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Shamefully obvious mercury playback enquiry
Hello,
I am an FCP user tentatively looking into switching to PP at the agency where I work.
Can anyone point me in the direction of a good guide to setting up PP to get the best realtime playback? We currently have PP installed on a 12Core Mac Pro with 32Gb of Ram running Lion.
I realise that the pre-installed Radeon GPU is not supported by CS5.5 but can I count on getting better realtime performance using PP on this setup than I get using FCP? If so, are there any setup procedures or gotchas I should look out for that I might miss, not being familiar with PP?
We just tried putting a DPX sequence on the timeline and our playback was terrible. At first I thought this might be a hard disc limitation, but I’ve seen a video on the Adobe site where we saw a DPX file playing on top of about 12 other HD files. Can anyone suggest what I might be missing here?
Sorry for being such a bumbling simpleton, any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Chris -
22 Replies
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Try right clicking and setting the Playback quality to less than Full resolution (with DPX, I’d do 1/4 or less if you can.) That plus fast drives (for playback delivery). Keep the Paused Resolution at full.
Best,
Jeff I. Greenberg
Editor/Author/Speaker/Consulting
My NAB seminar schedule, contact info and more -
Thanks Jeff,
I tried this already and even at quarter res the playback is poor. The resolution of the DPX clip is only 1920×1080, it’s not 4k or anything. Is it just that the data rate is too high (8Mb per frame)? If so, how would the guy in this demo video slap it so casually on top of 12 other layers?
skip to the 5 minute mark:
https://tv.adobe.com/watch/switching-to-adobe-premiere-pro-cs5/switching-overview/Is there a secret “Mercury playback” button that I can’t see?
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Hi Christopher,
You will definitely need to look at the supported NVidia cards for the performance you are looking for.
Unfortunately, there aren’t many to choose from unless you are willing to do some minor file editing.
And as Jeff mentioned, you’ll need a solid RAID array, you didn’t mention what you were pulling footage from.
Vince Becquiot
Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area -
MPE relies on ram, graphics card, processor and raid array. What kind of raid are you running?
Tom Daigon
Avid DS / PrP / After Effects Editor
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com
Mac Pro 3,1
8 core
10.6.8
Nvidia Quadro 4000
24 gigs ram
Maxx Digital / Areca 8tb. raid
Kona 3 -
Ah ha. This may be the problem. I just checked and the tower is brand new, with only a 1 TB system disc in it. If we but a couple more TB drives in and striped them RAID 0 might we be able to playback DPX files?
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Yes, 3 drives in RAID 0 should get you there. Make sure you at least get matching 7200 RPM drives.
Vince Becquiot
Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area -
Thanks a lot,
As you can tell im a bit wet behind the ears when it comes to PP but I’m excited about working in a world with less rendering, less transcoding and more editing.
Just to confirm, even without a supported GPU, I can still get improved real time playback of different compressed formats AND with more layers and effects compared with FCP legacy right?
Thanks again and expect more simpleminded posts of this nature from me in te near future. Except I’ll post them in the basics forum from now on.
Chris
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It’s a hard question to answer. FCP converts most formats to Prpres, unless you are talking about native editing?
I’ve never had real issues with FCP when it comes to Prores playback.
Vince Becquiot
Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area -
Hey vince,
Yes I’m talking about native editing.
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