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Premiere Pro 5.5.vs FCP 7 Performance Tests
Hello, all this FCP X nonsense finally got me to open up PPro, and I’ve been ignoring it for a long time although it was right there for a number of years now. Actually I had been thinking about switching to something else for a while. I used FCP as an offline editor last year and couldn’t believe how bad the EDL was. 7 was markedly worse than 6 in that regards as far as slow mos etc and if I recall correctly CMX was the only list actually readable by anything else and I was actually having trouble getting FCP to read it’s own list that it created! But that’s another story.
So I have a new Mac Pro 12 core with a Kona 3 and I was able to get a GTX 285 on Ebay as I read that is a really good card and half the price of a Q4000.
FCP was great at the time it came out but my main complaints were the quality of the DVE, KF editor, the EDL export and the apparency that Apple was never going to fix any of these things. I had hope of a more Smoke like system when I had rumors of the new FCP but that obviously didn’t happen
So this isn’t a thorough test by any means but it does give some idea of the real world performance of Premiere in relation to FCP.
So first Kona does work with Mercury although PPro seems to be more responsive in a non Kona timeline. With the Kona on the timeline’s a bit more sluggish. Also doing things like moving boxes around or layers is faster and smoother in a non Kona timeline. I was trying to see if I could turn the Kona off to see if viewport performance would improve but it seems once you pick a Kona timeline, it’s on whether you like it or not. They should fix that.
But some of the things I found interesting though were that I can take a keyable lower third in animation codec put it over video and it plays in real time with 720 60 footage from a Canon 7D. That’s a huge performance benefit over FCP. Last night at work I was using an 8 core Mac without PPro and had to convert the raw 7D file in Compressor to Pro Res. It was just a 2 minute clip and Compressor took 15 minutes to render it. That is without Q Master but I haven’t been able to get Q Master to work right in FCS since V3 came out so I haven’t bothered trying in a while. That was pretty slow.
Adobe Media Encoder seems to process 7/5D footage on my system at about 40 fps. So if it’s a 24P clip it’s faster than realtime, and slower for 60P. In any case PPro reads it in full rez with no conversion needed. With a 30P timeline I was able to add a Sapphire Film Effect plugin, plus a keyable Lower third and it played in full rez in realtime with no rendering. Adding more plugins started to slow it down though.
BTW it does seem PPro renders H264 quite a bit slower than Pro Res so it does seem worthwhile to convert it and Adobe Media Encoder does not shift the gamma as Compressor does.
Then I did a speed comparison. I took that same clip, converted to Pro Res and brought it into FCP and also PPro. I put a Sapphire Film Effect on it, and the keyable lower third on top. FCP took 60 seconds to render it, Pro 20 seconds! What was interesting is that in PPro you can select what type of codec it renders the preview file into. In PPro I was using Pro Res and after trying all of them Pro Res is the fastest. Evidently the encode of the render file actually takes a big part of the rendering time. In any case, all of the other codecs added quite a bit of time to render the preview. AVC Int was slower, Avid DNX was MUCH slower, as well as uncompressed.
Also the DVE in PPro is excellent. It’s image quality is top notch. You can reposition a lower 3rd and it will play flawlessly in real time. And as well it has Ease In/Out and bezier handles etc. The KF editor is very AE like which I have always liked.
To sum it up PPro still needs some work on a lot of things, but to me this is the direction I was hoping FCP would go. I’m really hoping Adobe can succeed with PPro and they seem to be focused on the right things IMO. Image quality and speed.
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5 Replies
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Hi Robert,
…certainly glad you see some items to appreciate in Premiere Pro.
On the sequence question regarding Kona… HDSDI output does take a bit longer route through the machine so it typically won’t have quite the same sense of response that a sequence that doesn’t use the HDSDI output does. Most of us edit on a non-Kona sequence and you can simply nest the finished sequence in a Kona sequence, or even copy/paste the material from one to the other when it’s time to make a final assessment pass or master. It’s not really a “fix it” sort of thing…it isn’t “broken.”
On render files: Unlike FCP, PPro does not need to render an edited sequence before you export to one (or many) output formats through Media Encoder. The “preview” codec is just that…preview. It’s not the mastering codec for the sequence in the way FCP would set it up. Every sequence is actually completely codec agnostic…the presets are simply there for convenience. The preview files you generate while editing are not typically used as the source for AME unless you choose them to be with a checkbox. Many of us find Iframe MPEG2 to be easy, scalable and more than adequate to generate a full framerate preview…but we would not typically choose to encode form those previews.
ProRes is a very nice I-frame codec that is well engineered to run very fast and have a very high data rate. AVCHD or DSLR are long-GOP formats that are designed to look very good at a minuscule data rate. It takes more horsepower to run an H264 codec than a ProRes or say DVCProHD (also an I-frame codec).
The main advantage to being able to handle all the different camera codecs is to give you a choice.
HDV used to be a handful so most wanted to transcode it…these days MPEG2 Long-GOP (XDcamHD, EX, 422, HDV, Canon XF) all runs easily and MPEG4 (H264) is the current codec of question for some systems (not all…lots of RAM and Proc Cores does help).
So…PPro is a different animal than FCP in lots of ways…straightforward DPX workflow with the ability to handle out-of-gamut colors and log curves, RED R3D on the timeline, native workflows for almost everything, and very sophisticated audio capabilities inside the NLE itself…
In many ways, I think computer workstations are “growing into” Premiere Pro as it presents so many options to the user, but to remove some of the busy work up front, it does use more system resources later…
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,Adobe Certified Instructor
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Yes I was experimenting with the idea of setting up things in a non Kona TL and then copying, or nesting is an interesting idea too. What sort of Time Line would be good to use if editing Pro Res 720 for example?
But I still like FCP’s ability to just turn of video out without having to do anything else.And yes I get more or less the whole preview concept. In my work though I do tend to render everything as I work so I can see how it plays out. And I think it was significant to learn that the codec choice has a big impact on render speed. There was a thread here about which codec is best for PPro. I’m liking Pro Res.
I bought it so I guess I can use it all I want.Also there are many situations like in live broadcast TV where people will just play out from the timeline and it is captured into another system. And speed is everything in that world.
And I know some of the tests I did were nothing groundbreaking, but I was getting so fed up with the crap DVE in FCP that it was nice to see a system as clean as the linear bays I used to work in. And for a lot of editing as many of us know the simplicity is lay out the edit, color correct and font.
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A better integration of video cards into Premiere Pro is very high on my wish list! I work with BMD Decklink Studio2 and:
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/124/876523I don’t want to take extra steps like edit on non BMD sequences and than copy to a BMD time line or transcode DSLR footage. This doesn’t fit to the rest of the unmatched speed and workflow opportunities Premiere Pro gives us.
I am looking forward to the next major Premiere Pro update wich hopefully includes a better integration of professional video cards.
LG, Robert
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There is a certain amount of this that is in the third party’s court as well. AJA recently refined how their card/software work with Mercury and CUDA.
Support and functionality in legacy FCP isn’t really a fair comparison as it’s been a relatively stationary target for so many years.
Premiere Pro’s engineering leaps since even FCP’s last minor upgrade have been significant.
Unless the third party PCIe cards move downstream from the display card, I don’t see how the performance can be made equivalent, though in AJA’s case, the gap is closing.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,Adobe Certified Instructor
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I don’t mean it as a complaint. I know there are difficult things to deal with when you have 2 PCI cards doing a lot of the work. But as a request I don’t think it would be that hard to have the ability to turn off the Kona card since I see many other programs including After Effects that can do it. But I’ll post it on their request page.
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