/rendering to video as a next step to speed things up.

Here’s what you can do…:

– Sounds like you’re rendering finished CGI rather than something to composite, so you won’t ned the alpha channel – therefore just render as 24bit TGA or TIFF.

– Bring image sequence into Premiere. Use a project setting where Preview files are set to use the Matrox MPEG I-Frame codec, and specify the bitrate – you can go to 300Mbs in HD, though often, 150Mbs is plenty especially for preview work

– Place the animation sequences on the timeline. If they don’t play realtime, then let Premiere render a Preview – in doing this it transcodes and stores seperately your anims in the Preview format you specified for the project – MPEG I-Frame – and in the background Prem replaces your TGA/TIFF image sequences on the timeline with the MPEG I-frames for performance purposes.

– Perform your edit. It’ll be as realtime as your system can handle, including colour correction due to Matrox FX

– When you then want to export final version, you can delete the Rendered preview files, so the next time you open your project, Premiere looks for them – you tell it to ‘skip previews’ and lo…. your time in nicely edited and sitting there with original TGA/TIFF sequences on timeline, render for final Export.

Dominic Osborne
—————
Director & Head of Visuals
Eight Eyed Sea Bass Ltd
http://www.eesb.tv