[Mike Jackson]

Well, the performance you get on a completely different platform and OS doesn’t really relate all that much – Apples and Oranges as they say 😉

But regarding the RAM – If DSLR and RED footage are chugging with 8Gb, that’s disappointing but understandable. But there’s something REALLY wrong if I can’t get smooth playback from a single stream of ProRes on a system that *does* meet Adobe’s official recommended RAM (and is double their min spec). And keep in mind, FCP could handle 3 or 4 streams without issue on my previous Mac with only 3 gigs.

I’ll shell out for more RAM if it comes down to it, but right now I’m not even sure that’s the issue…

[Mike Jackson]

So far, the results have been incredibly inconsistent. Changing that setting in either direction (software only or CUDA) always tanks my performance so badly I usually have to restart Premiere. When I was doing very simple projects a couple of months ago, software only always performed worse. Now, on slightly larger projects (music videos with a lot of footage) I’m seeing no significant difference… at least not consistently. It might be that I drop a lot more frames but maintain better sound sync in software only, but I could just be imagining it…

[Mike Jackson]

YOU NAILED IT. Renaming the HDV as .mpg instead of .mov brought back my superwhites!

That’s kind of hilarious… and a shame it took so long to sort out, as I burned a lot of time transcoding the footage to ProRes, and the show is already delivered.

Still, great to know what the issue is, and how to resolve it!

[Mike Jackson]

Sorry for the delayed response. Busy week.

I was handed the project with all footage already digitized, most likely in Final Cut. HDV was in a Quicktime wrapper… and all supewhites were still showing in Final Cut.

In the end, I used Compressor to transcode everything to ProRes, and all my superwhites came back in Premiere and After Effects. So as I say, looks like an interpretation issue with HDV in the Adobe suite. Maybe HDV works better in non-Quicktime wrappers, or if captured directly in Premiere, but at this point I just don’t have the time (or source tapes) to do tests…

[Mike Jackson]

Well, further bashing at the problem led to some further discoveries… which I’m only posting on the off-chance someone searches for answers to the same problem, and comes upon this thread.

Both Premiere and After Effects DID preserve my super-whites on NTSC footage… which led me to re-test everything. Looks like someone ‘helped me out’ by re-transcoding the show’s XD-Cam footage, and clipped off the super-whites then. Nice.

HOWEVER – What I CAN confirm is that *HDV* is hooped. Nothing I can do in either program will preserve values above 100IRE. Looks to me like a very codec-specific color interpretation problem. Only work-around I’ve found is re-transcoding before bringing it in, but it’s a pain and has inherent quality loss. Would be great to get that fixed…

[Mike Jackson]

Hmmm. Well, since the Blackmagic card works fine with Final Cut classic, I know it can’t be an intrinsic problem with the card itself. (And as an aside, I’m outputing through SDI.)

That would lead me to Adobe’s video output code or Blackmagic’s drivers, and how they interact… But if that was the case, then logically the superwhites should still BE in the shots, even if they weren’t displaying out to my monitor, and lowering the whitepoint (and a zillion other filters or functions) should ‘reveal’ the lost info.

And yet, that’s not the case. And of course the waveform on my monitor and in Premiere both look pretty much identical, and again, if the problem was my I/O board, those waveforms should differ.

This is quite the head-scratcher, to put it lightly. And yes, my card is hacked, and seems to function perfectly… but your original suggestion that somehow everything is locking into 8-bit seems to be the only thing that might explain it all…?

WOW would I love to pick the brain of an Adobe engineer…

[Mike Jackson]

Thanks for the response.

Sequence settings *are* set to Max Bit Depth (and 32-bit in AE). I’ve heard this mentioned before, yet have seen no change in my results.

I’m not using ANY effects, 8-bit or otherwise. Just viewing the clean footage itself. In both programs, all super-whites are clipped, and the fact that I can’t retrieve the data using ANY filters or settings seems to indicate the data is being thrown out at the earliest stage of processing.

The scopes I’m referring to that I’m using are the ones built into my Flanders Scientific monitor, which shows superwhites quite effectively. Signal is going out through a Blackmagic Decklink. When I look at this footage in Final Cut classic, supewhites are present. In Premiere and AE, they’re gone. On the off chance I was being lied to somehow, I tried various methods of exporting back out of Premiere and AE, at various gamma levels, using Proc. Amp, etc, and brought back into FCP – But the data was still gone… so I don’t think the scopes are lying to me.

So the only thing left on your list is my graphics card. I’m using a GTX480 with CUDA acceleration and Mercury Playback enabled. It’s not on your list, but it’s been enabled by editing the Cuda Supported Cards text file, and is working like a DREAM for all playback, and for ray-trace rendering in After Effects. But could that be the cause, and it’s defaulting to 8-bit? If so, that would seriously suck, as there’s painfully few reasonable card options for MacPros at present.

Is there ANY way to get around this, other than dropping 2k on a Quadro card that will (according to benchmarks I’ve seen on the Cow) actually render Ray-Traced 3D in AE *slower* than my GTX 480?

[Mike Jackson]

Been working on other things for the last few days, finally had a chance to try your suggestion… but no, all it’s doing is adjusting the data remaining below 100 IRE. The clipped data is still gone.

So, surely I’m not the only person to have looked at the waveforms for XDCam and HDV footage in Premiere, and seen this problem. Is this issue new to CS6?

Is there anyone from Adobe reading these forums who can point me to a way to keep Premiere and AE from clipping my superwhites?

[Mike Jackson]

That combination of color settings (Rec709 all the way) was the very first thing I tried. Mind you, I didn’t *export* anything from Final Cut – I sent an XML to Premiere, and from there cut-and-pasted the sequence right into AE – Thus linking AE directly to the original source footage.

But you have made me wonder – Are you on a PC, or a Mac? Could this be a Mac or Quicktime-specific issue…?

[Mike Jackson]

Not sure I see the point in posting a project file, when anyone with DV, HDV, or XD-Cam footage on their drives can test it for themselves in seconds.

Regarding my preferences and settings – Video Preview set to ‘More Accurate’ through a Blackmagic board (though I had the same issue with a Matrox board, and it really shouldn’t affect it anyway). Project color is set to 32 bits float (though the results are the same in 8-bit and 16-bit). Signal goes out through SDI to a Flanders Scientific monitor.

I have tried every combination of settings I can think of for color management in the project and clip interpretations. Most of the clips are embedded as Rec709 and can’t be changed, though even with one clip I *could* assign other profiles to, the results were the same. I’ve tried setting the project to Rec709, Re709 (16-235), Wide Gamut RGB, and many others. I’ve even fooled around with switching to linearized working space. I’ve tried all the same settings on the profile of the clip I *could* change, in various combinations with different project settings. The problem remains. The gamma will change, the white point and black point will rise and fall, but always the data above 100IRE in the original source is clipped, even if the new white point goes down as low as 70IRE.

So to my eye, it seems as though any of these color management options are applied only AFTER AE has thrown out the super-whites.

I would LOVE to bend the ear of someone at Adobe to see if there’s any way to address this.

-M