Erik Lindahl
Forum Replies Created
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A tip is to check your workflow in that you actually get proper bit depth in and out. Premiere is quite an odd bird in this regard.
– DPX I think works in RGB 10- or 16-bit but I can’t say for sure.
– TIFF is limited to RGBA 8-bpp which is extremely sad.
– In general I’ve seen odd things exporting. Stills seem to fall back to 8-bpp which is frustrating as hell.Depending on your system / workflow you do have codecs like ProRes and Cineform that are 10-bit or greater. ProRes 4444 is RGB 12-bit with a 16-bit alpha. That said they are compressed.
To Adobe: PLEASE make Premiere, After Effects and Photoshop consistent in format support. It’s quite terribad now.
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For Gone Girl they had the same workflow, sort of.
– Shot with RED DRAGON @6K
– Converted everything to DPX. This was their master / intermediate format they did VFX / finished in.
– For editorial, ProRes files from the DPX-files at roughly 2.5K was used.Choosing an intermediate codec I’d say ProRes is you best pick if you’re OSX based. If not, Cineform is a decent runner up from the various tests I’ve seen. A film like Gone Girl used DPX yes but for most that’s crazy overkill.
From my experience, even with modern hardware, the overhead of “all native” isnt worth it IF you can afford a transcode workflow. It will eat some time on the front end and it will eat HDD space potentially but it does ease up thing from my experience.
Also be very careful about mixing frame rates. Yes, premiere handles mixed frame rates but the end result will look like garbage.
Scaling HD to UHD works decently in Premiere where After Effects really shines in terms of quality (with the side effect of longer rendering times).
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If you have pre-comps that are 1080p in the massive comp you could try to pre-render this as new assets and replace the main comp with the pre-rendered versions. This tends to speed things up greatly.
Also, try to identify where your comp / comps head into long-rendering-territory. Sometimes changing a few filters or changing you source format / codec can help things along.
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We have the Ultra Studio 4K running under OSX and have the exact same issue. BMD really are sub-par to AJA in this regard. Either I’m doing something wrong or the features just aren’t there.
What you can do to remedy this is edit in an HD timeline and when the edit is done, copy everything over to a UHD timeline before output.
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The MacPro has a PCIe SSD, much like the one you can get in the Retina iMac given slightly faster. Never the less, having a disk that more or less guarantees 600-1000 MB/s or more read and write is a huge plus compared to the some what random performance of a Fusion Drive. The main reason to get the fusion drive is if you need more internal drive space than the SSD you can afford. The fusion drive will often be fast but you only have 128 GB of SSD “cache” so to speak which when dealing with video can get filled fast.
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Fusion Drives work pretty well. Have one in my home iMac.
That said if you can afford an SSD and don’t need the internal HDD-space, go for it. The MacPro at work is a dream in this regard.
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I’d say it really depends on what you’re going to do. For After Effects-work at a little higher level and to never be limited by RAM, I’d go with 32GB.
Other programs like Premiere I’m not sure how much ram they’ll eat. FCPX is a very RAM-hungry app also so there I’d again for for 32GB.
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Do both machines run the same OS-version?
Do both machines run with the same screen brightness?
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Have you tried working with and without the Mercury Hardware Engine? I know some instance where hardware rendering bugged out for us.
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Apple / OSX handles high-dpi screens quite intelligently. You can have parts of the interface be scaled 200% or have twice the resolution where others are 1:1 pixelmapped.
– 4K video you’d view at 1:1
– 1080p video you’d view at 200% scalingAE, PP, FCPX and a lot of other apps are “retina” or “high dpi aware” and solves this for you more or less.