MAC Users – How to verify CUDA is functioning on new Quadro 4000

[Derek Andonian]

In the Project Settings under Video Rendering and Playback, make sure the renderer is set to the GPU accelerated version of the Mercury Playback Engine, and not “software only”

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“THAT’S our fail-safe point. Up until here, we still have enough track to stop the locomotive before it plunges into the ravine… But after this windmill it’s the future or bust.”

[Todd Kopriva]

Tom, CUDA doesn’t accelerate decoding, so I don’t know what difference you were expecting to see.

See this page and this page for details of what is accelerated.

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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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[Tom Daigon]

Thank you Greg.

Tom Daigon
Avid DS / PrP / After Effects Editor
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com

[Tom Daigon]

I guess I also remember reading somewhere that someone cutting red footage together experience better playback with the card. Aother said exporting sequences generally was faster. A third showed demos of a 9 way split with a super over it not needing to be rendered. I guess my expectations were unrealistic but at this moment I am underwhelmed. I have followed your guidelines to streamlines my system so MPE can function at its best 8 tb. (raid array with Areca that reads Red at 745 mbps, a new Quadro 4000 and newly installed 24 gigs of ram. Im not seeing the kind of performance I would have thought my investments would reveal. I take full responsibility for greater expectations but I am disappointed and wondering how Avid would handle similar material.

Tom Daigon
Avid DS / PrP / After Effects Editor
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com

[Todd Kopriva]

I’ve seen the demos that you’re referring to, and the point of them is that those RED clips have color correction effects applied to them. It’s the acceleration of effects and scaling on many such large frames that is supposed to be the impressive part of that demo.

With Premiere Pro CS5.5, one of the big improvements is that the CUDA card accelerates most of the processing that needs to be done in real-world scenarios when mixing footage of various types (frame-rate conversions, pixel aspect ratio conversions, pulldown removal, etc.).

You should see sigficant differences with CUDA processing when doing more than decoding, making straight cuts, and encoding.

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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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[Robert Brown]

I thought I would chime in since I bought a GTX 285 for testing purposes too. The difference is real. You see more layers being able to be scaled and moved, as well as keying over keyable gfx. Also you can do things like take a single shot, copy it above itself while adding a transfer mode and a blur in real time for some interesting looks. Some Sapphire effects will also play in real time depending on the rez and frame rate and Colorista uses the GPU so you could actually stack multiple instances of Colorista for additional secondaries all in real time. You get more response in a non Kona timeline which hopefully improves. Also previews render faster.

I mentioned on another post that the 9 box effect wasn’t exactly realistic because for one, how many times do you ever need that, and two can your raid deliver that many frames at once? But what is real is scaling, color correction, plugins, and keyable gfx. I think the overall workflow of Mercury needs some thought to optimize what it can do and can’t but I think it’s one of the most interesting things out there as they are finally using the power a modern workstation actually has – which is a lot.

[Todd Kopriva]

> I mentioned on another post that the 9 box effect wasn’t exactly realistic because for one, how many times do you ever need that…

My thought, exactly.

That’s why I refuse to use that demo, even when I’m demonstrating Premiere Pro at tradeshows and such.

I stick with the things that I do in real projects, such as a couple of RED clips cross-dissolving across one another, with a third as a picture-in-picture with the Ultra Key effect… all color corrected and all scaled to fit the frame size. With CS5.5, I can even show that there’s no perceivable performance hit when I do all of this in a sequence with mismatched frame rate, pixel aspect ratio, and frame size.

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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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[Tom Daigon]

My biggest disappointment is probably with the fact that for any effects I always use AE. So the benefits of CUDA sped up sized images with type is a moot point for me since AE gives me much more options. But I take full responsibility in not paying enough attention to the devil in the details of what CUDA does. Its seems what it does best are functions that are not a big part of my work flow. Such is life.

Tom Daigon
Avid DS / PrP / After Effects Editor
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com

[Steven Lopez]

Just installed our Quadro 4000 last night. Still running the demo of Premiere 5.5. Discs should be in the mail. Initial tests are great. Ultra Key and stuff. Getting GPU realtime action. Awesome!

However, when I put an HD clip into an SD timeline. I’ve tried ProRes, XDCAM and Uncompressed 8bit footage, and all I do is a simple 48% scale to edge crop the clip. I cannot get realtime performance at all. Should that scaling be CUDA accelerated? As soon as I put a crop filter on the clip and don’t actually crop the clip, I get a yellow bar and it works and I get CUDA realtime playback. One thing two, without that crop filter, I get no color bar and I can’t force a render of the clip because PR doesn’t see any filter that needs to be rendered. I’ve tried stacking two clips in a PNP effect and it works great, but as soon as one of the two clips runs out and goes away, the remaining clip cannot playback anymore…

Here’s my specs:

Mac 10.6.6
2×2.66 GHz-6-Core Intel Xeon
16GB Ram
Quadro 4000
Using AJA Kona 3 and plug-ins for SDI output
External SCSI 2.5TB drive array.

Again, like I said still running the demo of 5.5 discs should be here soon. Is it a decode issue? Like I’ve said tried all kinds of different source clips. Any thoughts?

[Tom Daigon]

Steven: As a new Quadro 4000 user I noticed something about your setup that I thought I would share. Since you are running this…
Mac 10.6.6
2×2.66 GHz-6-Core Intel Xeon
16GB Ram
Quadro 4000

I found out that the latest Nvidia Quadro 4000 drivers and CUDA drivers need to be running on OSX 10.6.8. When I tried to install the drivers on 10.6.7 the software wouldnt let me do it. So you might be missing out on better performance by not having the latest drivers installed.Here is a link to the latest…

https://blogs.adobe.com/premiereprotraining/2011/06/quadro-4000-driver-and-cuda-driver-update-for-mac-osx-v10-6-8.html

Tom Daigon
Avid DS / PrP / After Effects Editor
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com