Premiere 5.5 on a 2010 MacBook Pro Any Way to Improve?

[Nick Pasquariello]

So, I'm trying out Premiere for the first time. I've seen, first-hand, real time R3D playback using NVidia cards with CUDA cores and Mercury Playback enabled. And it's drool-inducing.

Figured I'd try it at home, on my own time. If I can get it to work, then I'll be learning Premiere and abandoning FCP. But if I'm going to have to transcode R3Ds to ProRes anyway, then I might as well stick with what I know.

By default, the NVidia 330M in my MBP is not acknowledged by Premiere. I did a little research. Looks like there's a text file inside premiere that simply lists out each card that it will use the Mercury playback engine on. By adding the name of my card, Premiere now sees it and will use the CUDA cores for Mercury playback. When I make a new Project, Premiere now asks if I would like to use the Mercury Playback Engine (GPU). Brilliant!

But, when I drag a R3D into the timeline, it's got a red bar over it. And even after I render (now a green bar) it looks like it's stuttering, dropping some frames in playback.

My question, then: Is there a way to limit the size of the R3D in playback? Say to 1/2, or even 1/8? I'm betting that playing back "full" is what's choking it, and I can't seem to find any sort of playback settings.

What also could be affecting things, is currently, my test footage, as well as my OS and software, are all on the singular, 320GB 7200PRM drive. I haven't yet tested using an external drive, though this is the model before Thunrderbolt, and it's a 15" so there's no express card slot that I could rig up eSata with.

Anyone have any thoughts? It would save me so, so much time and hassle if I could edit with the Red Raws at home, and not have to either rent a Rocket, or transcode for hours (days?) after every shoot.

 

[Brad Allen]

Hey Nick!

You can definitely change the playback quality of r3d's, just right click on the playback window > quality > and then select 1/4 or 1/8 res. Whichever is acceptable for you

Check out this tutorial I put together for an intro to some Red basics in PPro.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vkR8frpyjw

 

[Nick Pasquariello]

I could kiss you. That's EXACTLY what I was trying to find.

Turns out I can play back at 1/8th. 1/4 stutters. 1/2 was the default. If I render the timeline, that changes to 1/4 is fine, 1/2 stutters. And this is on a system that', when it was new, cost less than a single Red Rocket card. I'm even more incredibly excited for my Scarlet to arrive now.

 

[John Galeano]

So, I'm trying out Premiere for the first time. I've seen, first-hand, real time R3D playback using NVidia cards with CUDA cores and Mercury Playback enabled. And it's drool-inducing.

Figured I'd try it at home, on my own time. If I can get it to work, then I'll be learning Premiere and abandoning FCP. But if I'm going to have to transcode R3Ds to ProRes anyway, then I might as well stick with what I know.

By default, the NVidia 330M in my MBP is not acknowledged by Premiere. I did a little research. Looks like there's a text file inside premiere that simply lists out each card that it will use the Mercury playback engine on. By adding the name of my card, Premiere now sees it and will use the CUDA cores for Mercury playback. When I make a new Project, Premiere now asks if I would like to use the Mercury Playback Engine (GPU). Brilliant!

But, when I drag a R3D into the timeline, it's got a red bar over it. And even after I render (now a green bar) it looks like it's stuttering, dropping some frames in playback.

My question, then: Is there a way to limit the size of the R3D in playback? Say to 1/2, or even 1/8? I'm betting that playing back "full" is what's choking it, and I can't seem to find any sort of playback settings.

What also could be affecting things, is currently, my test footage, as well as my OS and software, are all on the singular, 320GB 7200PRM drive. I haven't yet tested using an external drive, though this is the model before Thunrderbolt, and it's a 15" so there's no express card slot that I could rig up eSata with.

Anyone have any thoughts? It would save me so, so much time and hassle if I could edit with the Red Raws at home, and not have to either rent a Rocket, or transcode for hours (days?) after every shoot.

Hey Nick looks like i'm using the same MB pro as you. Problem is I can't get Premiere to see my Nvidia 330m. How did you add the card to the text file? Thanks in advance!

 

[Brad Allen]

I could kiss you. That's EXACTLY what I was trying to find.

Turns out I can play back at 1/8th. 1/4 stutters. 1/2 was the default. If I render the timeline, that changes to 1/4 is fine, 1/2 stutters. And this is on a system that', when it was new, cost less than a single Red Rocket card. I'm even more incredibly excited for my Scarlet to arrive now.

Always glad to help . It's good to have another Premiere user on board

 

[Nick Pasquariello]

Hey Nick looks like i'm using the same MB pro as you. Problem is I can't get Premiere to see my Nvidia 330m. How did you add the card to the text file? Thanks in advance!

1. Right click on the Premiere app in your Applications folder --> Show Package Contents
2. Inside, there is a Contents folder. In there, lives a file titled cude_supported_cards.txt. This file is locked. Right click --> Get info. At the bottom, make sure the "Sharing and Permissions" tab is pulled down, so you can see who has permission. Click the lock in the lower right hand corner, and it will ask you for admin password authentication. Once you give your credentials, you need to change your Privilege to "Read & Write". (This file, by default, is LOCKED. As most of the files of any application should be. Mucking with applications files and folders when you don't know what everything is can be likened to pulling random wires and hoses out of your car's engine just because you feel like it. What this step does is unlock this folder so that we can make one very specific change to it.)
3. Open this file in Text Edit. Inside, is just a list of NVidia graphics card models, each separated by a carriage return. At the very bottom, add "GeForce GT 330M" without the quotes.
4. Save. Close text edit. Open Premiere. It should now offer you Mercury Playback GPU.

Disclaimer: I have no idea if there are any adverse effects to this. Mobile GPUs, especially ones that are nearing 2-3 years old, are certainly not ideal for Mercury Playback. As I stated earlier in the thread, R3Ds in my timeline are still red, indicating they want to be rendered before playing back, whereas I have seen on other CUDA enabled machines that the clips are Yellow. I know for a fact that Mercury Playback wants at least 768 MB or VRAM, and the 330M only has 512 MB.

 

[John Galeano]

1. Right click on the Premiere app in your Applications folder --> Show Package Contents
2. Inside, there is a Contents folder. In there, lives a file titled cude_supported_cards.txt. This file is locked. Right click --> Get info. At the bottom, make sure the "Sharing and Permissions" tab is pulled down, so you can see who has permission. Click the lock in the lower right hand corner, and it will ask you for admin password authentication. Once you give your credentials, you need to change your Privilege to "Read & Write". (This file, by default, is LOCKED. As most of the files of any application should be. Mucking with applications files and folders when you don't know what everything is can be likened to pulling random wires and hoses out of your car's engine just because you feel like it. What this step does is unlock this folder so that we can make one very specific change to it.)
3. Open this file in Text Edit. Inside, is just a list of NVidia graphics card models, each separated by a carriage return. At the very bottom, add "GeForce GT 330M" without the quotes.
4. Save. Close text edit. Open Premiere. It should now offer you Mercury Playback GPU.

Disclaimer: I have no idea if there are any adverse effects to this. Mobile GPUs, especially ones that are nearing 2-3 years old, are certainly not ideal for Mercury Playback. As I stated earlier in the thread, R3Ds in my timeline are still red, indicating they want to be rendered before playing back, whereas I have seen on other CUDA enabled machines that the clips are Yellow. I know for a fact that Mercury Playback wants at least 768 MB or VRAM, and the 330M only has 512 MB.

Hey nick thank you very much, It worked perfectly. I'm not getting better results as far as playback is concerned, but at 1/4 resolution it plays back pretty good. At 1/4 or even 1/8 resolution should be fine for any of my editing needs. Anyway thanks again for your help!!

 

[Jack Shanahan]

Hey nick thank you very much, It worked perfectly. I'm not getting better results as far as playback is concerned, but at 1/4 resolution it plays back pretty good. At 1/4 or even 1/8 resolution should be fine for any of my editing needs. Anyway thanks again for your help!!

I was about to be siked but you are saying that playback is not improved by manually adding the video card to the list? (i have the same computer)

Is there a way to tell if the graphics card is working with premiere at all?

I would love to find SOME WAY of improving the performance of this laptop. I already have the OSX on a SSD....

 

[John Galeano]

I was about to be siked but you are saying that playback is not improved by manually adding the video card to the list? (i have the same computer)

Is there a way to tell if the graphics card is working with premiere at all?

I would love to find SOME WAY of improving the performance of this laptop. I already have the OSX on a SSD....

Haha my bad.. unfortunately playback didn't improve. But at least other things will render faster with mercury playback engine enabled. I too would like to improve the performance of this laptop. I did just upgrade from 4 to 8 gigs of ram but still not much improvement on performance

 

[Jack Shanahan]

Haha my bad.. unfortunately playback didn't improve. But at least other things will render faster with mercury playback engine enabled. I too would like to improve the performance of this laptop. I did just upgrade from 4 to 8 gigs of ram but still not much improvement on performance

yeah i have 8 as well.

So you are saying that the fix is worth it for rendering purposes though?

Thanks for this!

What is Mercury Playback GPU anyway?

EDIT: Well I went ahead and added my card to the list. Not sure how to test the performance advantage though...

 

[Nick Pasquariello]

Mercury Playback is Adobe's rendering engine. It can either use the CPU or the GPU. It's shocking to me that we are just now getting to a point where VFX software is using GPU power rather than CPU, considering that A) This frees up the CPU for other tasks and B) GPUs are better at rendering parts of an image in parallel.

In Premiere, on any machine, you can use a "software only" Mercury Playback engine. As near as I can figure, consider it "emulating" a GPU, using the power of your CPU.

If you have enough CUDA cores on an NVIDIA card in your machine however, it can use GPU acceleration (i.e. non-emulated GPU). For Red Raws, this translates to real-time 1/2 or even full debayer and playback in a Premiere timeline, without any rendering, and with all layers of metadata in tact. This isn't theory; we have Quadra 4000's in our Mac Pros at work, and Red Raw playback in Premiere is real-time.

As for this particular MBP model (and I have 8GB of ram in mine as well) I'm not sure if telling Premiere to utilize the GPU rather than the CPU translates to any real world performance boost because I've spent all of 30 minutes toying around in Premiere. So I have nothing to really compare before and after. If anyone can think of a test to run inside Premiere that would spit out some actual GPU vs CPU numbers, I'd gladly be the guinea pig.

 

[John Galeano]

yeah i have 8 as well.

So you are saying that the fix is worth it for rendering purposes though?

Thanks for this!

What is Mercury Playback GPU anyway?

EDIT: Well I went ahead and added my card to the list. Not sure how to test the performance advantage though...

Don't qoute me on this, but from what i've read it will help render effects faster. Here's a article that might explain things better. Hope it helps

http://www.studio1productions.com/Articles/PremiereCS5.htm

 

[Jack Shanahan]

Mercury Playback is Adobe's rendering engine. It can either use the CPU or the GPU. It's shocking to me that we are just now getting to a point where VFX software is using GPU power rather than CPU, considering that A) This frees up the CPU for other tasks and B) GPUs are better at rendering parts of an image in parallel.

In Premiere, on any machine, you can use a "software only" Mercury Playback engine. As near as I can figure, consider it "emulating" a GPU, using the power of your CPU.

If you have enough CUDA cores on an NVIDIA card in your machine however, it can use GPU acceleration (i.e. non-emulated GPU). For Red Raws, this translates to real-time 1/2 or even full debayer and playback in a Premiere timeline, without any rendering, and with all layers of metadata in tact. This isn't theory; we have Quadra 4000's in our Mac Pros at work, and Red Raw playback in Premiere is real-time.

As for this particular MBP model (and I have 8GB of ram in mine as well) I'm not sure if telling Premiere to utilize the GPU rather than the CPU translates to any real world performance boost because I've spent all of 30 minutes toying around in Premiere. So I have nothing to really compare before and after. If anyone can think of a test to run inside Premiere that would spit out some actual GPU vs CPU numbers, I'd gladly be the guinea pig.

Thanks for the intel. Much appreciated. I wonder if there is a benchmark program that could tell us if this fix actually does switch the rendering over to the card and off the cpu. Kinda like the app that tells you what temp ur cpu is and the rpm of the fan.


EDIT: FWIW I just rendered a 4k clip in the timeline and was able to playback at 1/4 s opposed to 1/8 w/o render.

EDIT 2: Maybe someone from Adobe could chime in?