[Brad Bussé]

After some tests between Pr and Resolve, I don’t think the drive problem is going to fix everything for me.

I created a new project in Resolve and imported some of the source clips I’ve been working with and was able to layer several layers with fx and opacity and it plays back smooth as butter. I create a new project in premiere with AVC-Intra 100 sequence and it plays back ok, a frame drop or two here and there (sequence is all yellow), then I render a section and that’s playing back okay … for a minute or two. Then the project seems to get corrupted with the same problems that keep creeping up for me–namely that rendered sections are dropping frames all over the place.

Why is it that preview rendered sections are playing worse than several layers of un-rendered clips stacked?

[Brad Bussé]

I found that the disk speed test was giving higher numbers for uncompressed 4GB tests, but compressed formats whether AVC-Intra, DNxHR, or ProRes are all giving me very low numbers, and when I use the AJA Speed Test, I can now also see that the disk writes are sometimes hanging, both read and write are all over the place without consistent rates being held and drops in speed, and reads being slow to get up to speed. I put in a ticket with Promise.

[Brad Bussé]

Codecs of source footage ranges from ProRes HQ to DNxHD/R, to xavc, to Cineform, to h.264. The problems appear with all codecs really, even if I’m using DNxHD source with the sequence matched so there’s no color indicator, and even with footage fully rendered to green (with the sequences set to various codecs including DNxHD, AVCHD, and I-Frame Only.

Dell Precision 7910 (latest anti-sceptre BIOS flash) with: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2630 v3 @2.40GHz 2.39GHz (2 processors).

Disk Speed Test:
boot drive: 433 MB/s Write, 507 MB/s Read
media drive: 338 MB/s Write, 410 MB/s Read … hmmm, this is odd, this should be posting double these rates. (24TB Pegasus 2 24TB w/ 6.6 TB free – was originally testing double these rates when first setup), it’s connected to an add-on Dell TB2 PCI-e card.

Okay, so here’s the weird thing: I setup new 1080p60 sequences in the standard AVCHD and 10-bit DNxHD, imported some ProResHQ, DNxHD and H.264 footage and added a couple of fx and even in the areas where it was red with two layers comped over eachother with a luma matte, it was playing back at a very reasonable rate. So I opened the project that I’ve been working on earlier today which was really shutting me down, and that was suddenly playing back reasonably. So I worked in that for awhile and then it suddenly hit a brick wall–in this instance when adding the VHS RG Universe plugin to a set of highish res stills with animated transformation keys. That’s when I’d be sitting there waiting 10 seconds just for the system to show the frame if I clicked somewhere else in the timeline. And if I grabbed a UI border to rescale, I’d be waiting 20+ seconds while the cursor did the blue pinwheel of death. So, then I opened the previous test project, and found that I could still navigate quickly, and … when I clicked back to the project that had been hanging, it suddenly was performing quickly again!

Any advice on what’s going on?

[Brad Bussé]

1080p60 and 1080p30. I’ve moved the media cache and media cache database to both the media drive (6-drive thunderbolt RAID-5 array) as well as the ssd boot drive. Both drives have plenty of available free space, and I’ve never had problems like this with hosting the media cache and media cache database on a similar thunderbolt RAID-5 in the past when working on a Mac Pro with half the CPU and RAM.

[Brad Bussé]

Thanks, those didn’t work but what did is trashing preferences and plug-in cache at startup.

[Brad Bussé]

Yeah, there’s not as of yet any support for ProRes Raw aside from FCP X, software-wise.

If you have an Inferno, you could try copying the files onto an SSD and playback, then export signal to another recorder to record as another format, but to retain the full data you’d need to go out SDI and record in another raw format, and you’d want to know if the original footage was encoded as log2 or a different gamma.

[Brad Bussé]

Thanks for this, Dave. I’ve been using PhotoJPEG codec to render Nuendo-friendly videos, but the new CC update seems to have removed that, so this may be a solution for me.

Is anyone using this for ProRes encoding on Windows? I’ve read about other 3rd-party ProRes solutions for encoding on Windows and came to the conclusion that none of them were a very solid workflow to rely on for retaining an all-ProRes workflow on Windows. I imagine it’s the same here, but at least it’s a cheap solution for ProRes deliverables to clients when needed, as long as the quality and compatibility hold up.

[Brad Bussé]

So I can reliably keep monitoring output sync between separate video and audio interfaces by timing internally?

[Brad Bussé]

[greg janza] “Do not waste a super speed M.2 PCIe x4 SSD on the boot drive. Use only for Projects and Media. Use a standard SATA III SSD for the OS/Applications.
Never use RAID 5 if you are dealing with high sequential rates like video streams
RAID is a thing of the past for performance, it is good for high reliability back up and archiving.”

Using an M.2 x4 for your Projects and Media would only work if you never need to have more than 1.5 TB of usable space for all of your concurrent live projects and their media. I imagine M.2 x4 would also be a great dedicated Ae cache drive (probably want to periodically reformat, and may be a wear item burner (see last paragraph).

RAID 5 is great for storing large amounts of data, with parity for data redundancy, as well as high sustained data rates. A 6 drive RAID-5 can provide in the dozens of TB and sustained read and write speeds of ~1GB/s. An 8 drive RAID-6 can do the same and provide even more safety with the ability to hot swap 2 drives without data loss. Sure, you should always have an off-site archive of your work, but RAID-5/6/10/50/60 provide a great solution for allowing you to work with large projects locally and not have any downtime in the event of a drive failure.

Besides, solid state still isn’t a great solution for long term life span in applications where tons of i/o operations are constantly being written.

[Brad Bussé]

Wait for the next revision of the Pro to come out. You need more cores and Ram than an iMac can handle, and I think it’s worth having a decent desktop GPU. It will help for accelerated effects that have been added to Pr and Ae. There’s not a ton of them yet to my knowledge, but Lumetri is a big one. I’ve switched over to that from Colorista III now that Lumetri Color has Secondaries and GPU acceleration.

I have a 2013 Mac Pro octa-core with d700 gpus and 64 MB RAM. If you were to need an upgrade I’d suggest that or the 12-core since you do 75% Ae, though Ae doesn’t utilize multi-cores so well yet since they removed support and switched the underpinnings to focus on multi-threading. Also, you’d want 96+GB of RAM for 12-core with Ae (I think you’d need to go aftermarket, Hynix, Crucial or OWC).

But, I definitely wouldn’t recommend that if you’re just looking to upgrade your current dodeca-core and don’t need an additional machine. The trash bin mac “pros” at this point are 3 years old design at the same price they were 3 years ago. They’re an amazing feat of engineering, but not built well for Pro usage unless you travel a lot and need more power on the go for Ae and C4D that a Macbook Pro can’t provide. Even if you’re looking for an additional machine, I’d say find another used pre-2013 model.

Check your RAM usage in Ae. You might very well benefit from extra RAM for those cores for Ae so you’re not starving them and/or paging out.

If you want to upgrade the GPU, look at the list of Mac compatible cards at tonymacx86

Hopefully Apple will come out with a redesigned larger Mac Pro very shortly or I’ll have to recommend my department’s upgrades this year go to either custom built Windows PCs, Boxx or the high end video line of HPs.