[John Rowe]

Ok, I did some tests:
Sequence: AVCHD 1080p25 with
1 layer of 1280/1080 Video “Talking Head” keyed with UltraKey,
1 CG background layer loop rendered as mp4 from After Effects at 720×576 and scaled up to fill frame and Nested to keep BCC Light Wrap happy.

Sequence->Render Effects in Work Area (252 frames) with Max Render Quality On/Off
BCC Light Wrap (MP On) 54/27 secs
BCC Light Wrap (MP Off) 108/55 secs

DE LightWrap 6 mins/ 6 mins

(MP stands for Multithreaded Processing Option in BCC Light Wrap Setup)

Preferences->Memory->Optimize Rendering for Memory or Performance doesn’t affect time.
Sequence Settings->Max Bit Depth doesn’t affect time.

Wow! That’s quite a difference!
I guess I’m using BCC Light Wrap from here on out!
Message to DE LightWrap: You’d better lift your game guys!!! BCC Light Wrap renders up to 12 times faster!!!

[John Rowe]

I just tried running DE LightWrap on a simple circle generated using the Circle Effect in a HD 1920×1080 25 FPS sequence.

Rendering an 8 sec long sequence took 8 mins!!! and only 9% of the CPU was being used. 😛

[John Rowe]

Wow! That’s really surprising! That’s just not the performance I’m seeing at all.

What res was the footage you tried it on? I’m using HD 1920×1280 25FPS footage that I’m keying using UltraKey. So I have both the UltraKey Effect and the DE Light Wrap Effect applied one after the other on the footage layer.

Are you using a similar setup?

Thanks for going to all this trouble,
John

[John Rowe]

Hi Tim,

Just pop up the Windows Task Manager and you’ll see it’s using only one CPU.

It’s fine in After Effects because AE deals with multithreading by running multiple instances of itself with each one rendering a single frame. So non-multithreaded effects still use all the CPU power in the machine.

Premiere however doesn’t do that. In Premiere it seems to be up to the individual effect to be multithreaded or not.

I’ve just tried the BCC Light Wrap effect. It seems to be faster but still doesn’t seem to use multiple cores.

Can anyone suggest another Light Wrap effect that’s faster or uses multiple CPUs in Premiere?

Thanks,
John

[John Rowe]

Thanks Ann,

That’s a huge help! 🙂

John

[John Rowe]

Thanks Alex.

It’s a bummer Premiere can’t do this. Sometimes I wish Premiere was just a little bit more like After Effects.

Then again, I wish After Effects could play video in realtime instantly like Premiere can. 😉

Thanks again,
John

[John Rowe]

Thanks for your reply Todd.

If you were buying a machine with 24GB of RAM specifically for Premiere HD editing, for maximum usage of the FX5000 Quadro card for Mercury playback, would you go i7 or Xeon?

I’m wondering if the FX5000 will give better playback using Mercury on an i7 because it’s newer architecture than the Xeon architecture?

Thanks,
John

[John Rowe]

Hmmm… any recommendations for a Workstation supplier?

Both HP and Dell seem to go straight to the Xeons once you want more than 16GB of Ram.

[John Rowe]

[Dave LaRonde] “Get i7 chips. Dual quad core is good.”

Thanks for the reply Dave, but which i7? The i7-980X with 12 cores sounds like it would encumber AE more than help it????

John

[John Rowe]

Thanks Ted.
The problem was I hadn’t set up Keylight right – been a while since I last used it. Doh!
Now that I’ve got the controls set in Keylight correctly everything is right as rain and Refine Matte works perfectly!

Thanks again,
John