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Old friends with new lovers…
It used to be that you couldn’t find a mention of Avid on Black Magic’s site…
Chris
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12 Replies
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[Chris Conlee] “It used to be that you couldn’t find a mention of Avid on Black Magic’s site…”
While exploring my next move I discovered that ProRes is a major workflow bottleneck when cutting on PCs. Both Avid and Premiere can handle it, but it slows both down, negating the advantages of going PC in the first place. DNxHD works equally well on both Avid and PPro PC systems, giving full access to Adobe’s mercury engine. The problem had been that many recorders, most notably the AJA Ki Pro, recorded solely to ProRes. That is now changing. This BM HyperDeck Studio is joined by the Ki Pro Mini and the Sound Devices Pix 240 in offering DNxHD recording at a great price, making a PC workflow much more appealing. My only problem with the BM HyperDeck is that you have no control over file names and/or metadata, making it of limited use for me, but I will say the price is right.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
[Herb Sevush] ” I discovered that ProRes is a major workflow bottleneck when cutting on PCs”
Could you elaborate? I have not experienced any kind of slowdown in either MC6 or PP with Prores material on the PC side at all. Actually, thanks to Cuda, PP performed significantly better on an otherwise similarly configured PC vs a Mac. There is the problem of not being able to encode to Prores but apart from that I cannot see any bottleneck.
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[Frank Gothmann] ” I have not experienced any kind of slowdown in either MC6 or PP with Prores material on the PC side at all.”
I need to edit 5 to 6 streams of multicam for my work and I was told by a highly respected PPro and Avid systems integrator that ProRes does not run at full speed on Adobe’s mercury engine, it will run but not at full speed. For somewhat different reasons it also isn’t efficient on the Avid and transcoding to DNxHD would give me the bandwidth I would need. It probably wouldn’t matter if I didn’t work in multi-cam, but I do and apparently it does. If you have some ProRes files and care to do a multi-cam test I would love to hear your results.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
[Herb Sevush] “This BM HyperDeck Studio is joined by the Ki Pro Mini and the Sound Devices Pix 240 in offering DNxHD recording at a great price”
And don’t forget Arri’s Alexa camera, although the “great price” is subjective…
Chris
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On the Avid it probably more an issue of AMA vs native, regardless of the codec. I see no differrence between six DnxHD movs or six Prores movs. Multicam is generally better and smoother with MXF files. I have never done multicam on PP but I’ll give that a try over the next couple of days and report back.
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[Herb Sevush] “I need to edit 5 to 6 streams of multicam for my work and I was told by a highly respected PPro and Avid systems integrator that ProRes does not run at full speed on Adobe’s mercury engine, it will run but not at full speed.”
Currently Herb, the limitation of Premiere Pro in this case is that our Multi-cam only supports up to 4 cameras. I have however played 5-6 streams at full-res with no dropped frames. It all depends on disk speed and that your PC/Mac system has enough horsepower to process it.
Dennis – Adobe guy
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[Herb Sevush] “DNxHD works equally well on both Avid and PPro PC systems, giving full access to Adobe’s mercury engine”
Adobe Premiere Pro cannot play native DNxHD MXF files due to Avid’s licensing. We can however playback QT rewrapped DNXHD.
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[Dennis Radeke] “Adobe Premiere Pro cannot play native DNxHD MXF files due to Avid’s licensing. We can however playback QT rewrapped DNXHD.”
The Sound Devices Pix 240 records QT wrapped DNxHD so that should work fine.
On this other issue of ProRes and PC PPro, I was told that ProRes is not one of the file types optimized for the Mercury engine and that it is not as efficient as other file types, such as QT DNxHD, in PPro. Is that true?
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
Dennis may be able to give more in-depth info on this but there is without a doubt a significant performance boots with Cuda, also with Prores files. I get a lot more realtime goodness on the PC with a Quadro 4000 than on a MacPro with an ATI card. That should be true for multicam as well.
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The architecture of Premiere Pro was designed to deal natively with the codec/format whenever possible. To that end, with things like H.264, we decided NOT to use Quicktime whenever we could work around it. Mostly because QT is 32-bit as I understand it.
With ProRes and DNxHD, we do have to use Quicktime which takes a certain performance hit. I find that DNxHD is much worse than ProRes, which makes sense.
I would characterize working with ProRes as “great” and DNxHD as “satisfactory”
Hope this helps.
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