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Stupid questions regarding CUDA, OpenCL and Premiere 6
So I’m thinking of buying something like this.
https://www.gumtree.com/p/for-sale/34ghz-quad-core-i7-27inch-imac-like-new-condition/101517973
nice price, nice heft, nice little motor altogether, I know lots of editors going for stuff like this. It’ll drive AE very nice too what with the i7 hyperthreading and all that.
I’m also after springing for CS6.
My problem is how my new likely primary editing system is going to perform on this machine, because I’m beginning to worry that its going to perform very badly.
Shane Ross just worked with it and he found, on something non-cuda (90%+ of all current in operation mac hardware) it performs very badly as an editing system. to quote him:
This was…OK on my laptop and the work computer, but only OK. Because neither had a graphics card to enable CUDA and let the Freddie Mercury Engine loose on my footage. So scanning the footage was stuttery, playing back was as well.
Stuttery playback reads as unusable for me.
Lawrence says that he loves this baby, and personally, as someone spending half their day in AE, I figure you know, this is the editor for me, but if the only option in terms of hardware is a tower?? where you can swap the GPU out, then this isn’t really going to work is it?
If we’re all outputting to monitors at half or quarter resolution because non cuda systems can’t support playback of the open timeline at broadcast resolution, and there is no DI codec, then how does this work?
Am I missing something? Also Dennis from Adobe completely hypothetically suggested that it was reasonably-ish doable to point the adobe Open CL implementation to a card not specifically listed by adobe as compatible, does anyone have a view to that?
This is the one component of the Adobe house that needs to be able to reliably throw around a few layers of 1080p with 3 way CC and dissolves on more or less current hardware, without dropping a frame – at the chosen broadcast resolution.
If i can’t even properly scrub avchd footage without an nvidia card, isn’t this kind of a non-starter right now? until they broaden the OpenCL spec?
https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos
http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics -
59 Replies
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As long as you have 1GB of video ram, you can easily edit a text file in Premiere to add support for the built-in dedicated graphics option of any newer graphics chipset.
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yes, exactly, that was what dennis was getting at. say I’ll have between 1-2 gigs on the system of the 6970M variety.
But it would be good to hear that it actually, reliably works and doesn’t flake out as unsupported, because functional access to the GPU appears to form the entire basis for premiere 6 as a usable editing system.
https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos
http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics -
We have an i7 iMac with a Pegasus RAID as a extra edit unit with CS5.5 Production Premium and now I downloaded and tried the CS6 trial on it. Even without the GPU support it is very responsive and wayyyyyy faster than CS5.5. I can run R3D 4K in 1/4 quality with a couple color correctors on it in realtime. 1080p prores and DPX sequences also work without any hassle in full res.
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I think there’s a difference between supporting OpenCL and actually being optimized for OpenCL. Adobe has obviously spent a lot of time with nVidia optimizing their software for CUDA. It seems if you’re going to commit to CS6 then it may be best to use the best hardware available for the job. I can tell you first hand that the difference between using an approved CUDA card like the GTX 570 or not is gigantic – I was able to get full rez playback with 1080p footage with myriad of effects stacked on clips – this was on a i7 PC…
Adobe says they’ll be updating their list of supported graphics cards but who knows if/when the ATI cards in current iMacs will be on the list? I would hope it soon than later…
Lance Bachelder
Writer, Editor, Director
Irvine, California -
Get a Thunderbolt iMac. Aswell for fast storage and the AJA or BMD broadcast I/O solutions and you will be just fine.
This way you even have the option to add a CUDA card in a Thunderbolt box later.
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Lance is right. If you want Premiere to work to it’s full potential, you need to be running CUDA. The difference between the GPU accelerated Mecury Playback Engine and the CPU MPE is night and day.
I personally couldn’t be bothered waiting for Apple to bring out a MacPro (and yes, I know that they’ve been dependent on Intel releasing CPUs), so six moths ago I went and built a hackintosh specifically for Premiere/Resolve. It was cheap as chips (i7 2600k + 16GB ram + dual GTX570) and works like a dream.
So if you’re technically minded and prepared to do a bit of tinkering, I recommend giving it a shot. At the end of the day, if you find it all too hard, you’ve still got a pretty decent Windows workstation.
Alternatively, wait it out and hope that Apple don’t ditch the MacPro…
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thunderbolt won’t be in a position to hande GPU throughput until later, faster 100 Gbps specs are introduced in about three years time. I’m repeating that like a parrot mind you. 20Gbps doesn’t and won’t cut it for external GPU throughput.
Also my understanding is that this doesn’t relate to disk read write ala the promise raid. the stuff coming off a c300 or an af100 or a 7D isn’t exactly a data hog. the whole point is that there is no DI codec to send them to in premiere. I’m relying on premiere’s super powered open timeline to throw that stuff around natively, but if Premiere doesn’t have CUDA its dead in the water in those scenarios dealing with native camera codecs. that’s right isn’t it?
https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos
http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics -
[Aindreas Gallagher] ” if Premiere doesn’t have CUDA its dead in the water in those scenarios dealing with native camera codecs. that’s right isn’t it?”
Not at all. I go back and forth with CS5.5 on a PC with a GTX285 and my i7 MacBook Pro and don’t have much of a problem dealing with those particular native codecs. From what I hear, CS6 is even better even without hardware support.
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “Premiere doesn’t have CUDA its dead in the water in those scenarios dealing with native camera codecs. that’s right isn’t it?”
As said before R3D footage works pretty nicely, Prores too. I can try out some 5D mk II footage tomorrow, but I can’t say anything about c300 and af100 footage. Unless you have some to share or know where I could find some.
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “Dennis from Adobe completely hypothetically suggested that it was reasonably-ish doable to point the adobe Open CL implementation to a card not specifically listed by adobe as compatible, does anyone have a view to that? “
I have a 2010 iMac 2.93GHz i7 Quad + HT, 16GB RAM, with a Radeon 5750 1GB.
I just downloaded the PPro CS6 Trial, edited the /Applications/Adobe Premiere Pro CS6/Adobe Premiere Pro CS6.app/Contents/opencl_supported_cards.txt file, and fired her up. Mercury GPU acceleration was enabled, so I pulled up some 720p60 footage from my T2i, laid it into the timeline, set it to loop, and then starting messing with the motion controls during playback.
No stutters, so hiccups. I added 3-way CC. No stutters, no hiccups. Let’s break it. Added Warp Stabilizer. It kept playing, though at much lower fidelity as it analyzed in the background. Mind you it is still looping playback in the timeline.
I quit, removed the edit from the txt file, and relaunched. Warning: no MPE GPU! Now it can’t do any of the above gymnastics.
Then I modded the txt file again, fired up, and tried a few streams of T2i 1080p29.97 layered. Looped playback, started playing with motion parameters. Added 3-way CC to each clip, made some random changes. Still looping playback, and just a slight stutter for a beat following a couple of my inputs, but that could be that these are playing back from a single SATA drive.
So I got solid MPE GPU action with my older OpenCL card, and the newer ones will probably do more than mine does. But you will have to edit your opencl_supported_cards.txt file.
Best,
Andy
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