[Kim Taylor]

Mercury playback appears to be on! (OpenCL)

[Kim Taylor]

Hi Alex, thanks again. I think I’ve figured out what it is…

The clips imported into Premiere had a LUT attached, so each master clip contained a Lumetri Color (AMIRA LUT). I’ve not seen this before but this is the first time I’ve worked with Amira. I can only assume that Lumetri must be quite a processor heavy effect, and so stacking up lots of them will slow it down.

Now i’ve taken them all off and added a single LUT on top as an adjustment layer. Hallelujah it plays back near perfectly!

And yes, 4444 does seem like overkill although I’m doing some green screen stuff with these and needed the extra bit depth.

Thanks again!!

[Kim Taylor]

Thanks for your help!
No I’m not using multicam view, just a normal sequence. I set my playback res to 1/4 and it’s still jerky.
I find that the only way I can passably do it is to make sure that only one enabled clip is playing at any one time (it seems that premiere is trying to read every stacked clip that’s enabled even if it’s under another clip).

I would have thought that as all the clips are unaffected ProRes they should play back smoothly but they don’t 🙁

The render and replace workflow seems interesting, I suppose what I really want to do is to do this from the project bin fine browser, so I don’t have to move all my new clips to the timeline before creating a proxy of it. I will investigate more. Thanks

[Kim Taylor]

Thanks for your reply. I discovered the Project Manager function in Premiere and managed to transcode everything to ProRes 4444, which has made the playback really smooth again and retained my alpha channels for the VFX plates.

I think the lesson here was not to try and edit using lossless PNG sequences and instead convert to a quicker mezzanine codec. 12-bits of depth is more than enough considering that the footage is only 10-bit, and my background plates don’t require any colour correction.

Thanks!

[Kim Taylor]

Thanks for your reply Dennis. The very final deliverable would be at 8-bit as it would be for web and youtube. My reason for wanting to keep it 16 bit would be to allow the colourist maximum colour information to maintain resolution. Quite a lot of the footage is dark and so he may choose to stretch the tones out a bit, so I’d want to avoid banding. I also aim to keep as much resolution throughout the pipeline as a matter of best practice.

Thanks I will look into DPX to see if that helps!

[Kim Taylor]

Great, thanks Joseph

[Kim Taylor]

Yes, starting to agree it’s making more sense to do that kind of visual thing in AE instead of shifting to and fro from PS.

Do you always work in linear mode then? And then only de-gamma right at the end? I just find it impossible to work in this mode given how it behaves:

• Ramps (gradients) don’t appear a smooth white-black, they are heavily biased to the white. I use ramps a lot and it’s problematic.

• Things like curves, levels and other colour-correction fx are uber-sensitive. Especially in the shadow end.

• Ram preview comes out all posterized. I’m guessing this is a bug looking at the following thread, and it hasn’t been fixed since 2009. Pretty annoying.
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/2/962886

[Kim Taylor]

Thanks Dave. I ended up exporting from FCP in the end, works fine.

On a side note, I discovered AE can output 4444, under quicktime and then in options. However I had issues with the alpha matte on it, it didn’t come out as nicely as the FCP rendered file.

[Kim Taylor]

Sorry, I’ve just established that the rendering problem is due to an separate issue. I’ve managed to make it work fine now.

Thanks for your help

[Kim Taylor]

Thank you for your reply, I wouldn’t have thought to look in there!

I changed the setting for Frame Default and the error has gone away, however now I have a new problem: When I execute the command to ‘Save Frame to File’ it appears in the render queue, but when I press Render, nothing happens, even after waiting for some time. I’ve tried all the different presets to see if it makes any difference but no luck. Curiously, the default ‘Photoshop’ setting now works, and doesn’t give me an error.

Any idea why it’s not rendering? It seems like such a simple command yet so hard to make it work :s