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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

performance advise CS5.5 R3D Files

S

Sebastian Cepeda

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Hi everyone,

Im having some troubles with my CS5.5 and R3D files that my Mac wont realy play them. Its stuttering the whole time.
Here my setup and way of work:
Mac Pro 6-Core Intel Xeon (2x2.93GHz)
12 GB Ram
ATI Radeon HD 5770
NVIDIA Quadro 4000
2x G-Speed es (http://www.g-technology.com/products/g-speed-es.cfm) via SAS

Just to say, everything works flawlessly on DaVinci Resolve at 2K without stuttering or anything at around 10nodes. No Blur node...
With CS5.5 im having a lot of troubles, first I started with a 4K sequence and then I though of going to FullHD R3D (like Output) but it still has some troubles with playback.
I have to say I edit a lot of musicvideos and I work with around 10 video layers, eventhough many of them arent visible. I work with 1/4 resolution on playback

Is there anything I can do/change to make it work better? What about more RAM or even an SSD for the software? would that help?
I would love to get me a RED Rocket but my actual budget wont allow me that for now...

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

thanks in advance!!
 
So I do need to work with 2-3 layers max? That really sucks cose I want to have many performances that I can back and forth without having to resync and search for everything.
I guess I will do different sequences and on the "final cut sequence" just stay at around 2-3 layers...hope that helps.

So RAM and SSD wouldnt help at all eh?
 
If you want to work with 10 layers stacked, why not just make SD proxies and re-link when you're happy with the edit (ie off-line and on-line).

Before you went R3D, what process and resolution where you using? 10 stacked layers of 4K is a lot of data on a timeline.

You say all is flawless on Resolve in 2K - is that with the same stacked timeline?
 
I recently reconfigured my system to greatly increase my render times and performance.

First though, yes more RAM will help in my experience, max it out, as this the cheapest way to get better performance for $ value.
You may only be accessing a part of your machines power, but 12Gb of RAM is not a lot for a 4K workflow.
Second is to go in and configure your multicore settings and experiment with what is giving you the best results.

Read through this thread and experiment with different settings.

http://blogs.adobe.com/toddkopriva/...-for-after-effects-cs5-and-give-feedback.html

Also you can look at going into preferences and increasing your disk cache size, it may even be full if it's set low, and I would recommend cleaning your database and cache. (Just hit said button)
Moving your caches to different drives can help with performance too.

I'm not an expert by any means, but have travelled this road and it has made a considerable performance difference.

Best Wishes

Lliam
 
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@Andy: I used to work with HD formats of all kinds and even RED ONE MX at 36mb/s. now im working with 6:1 codec, yeah I thought of going Offline/online but couldnt wait 24hours to transcode to start editing thats why i went straight online...
Now I deleted a couple of layers and its playing way better, guess will need to start cutting down layers to work more efficent.
With davinci I had max 2 layers. thats of course a huge difference.

@Paul: thanks again for your help.
 
When you create a new project do you have Mercury playback set to hardware? On my pc with one hexcore i7 and a gtx 580 I get real time at 1/2 res for most stuff, once I start adding a lot of layers and effects I go down to 1/4 and It will play anything i throw at it without ram previewing. I'd say if your really using 10 layers of video stacked on top of each other you may just have to be more clean in your editing. I doubt you have 10 video streams playing at once unless your doing some PIP stuff, even then I would do that in AE. But if thats the case then just knock it down to 1/8 in those cases. I get realtime on a macbook pro with 1/8th, your computer should have no problem with that.
 
Hi Joseph,

The problem is somehow I cant go down to 1/8 that option is gray, maybe cose im using a FULLHD R3D sequence? I have many layers cose I take different performances from the artist, sync them and then I can go through the song picking the best part of him singing and "story". Otherwise I have to be looking for exactly the same part I need and sync it and add it to the sequence. On my timeline I have for example: CUs, MS, Wideshot, and then I can cut between them to be a bit faster, normaly without any problems.
GPU Hardware is active...
 
This might be a frustrating test for you to try Sebastian but why don't you try copying all footage into a 720p timeline and then "scale to frame size" on all of it. (Select it all > Right Click > Scale to Frame Size).

This will force Premiere to preview it at a lower resolution (and you should still have some of your playback resolution options available too).

Once your edit is complete, you could then copy it back into your 4KHD sequence. Unless by "FULLHD" you mean you are already working in a 1080p sequence - in which case this suggestion may not help out all that much.
 
Hi Brad,

Thanks for your tip, but i meant 1080p so don't guess that would change much. I didn't scale to frame cose I wanted to have the 4K image to be able to play with, crop, stabilize,etc.

Btw just an hour ago I was watching your cs advance tutorial...cool stuff!
 
Ha ha - good to know - hope it helped somewhat :)

You may have just inadvertently given a clue as to why your performance isn't great. What method are you using currently to get your 4k footage down to your 1080p frame?
 
Im just scaling it down 50% but now with only 1-3 layers it works fine in 1/4 resolution at 1080p... you think it could be because of the scaling down? Next time i guess i ll go scale to frame, and with those clips needed take it out scale them manually down as much as needed and thats it...

I guess that should help a lot...right?
 
Give it a test :)

Scaling to frame size vs. going into the motion property and scaling down, should give a substantial difference in performance. In my testing I have found that scaling to frame size means that Premiere simply pulls out the required pixels from the R3D for the frame it's being matched to. On the other hand, scaling down manually means that it uses the full frame as a starting point.

It's a little hard to explain when writing it down. I think I go through this in one of the tutorials. Perhaps it's the basics and not the Advanced one. Ahh yes - found it. Have a look onward from 17:30 at this tutorial http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vkR8frpyjw
 
Sebastian
I assume your main monitor is connected to ATI and not 4000
Looks to me premiere is not taking advantage of CUDA, thus not playing real time.
Try connecting your main monitor to the Quadro4000
Hope it helps.
Cheers
A.
 
Sebastian Cepeda said:
Hi Brad,

Thanks for your tip, but i meant 1080p so don't guess that would change much. I didn't scale to frame cose I wanted to have the 4K image to be able to play with, crop, stabilize,etc.

Btw just an hour ago I was watching your cs advance tutorial...cool stuff!
Click to expand...

Sounds interesting - Where might I find that Brad/Seb?
 
Here are some tips for rendering in Premiere CS5.5 in Windows 7x64, which is very inefficient at this process.

First, download a free utility called Prio and install it, then:

1) Check to make sure that you have the Mercury GPU processing enabled.

2) Mark the in and out points of your film in your master sequence.

3) In Premiere options, set your Memory/Rendering Mode to 'Performance'. Then close Premiere. Yes, really.

4) Open Adobe Media Encoder.

5) Go to /File/Open Adobe Premiere Sequence and select your master sequence from your working directory

6) In the main AME interface, select the destination format, preset (if any) and output file name.

Note, if you're using GPU, you do not need Maximum Render Quality on. This may slow down the render and make almost no appreciable difference

7) Press the go button.

8) Open Task Manager

9) In the Processes Window, right click Adobe Media Encoder and choose CPU Priority, which you set to maximum (realtime). While you're there, tick Save Priority (which is Prio at work). Do the same for PProHeadless. You might also want to prioritise the QT32 Server and Dynamic Link Manager to above normal.

10) Also make sure that the IO priorities are normal

This should hopefully help you get a render within reasonable times.

If you don't have at least 1GB RAM per core, you might get better performance setting Premiere's rendering option to 'Memory'

I've also found, through a lot of wasted render attempts and mid-way crashes, that the best way to render out the finished file is either as a TIFF or DPX image sequence, so that when you need to render out multiple web and DVD encodes, your machine has already done the backbreaking transcoding only once.
 
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Paul Russell said:
@Sebastian: Not much. It's all about disc throughput. And Premiere is really inefficient and doesn't use multi-processing environments very well.
Click to expand...

???

Actually Premiere is pretty good with multiprocessor environments. Currently the best there is in that regard for NLE software. I do agree with your statement about disk throughput. Most likely, that is his primary bottleneck here. If you're talking about AME and final rendering, then yes, it still could stand lot of optimizations for multithreading and multiprocessor use. Without a Rocket, there's always going to be a huge slow-down when doing a high quality render because of the resources consumed when decompressing the wavelets to full-resolution data.

I didn't see it or maybe I missed it, but he didn't say if he was running displays off that Quadro 4000 card. More than likely not if he's using it in Resolve -- Resolve won't latch onto the card and use it for CUDA acceleration if it's using its frame buffer for GUI display.

It's a real pain, but that's how it works. In order to take advantage of the Quadro card in Premiere, which will indeed help with scaling, transitions, layering, etc..., he needs to have monitor(s) connected and running Premiere in the GUI solely on displays connected to that card.
 
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