[Tim Kolb]

I would stay away from “Brightness/Contrast” and use Levels instead, using the gamma slider (the middle widget) to bring up the mid-tones.

“Brightness” just raises the blacks…and “Contrast” then tries to re-crush them.

It becomes bad news very quickly.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

The display card acceleration for Mercury is based on NVIDIA’s CUDA technology, NOT conventional GPU display processing…so, since ATI does not have CUDA, no ATI card is listed.

No ATI card will work.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Try the Final cut Pro forum.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

First up, no NVIDIA card with 256 MB of RAM will support PPro CUDA operations…you need at least a GB in my opinion, but I think the bare minimum is between 700 and 800 MB…

Second, The laptop you’re referring to will struggle with PPro CS5… Certainly not enough processor cores to handle H264. ProRes runs very well as it is 32 bit just like QuickTime, and just like FCP. PPro is 64 bit and needs a TON of RAM…4 GB of RAM is not really enough.

(Adobe’s minimum system requirements apparently indicate what you need to launch it…it’d be nice if they published a separate sheet for what it actually takes to RUN it.)

As far as your desktop system is concerned, I recently set a client up with CS5 on that exact machine…I can’t tell you why its performance is so inexplicably pathetic…but it is. I don’t honestly think any single processor machine is a good bet to run PPro CS5 with anything Hi Def…particularly on the mac side as QuickTime needs some updating to actually run fluently with a 64 bit application.

Most of the demos for CS5 are done with 720p P2 footage…which runs like butter on nearly anything… ProRes is pretty good as far as ease of handling, but it seems to me that QuickTime is the roadblock on that one. Adobe did some creative coding on the Windows side to work around the 32 bit QT architecture, and it seems to work pretty well. Maybe the same flexibility is not available on the Apple side? I don’t know.

I think Apple users seem to have a few more hangups with PPro CS5 than Windows users in my experience, but I also think that FCP’s ability to run as well as it does with ProRes…a 32 bit app running a 32 bit media architecture with a 32 bit codec…gives some Mac users a false sense of what it takes to actually handle some of these non-intermediate formats natively under 64 bit.

Also…ATI cards also seem to come up more often than NVIDIA display cards in Adobe issues in my experience…I really don’t know why.

I did some of my CS5 training material on a Mac like your desktop almost exactly, with the only difference being two quad-core processors like yours, and that machine seemed to work without much trouble, even without CUDA acceleration.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Make sure you have the most recent updates. This sounds very similar to a problem that Adobe has tracked down and fixed as far as I know…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

I’d say that PPro CS5 has the ability to recognize and edit AVCHD/DSLR footage, but the hardware you have needs to have the ability.

CS5 is great, but it’s a box (or a download) of potential…

You can’t put a fighter pilot in a Piper Cub and go into a dogfight…you need the machine that’s built for the job too.

CineForm’s products not only bridge the gap for formats that are tough to edit…they also help machines that might be a couple years old respond much better as their codecs are not only very high quality, but optimized to run on computer CPUs from the start.

Depending on your hardware configuration, CS5’s capability to handle some of these formats probably won’t translate into the same edit performance while you’re cutting. All this doesn’t take into account that color correcting 8 bit camera footage won’t be as nuanced as color correction on 10 bit CineForm footage (even if it’s converted from that very same 8 bit footage.)

…I might do some testing before I wrote off CineForm just yet.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

I answered your original post that you tagged onto a 3 month old thread:

https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/3/909582

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Hmmm… Without knowing the context of the response of the “Adobe Expert”, it’s hard to know what they meant exactly…

Depending on what your previews are set to be and your camera material is, there would certainly be scenarios when the differences in quality would be relatively minor and the speed gain might be a worthy tradeoff…

However the statement that encoding from rendered previews vs using the original material in a direct encode to the output format have the same results is not technically defensible as a general statement…

The preview render format options that are utilized most frequently are intentionally lossy and relatively small data rates…MPEG I-frame, DVCProHD…these are great for improving playback performance if you are editing uncompressed or some heavy datarate footage, but obviously the quality of the image is not as good in the preview…if you are editing 10 bit uncompressed footage and you have a 8 bit MPEG I-frame preview set up for the sequence, it will make the edit process and the system response much faster and help you edit, but you’ve obviously taken a huge quality hit to create the preview. Using that as your “program master” would obviously cost you image quality. Particularly when you consider that the effects were created on the lossy preview clip, and that’s as good as they’ll get…

In the case of using DVCProHD as the preview format…it stores your uncompressed 1280×720 footage as 960×720 (or your 1920×1080 footage as 1440×1080 or 1280×1080), which helps speed of playback, but can hardly be classified as being a net wash in the image quality department).

However, if you are shooting DVCProHD (and the camera stores the 1280×720 as 960×720 to begin with), and preview-rendering DVCProHD, you could probably make the case that the loss is minimal, but you have still introduced a re-encode step in between the original footage with queued effects, etc and your final output.

On a Mac, if you were editing ProRes and you set the preview file format to the same ProRes profile you were editing (if you have FCS installed so you have the ability to write ProRes files), you would introduce a rather minor amount of re-encoding into the process…so you might be able to make the case that the speed up in the output encode is worth adding that minor encode pass depending on how many effects you have in the material.

Whether you, the “Adobe Expert”, your client or the guy down the block can visually tell the difference between the two encode methods is a different discussion entirely and will differ with the camera format, the content of the footage, the amount of effects work done, and of course the chosen preview format.

In general, encoding from the preview format is faster because there is only one, or a handful of contiguous files to access, and the effects do not have to be re-executed as a component of the output encode.

However, those preview files are not necessarily at the same image quality level as your footage. Particularly when you are using the preview files to “pre-render” effects, understanding how all these factors relate to each other is how you can best decide if the loss inherent in using the preview files as the input for your encode is worth the speed gain you achieve…

But in a general, theoretical sense…using the previews is not the same as using the original footage.

In a visual sense the differences may be slight and acceptable… Or, I know there are certain third party effects plugins that simply don’t operate correctly when you try to re-execute them in a normal encode, so “pre-rendering” those effects into a preview file is the only way to use them in the final video.

I advocate that people test it for themselves as often the preview will appear to be as good as the original, but launching a very lossy output encode for DVD, Blu Ray, or the web on that preview file vs the original footage will often reveal just how much of a compromise was made…and it can be a little surprising.

Each user needs to determine their own best course…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Hi Josh,

As you know, the only way I can help is to get some more detailed info…

Your four bullet points are all a bit vague…bit rates, timeline frame rates/frame sizes/pixel aspect ratios are all key…then what is exactly happening when you aren’t getting the CineForm material to play out on the kona from a Kona-compatible timeline…

With the hardware config you refer to…my first concern would be what CineForm quality setting you’re using. “Low” makes very usable images and “Medium” looks great…anything above that adds to the bitrate, and while there is some quality difference, unless you are in a feature film workflow with lots of effects and compositing, I think that even most trained eyes would have difficulty picking out the differences visually.

The two “Film” modes make some very large bitrates…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Try changing the NVIDIA display card driver version…

There happens to be one version of the drivers for the Mobile Quadro cards that simply will not allow PPro CS4 to open a sequuence of any kind. I changed my installed Quadro driver version and that seemed to take care of it.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,