Sony FS7 and XAVC-I Codec in Premiere

[David Roth weiss]

Premiere CC has no issues with the various Sony XAVC codecs, but you’ll need a pretty beefy RAID if you want seamless playback without dropping frames and if you want to see things at 1/2 or full resolution.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los Angeles

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[Michael Buday]

Thanks David. Any suggestions on minimum specs for a RAID setup to support 4K XAVC-I?

[Kent Pope]

I shoot FS7 4K footage and edit in Adobe CC2015 with an nVIDIA CUDA GPU (very important) with my i7 8 core 12mb RAM computer. It hangs at full resolution, stutters at 1/2 resolution, plays fine at 1/4 and 1/8. I occasionally get audio & video clock out of sync errors (video hangs, audio keeps playing) and hitting the spacebar to stop has no immediate effect (wait for it…..). My system is self-built. If you can afford it go with Xeon processors and a Quatro CUDA card, fast FSB, lots of memory, oh heck just go over to the VideoGuys website. They have details on GREAT DIY systems. Mine is based on one of theirs from three years ago and was screaming fast with multiple layers of BCC until I started throwing 4K at it.

[Paul Colin]

Hey Guys
I’m having a terrible time with XAVC-I 1080 24p footage from the FS7 in PP CC2015.
It plays OK but when I attempt a simple extract or lift from the time line. No go! It just doesn’t work.
I recorded Pro Res 422 (with extension back)and laid it in a time line and everything worked.
I need some help here. Am I overlooking something?

[David Roth weiss]

I discussed issues working with XAVCi in Premiere with Adobe’s Al Mooney – it’s definitely not working as it should, and Al and his team are looking into it. How long before it’s fixed is anyone’s guess, but Adobe has been pretty good at these things once they know lots of users are having issues.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los Angeles

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[Jon Collins]

Interesting to hear. I hit a brick wall last week. The Adobe guys spent 2 days going over my setup with 4 screen shares, phone calls and support threads. Shooting on FS7 editing on IMac 5K. They couldn’t work out the problem. I eventually figured out PluralEyes was rearing it’s ugly head again and despite being years since corruption issue were first spotted, PluralEyes had somehow corrupted not just the project but also all the media caches too so no other projects would play back.

The senior engineer I talked to at Adobe said there was 99% chance that what I was suggesting couldn’t happen, but after deleting the media cache, all was good in the other projects. The corrupt project is all but a write off.

Anyway, might be worth deleting the media cache files if you keep encountering issues.

Cheers,
Jon

Jon Collins – Videographer

[Paul Colin]

Thanks David!
One more thing . . .
As an attempt to patch the situation I placed some XAVC-I clips in a ProRes422 sequence and everything worked smoothly as far as working with the clips (extracts, lifts etc.)
But what am I losing or gaining by placing the native clips in a ProRes enviornment. I don’t think it’s transcoding the clips or maybe it is.
Your thoughts.

[Jon Collins]

Hi Paul,

Setting the sequence to ProRes 422 is a standard thing with all my sequences. ProRes has always run much more happily on a Mac than Premiere’s MPEG format so I would advise you to do the same thing with all yours. I found this tip out when managing a production team at an agency and we found that this cut our crashes by at least 90%.

Cheers,
Jon

Jon Collins
Director // Editor // Motion Graphics

[Paul Colin]

Hey Jon,
The questions: are those XAVC-I clips being transcoded just by placing them in the 422 sequence?
Thanks!

[Jon Collins]

Hi Paul,

Not entirely… by setting a sequence to ProRes, Premiere will only render previews in ProRes. So if for example you stick a bit of a grade on there and some transitions, Premiere will render the necessary media to ProRes with effects on to playback usually on the fly. When you export (unless you enable the “use previews” option which is not recommended), Premiere will use the original linked media, so in this case XAVC-I, for export.

Cheers,
Jon

Jon Collins
Director // Editor // Motion Graphics