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PP CS6 performance on MacPro
Okay, so I’ve upgraded my system to Lion so I can properly test Premiere. 10.7.4 with the latest AJA drivers.
The upgrade solved my issues with the Kona card and playback stopping, so that’s a plus. However, I am running into something that I’m not sure if it is a driver/hardware issue or just the fundamental way Premiere works.
Say I have a timeline (1080/24p) and I drop a ProRes file in it that is also 1080/24p. I get a yellow bar above it but playback is fine. On the same timeline, I drop in a clip from a RED EPIC (5K). It also gets a yellow bar but I can’t play the clip back for more than a second or two before it drops frames when the viewer resolution is set to full. If I drop the viewer resolution to half, I can play it back OK but then, of course, my ProRes clip looks nasty because it is also playing back at half resolution. It seems Premiere doesn’t have dynamic resolution playback (like FCP 7). OK.
My system is a year-old 8 core Mac Pro, 16 GB RAM, Kona3, QuadroFX 4800 and a RED Rocket card. I thought I would be able to play pretty much whatever, whenever without rendering but that’s not quite happening.
Also, when I play the RED file back at half resolution, the system’s cores (all 16 of them) are maxed – I didn’t expect to see that much CPU activity, thinking it would leverage the GPU/Rocket more for playback.
Am I missing the magic “go fast” switch somewhere? I have my project set to use the Mercury Engine, so I should be getting some good hardware acceleration with this system, right?
I guess the dream was to not have to make proxy files from 5D and RED source material to offline with like I have to now with FCP 7. I was thinking I’d just be able to edit the native files in real-time in a mixed resolution/format timeline in Premiere and move on with life. No?
-Matt
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4 Replies
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Well, my first thought is that it doesn’t sound like Premiere is using the Red Rocket, cause i get about the same performance without one, but I don’t know anything about the RR so that’s for someone else to answer.
Also, GPU acceleration doesn’t affect everything.
—Begin Quotes—
“Here’s a list of things that Premiere Pro CS5 and later can process with CUDA:
some effects (complete list at the bottom of this post)
scaling (details here)
deinterlacing
blending modes
color space conversions”and from https://blogs.adobe.com/premiereprotraining/2011/04/adobe-premiere-pro-cs5-5-improvements-in-cuda-processing-and-the-mercury-playback-engine.html
Which is a list of stuff added with CS5.5:“frame rate differences
field order differences
pixel aspect ratio differences
frame size differences
media with different alpha channel representations”—End quotes—
So the GPU isn’t doing very much in your example, except scaling.
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It’s most likely the lack of having a Red Rocket. If I recall correctly, Adobe’s Mercury Playback engine is optimized for inter-frame codecs: h.264, AVCHD, XDCAM, MPEG2, MPEG4. All the MPEG variants are the most common interframe codecs and usually the most difficult to edit natively.
Red Redcode (R3D) is an intra-frame codec. Each frame is discrete. What’s cool about Redcode is that it uses wavelet compression, as you process less of the file, you still get an image but one with less detail. That’s why you can set the quality to 1/2, 1/4, 1/8 and so on.
The Red Rocket does the most computationally expensive process, the image debayering, in hardware. It sounds like you don’t have the Red Rocket enabled in Premiere.
Try the following:
– In your project bin right click a Red file and select “Source Settings”– At the bottom of the window that pops up with all the Red raw settings, make sure to set Premiere to use any available Red Rocket cards.
If the setting is grayed out then restart your computer, open Premiere and try again. If you open Redcine-X before Premiere, it will “claim” the Red Rocket card. Adobe is also weird about releasing the Red Rocket card when the program closes, so you may sometimes see it disabled in Redcine-X. Again, a restart fixes the issue.
Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire – Digital Production Services
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services.
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks -
Um, Angelo, Read a little closer:
[Matt Riley] “My system is a year-old 8 core Mac Pro, 16 GB RAM, Kona3, QuadroFX 4800 and a RED Rocket card.”
So, I think you and I agree that his RR card isn’t working….
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Yes, I missed that and edited my response on how to check his rocket card.
Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire – Digital Production Services
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services.
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks
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