[Audrey Chandler]

Hi Jeff! Thanks so much for your reply. Big thank you to both Richard and Jeff, actually. You have both helped so much with understanding this stuff and sorting out — as you put it — the “good” from the “bad” in terms of what I need to know. I feel so much more confident about what I’m doing now. =)

As far as lossless/uncompressed, it’s actually the other way around — my source can come in those formats if I choose (since I can capture to any codec I want via Dxtory), and I wanted to do so for the image quality advantages because computer-generated subjects break down in quality faster under compression since they have simpler lines and more areas of solid color, etc.

However, these lossless/uncompressed formats are huge and, as you point out, require crazy disk throughput both for reading (editing) and writing (capture). So I was trying to find ways to “cheat” I guess — capture at very high quality and uncompressed (for minimal CPU load during play), then encode down to a slimmer format to reduce disk storage and bandwidth needs once I have idle CPU time.

Unfortunately, a 3TB source file is actually quite easy to create when doing game capture! Capturing in True Quality RGB 24 in Dxtory produces about 1.3 TB per hour in 1920x1080p at 60FPS. It’s not uncommon to record 5-6 hours over several days before finally editing it down to a final video.

But from what Richard explained, that kind of footage is (unwittingly on my part) on par with the sort of data Hollywood productions push, apparently. Oops. =(

I wanted to use Thunderbolt 2 for external drives because it’s faster and less bogged-down by the presence of other peripherals than USB3. I know it’s mostly on Macs, but since the motherboard I’m considering supports TB2, I figured I should take advantage. =)

I agree with you about the SSDs for editing — a lot of people keep encouraging me to, for example, RAID0 two 840 EVO 1TB for the ~1GB/s throughput. But I have a hard time spending ~ $1000 for 2TB (…) of storage with video editing. I’d rather have more space. I guess there is some argument for capturing/editing to the SSD array and then storing the files on a big HDD for archive when finished, but it still seems really expensive for what you gain.

The 780s are most definitely overkill for Premiere, hahaha. No arguments there. They are there to allow me to game at 120 FPS when not recording and to ensure I maintain 60 FPS during capture, because I start to get really bad motion sickness when things dip toward the 30-40 FPS range. =)

I am curious about your disapproval of Windows 8 — from my understanding, the issues people have are mostly with the clunky UI (which can be remedied). I thought Win8 would be a good idea since tech types have told me it has higher performance and better design at the code/OS/technical level. But if there’s issues with Win8 in terms of creative/professional workflows, I am definitely interested to know about it! =(

Your other comments and recommendations about disk setup and different codecs, as well as your own experiences, were very helpful. Thank you.

Whew. Every time I think I can rest and have everything wrapped up, you guys come back with even more insights and comments that get me thinking again. It’s totally great — I love having such experienced users helping me plan. Again, I feel so much more confident about this compared to how lost and overwhelmed I was when I started. =)

TY both, as always. ♥

[Audrey Chandler]

Wow. That’s probably the most education I’ve ever received from one single forum post. It’s also in competition for the most number of times I’ve had to stop reading and go to Wikipedia before finishing a single sentence, hahaha.

So, thank you, that clarified a lot of concepts and crash-coursed me in some major areas related to codecs and video processing that I was still missing.

Basically what I’m understanding is a few major points of interest:

• Very few people, even professionals, edit in Uncompressed or True Lossless formats because they are simply massive in size and data rate.
• Instead, even most professional work occurs in “intermediate” formats that are “acceptably lossy” so that they don’t impact perceived visual quality very much but do reduce bandwidth and file size significantly.
• Highly-compressed or very lossy formats are generally only used in the final export period when no editing is necessary and the product is being delivered to its target audience (broadcast, Web stream, etc.); these are “distribution” codecs and usually have nothing to do with the editing process.

For expensive/ultra-professional work, a general format like this is used:

• Perfect or very-high quality source is captured
• This source is then transcoded down to a smaller, lower-bitrate, more manageable format which is used as a ‘rough draft’ so that the editing process is smooth and responsive
• Once all edits have been made, those are applied to a copy of the source to produce a cut-down, edited source version which is still original/high quality
• This edited source is fed further down the production stream to people who can’t work with ‘rough’ versions, such as precise digital effects or color-correction.
• The overall goal is to minimize how much full-size, full-bitrate source needs to be manipulated at any given step, which allows less-expensive hardware to still function effectively.

Based on this, my problem is thus:

• There is no magic bullet that makes video footage smaller and faster to edit and causes no quality loss; every codec and format choice makes tradeoffs. Professional workflows handle this by having external storage that allows different versions of the footage to be split off to different parts of the production pipeline based on its minimum requirements.
• My “actors” and “studio” and “sets” are all digital inside my computer, meaning there is no ‘external’ source separate from my editing environment, unlike an HD format digital tape or an expensive studio camera that records directly onto SSDs.
• This means that transcoding my source into a ‘rough’ editing format can partially mitigate some issues (disk throughput requirements during editing), but actually makes the storage space issue worse (since I have to store both my source and my transcoded copy internally).
• Additionally, there is no way for me to get around the bandwidth requirements for the highest-quality part of my workflow, because I’m not using external hardware (like a studio camera) — I’m capturing the action directly from one part of my PC (RAM) to another (media storage disks), so my hardware must be capable of transferring the highest-quality bitrate in use (even if I transcode down and edit in a rougher format).
• Basically, I have two choices: pay a lot of money to make sure I have enough storage options and HW power to handle these extreme data rates and sizes, or accept some imperfections somewhere in the workflow: either less-smooth editing, a more destructive workflow, or lower-quality footage.

However, the problem here is not Premiere Pro. PP will gamely handle nearly everything you feed it (assuming you import properly). Instead, the problem is attempting to use PP to perform (unintentionally) professional-level editing with merely high-end consumer level hardware. For example:

• If PP is choking on 3TB Uncompressed files, it’s not PP’s fault — PP just doesn’t have access to enough disk data xfer rate and/or RAM and/or GPU power to keep up.
• If PP is choking on Lagarith or UT files, it’s not PP’s fault — PP just doesn’t have access to enough CPU cores to decode the video stream in real-time.

I think that’s a correct summary of my issue, based on everything you said and directed me to research. In this case, it seems the best approach is to stick within my budget and build the best system I can. Then, adapt my workflow around my PC’s capabilities, since I’m doing much more extreme work at the data level than I realized!

I guess it’s humbling to realize that even building a “top line” desktop PC that costs thousands of dollars is still nothing in the face of truly professional-level hardware demands, haha.

You’ve taken tons of time to read my stuff and answer, and I really appreciate it. I guess this post is mostly to collate my thoughts and assess everything I’ve learned. But if you do read through this response, feel free to let me know if I’ve misunderstood a concept. =)

[Audrey Chandler]

Hi! Yes, thank you, we’re definitely making progress now, haha. I appreciate your patience. The explanation about the difference between Source and Project even answered a separate question I’ve been wondering about, too. =)

I was worried about codecs because I’ve read that some codecs are very much inappropriate for editing (like xVid and .wmv), and other people have expressed really bad editing issues with codecs like x264. I was just trying to avoid those and favor ‘good’ codecs that PP handles well.

I was dodging getting into too many details about my workflow to try keep the TL;DR factor down, but from how you’re talking it seems important to explain better:

I’m not starting a business, no. I wouldn’t mind being paid to do this, but I don’t have the experience yet at all, haha. =)

This is a personal creative passion, so no, ROI is completely secondary to just being able to finally do what I want.

I will do some editing of ‘IRL’ footage or cleaning up my animation work for upload, but I’m not doing tons of ‘shooting’ or anything professional like that.

Primarily, my worry point is relating to capturing and editing gameplay footage which I want to upload and share on video-sharing sites.

I know that last point usually meets with exasperation/dismissal, but understand the kind of data I’m moving:

I want to record at 1080p 60FPS.

Doing this Uncompressed (True Quality RGB24) passes roughly 350 MB/s (!) to the recording drive (since this is captured to disk in realtime) and requires roughly the same data rate to read it for playback.

It also occupies disk space at a rate of about 1.5 TB/hour (!!).

If you record to Lagarith Lossless (for example), you pay a CPU penalty while gaming (lower in-game FPS) but the data stream requirement to your disks is cut down to about 80 MB/s (!) and storage space down to about 300 GB/hour. However, Lagarith has issues in PP according to other editors (addressed below).

“1080p 60FPS for YouTube? You’re an idiot!” you may be saying, haha. I have thought it through, and I do have rational reasons for striving for this goal. =) But I’m happy to explain in more detail if asked.

More to the point about my design concerns: I was talking with someone else who has a very similar setup to the system I’m building (sans the storage choice):

i7 4770K (oc’d)

32 GB RAM

SLI GeForce GTX 780

Editing source media from 2 SSDs in RAID0 (!), with OS/Programs on a separate SSD.

That’s no slouch system. It’s not a dual-Xeon workstation, for sure. But the CPU is 4 core (hyperthread to 8), GPU is top-of-the-line current tech and totally CUDA-capable, and those SSDs should be providing about 1GB/s (!!) transfer rates in both directions.

But he says that editing a 3TB Uncompressed file in PP is ‘a struggle’ and he has to keep Low-Resolution Previews on at all times. Bringing in Lagarith Lossless footage is ‘too tedious’ to edit with because PP ‘struggles to play it back’ no matter what settings he tries.

That’s what has me so scared — I’m trying to figure out what I have to do to make it possible to edit smoothly, if his PP is choking that badly even on that system.

But unlike someone who has to work with a specific studio, or just accept whatever their clients bring them, I can choose exactly which formats/codecs I want to record and edit in. Hence why I feel so disoriented — everything seems to be either too big (and PP chokes) or too compressed (and PP chokes) or too low-quality (and negates my whole point). The ‘Goldilocks’ capture/editing format eludes me.

So, I thought that asking people who do this in serious quantities, with seriously huge/high-quality source footage, every day, for a lot (?) of money, might be able to just give me the straight dope about what file sizes and types do and do not work well in PP. =)

[Audrey Chandler]

Hi, thank you for taking the time to write such a detailed reply, I appreciate it. But unfortunately I think there was a miscommunication about what I’m trying to understand. =) I know I tend to write a lot; I type really fast and I’m detail-oriented so it just happens.

You’ve explained a lot of good stuff about how to set up an editing hardware flow based on one’s situation and codecs in use. What I’m trying to understand is the reverse — what codecs and formats should I use, given a flexible (not-yet-constructed) HW system.

Let me try to TL;DR the most important questions from my post to make it a little more direct/readable:

Does PP have trouble keeping a smooth editing flow as file sizes increase? One example I was given is that anything over about 50GB will make PP stutter/lag on playback, and a 3TB source file would be almost uneditable.

Does PP have trouble keeping a smooth editing flow as source length increase? For example, if you ingest 5 hours of total footage, would it become very hard to scrub/playback while you trim it down?

If I hypothetically have the choice of editing in PP with any codec I want, are there any ‘darling’ codecs that behave better / edit smoother in general? Or, conversely, any codecs you should emphaticaly not edit with?

If I’m trying to maintain maximum fidelity, will PP behave better with Uncompressed sources (massive size, but low CPU burden) or Lossless codecs (much smaller size, but compressed/encoded)?

That’s my situation, I can choose to capture in basically any format I want (and likewise encode before editing, if appropriate). Thus I’d like to try to select the ‘best’ file design before choosing hardware so I can adapt the HW to the proposed design, rather than having to later adapt the editing choices to the available HW.

I hope that was a little more clear & I’m sorry if my first post was too disjointed/vague. This stuff is just super overwhelming when you’re first crash-coursing it so I’m a little scattered atm. =)