Erik Lundberg
Forum Replies Created
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We got almost eight years from our 5,1:s (12 core w 64 GB internal memory, dual NVIDIA Quadro K5000 for Mac). Which is good by any accounts, I’d say. And took us from FCP 6, transitioning to Pr CS5.5, CS6 and then CC up until CC2018. Then we hit oh so many hurdles last fall trying to go to CC2019. To lift the OS enough to be able to run Pr CC2019 was feasible, BUT at the same time to find reliable drivers for our old NVIDIA Quadro cards was impossible. With drivers that gave us CUDA, the system in itself and GUI rendering was hopelessly unstable. Along with all the caveats Adobe released we could not see a way forward for us with these machines. The only road for us to get a stable system was reverting to CC2018 and Mac OS 10.11.16. As I recall it we couldn’t go to 10.13 and get stability at all in a way that we could rely on. Especially with CUDA.
The solution for us in the end was to switch from Mac to Windows. As an all Mac shop since the late 90’s, this was as you can imagine not done ligthly. But since the 5,1’s was due for replacement anyway (we can’t rely five more years on 7-8 year old machines), and Apple (at the time) had no real replacement that suited our needs we needed to take that step. Fortunately the switch was rather smooth, we could use all our old I/O-cards (AJA) in the new towers and each machine was set up in less than half a work day. So minimum time lost.
I know that the config isn’t exactly the same as yours, the issues doesn’t match exactly either. But I think it can testify for issues with these (fine) old machines combined with newer OS/drivers.
Erik Lundberg
Technical Director, Media Technology, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
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Seems like I managed to solve this by setting the Time Sync prefs in the OS on all seats to sync to the EditShare-server. Any drawbacks for working this way (using the same cache locations on multiple seats)?
Erik Lundberg
Technical Director, Media Technology, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
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We don’t use ProRes for previews (and never for exports). And even if we would, this problem would have surfaced. Optimize stills (a function that coming from FCP seems really odd not being greyed out when you make certain codec choices) and ProRes are not good friends. A fool proof solution from Adobe would be to always leave this function off when we’re not dealing with temporal compressed codecs. A newbie problem- now that we found it, it’ll never happen again. Next time we’ll make new mistakes.
Erik Lundberg
Technical Director, Media Technology, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
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[Gerard Tay] “Are you able to render to Prores within Premiere?”
Yes. The issue is tied to when exporting ProRes using Premiere (either when taking a Pr sequence and clicking ‘Export’ in the Export Media dialogue, or when sending off to AME with a click on the ‘Queue’ button). AND the above applies. When the caveats are honored (by chance or design) the ProRes exports are doing just fine. Otherwize they’re most likely not.
Erik Lundberg
Technical Director, Media Technology, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
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Systems are Mac Pro 2010 with 10.8.5 (we had this in 10.7 as well). We’ve done exports both on quad core machines and 12-core. RAM is 32 GB for the quads and 64 GB on the 12-cores. We’ve had the issue both in CS6 and now in CC (all the way through to the october update). Graphics card both with Nvidia 4000 Mac and/or with factory shipped baseline ATI cards.
My first thought when one of our editors showed me the issue was raster size of stills (coming from FCP6 with its twitchy phobia of large rasters). But the issue persists even with files scaled/cropped to 1280×720. Always RGB, haven’t tried to feed it CMYK to see if that fixes the issue (I’d say not).
The problem is trigged by these circumstances:
1. Using Premieres built in Titling Tool. Use title with a solid (either made in the titler or just using slug/colour clip) background. No issues with video background.
or
2. Using a still image on the timeline. BUT NOT when animating with position/scale keyframes. So everything is fine as long as you keyframe PTZ in the still, but when you hold that position/size (for example zoom into a still and then hold), the export fails to make a functioning ProRes file.
AND
using ProRes. Same timeline, same content exports nicely in other codecs. We work and export in 720p50 w/ 48/16 audio. Never use Previews in exports (oh yes, we’ve tried that box too just to see if it made any difference).
A working (but not a good solution in the long run) is to right click the offending clips, and ‘Replace with After Effects composition’. For stills, this is all that is needed, for titles, the title needs to be rebuilt in AE (since these are replaced by black slugs). When exporting, everything works fine.
Failed exports does not render in any error message or other hint that it has failed.
Everything tells me that this issue is tied to the Premiere/AME export engine handling consequent frames with the same content in conjunction with ProRes- and if the AE comps are rendered directly with the AE engine when exporting it would fit into this logic (if not, I can’t say why the fix is working). I’m not familiar enough with the (under the hood) file handling in Premiere (not as familiar as 8-9 years of managing FCP can give you, or 3 years of SphereOUS prior to that).
Erik Lundberg
Technical Director, Media Technology, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
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NOOooo!!… I really wanted this to be a “stupid- just tick the NNN box and you’re good to go”- problem and not a “never seen by Biscardi”-problem…
We’re using the master files both for archiving and as a starting point for our transcoding cluster to make the final deliveries. Sometimes we deliver ProRes 422 HQ for broadcast.
UPDATED: Downloaded Adobes own ProRes settings (https://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/thankyou.jsp?ftpID=5411&fileID=5030) to “compare notes” with my own. Noticed one difference with those- a little tick box named “Optimize stills”. What does this do? On the preset I’m using this box is ticked, on Adobes pre-fab presets, they’re not. Hm. Suspicious. One would imagine that Optimizing is good, but is it something to be avoided? What are your export settings?
YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Found this: https://help.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/9.0/WS81733643-B4A6-45c5-ABD7-D5A90EB388FC.html
Optimize Stills or Expand Stills Select this option to use still images efficiently in exported video files. For example, if a still image has a duration of 2 seconds in a project set to 30 fps, Adobe Premiere Pro creates one 2‑second frame instead of 60 frames at 1/30 of a second each. Selecting this option can save disk space for sequences and clips containing still images. Deselect this option only if the exported video file exhibits playback problems when displaying the still images.
Sounds like a REALLY bad idea together with ProRes…
Erik Lundberg
Technical Director, Media Technology, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
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[Craig Seeman] ”
I think that’s going to change very quickly during this quarter, I’d guess.”Very possible.
Erik Lundberg
Technical Director, Media Technology, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
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[Craig Seeman] “For people who edit photos it’s important.
One might even say it’s designed for full screen 2.5K from Blackmagic Cinema camera.”I was referring to the fact that very few as of yet OWN a retina display machine.
Erik Lundberg
Technical Director, Media Technology, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
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[Chris Harlan] “and there is a mention of Media relink that sounds quite promising.”
Hm. Might be my sleepy brain again- but wasn’t the media relink in 10.0.4?
Time for coffee methinks.
Erik Lundberg
Technical Director, Media Technology, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
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Retina support is absolutely a good feature. But not THAT relevant for THAT many as of yet…
Other than that, is there ANYTHING new? Seemes like apple broke their suite (no pun intended) of feature>fix>feature>fix>fe… thing they had going.
Erik Lundberg
Technical Director, Media Technology, University of Gothenburg, Sweden