6K Dragon Footage Slow Playback in APP CC 2014 - Would a new vid card help?

[Luke Humphrey]

I'm editing Dragon footage on my system in a very large project file. It's slow to playback in real-time on the timeline (playing back at 1/8 resolution).
My system looks like:

i7 3770 3.9Ghz
32 GB DD3 RAM
Disk system ~800 MB/s Sequential Read
GTS 450 vid card with 2GB vram

The vid card is low-end as I didn't see significant improvements in real-time playback a couple years ago when I tried a 680. I don't export frequently enough to care about speeds there.
But maybe now it's time to get a new one? I'm looking at the GTX 970, although not supported by Adobe, it looks like tests have been run and performs like a Titan/780ti. The quadro cards still seem like they are too much $$ for similar perf of the GTX line (from what I've seen).

Thoughts on this or generally on improving my real-time playback? I also notice significantly sped-up video (ie 500-100% fast motion) from a MKIII also lags in real-time.

One last piece of info I'm just thinking of now - my project file has been upgraded a couple times from older versions (at least 1x, maybe 2x). I'm wondering if that could be playing a role in reduced perf.

 

[Eric Bowen]

The CPU will be the limiting factor with the GPU acceleration. However a 970GTX is the card to get at this point for that system. A 4790K clocked at 4.5GHz or so would be helpful. You really want a X99 system for 5K and 6K media though at this point. The DDR4 has a significant impact on the GPU acceleration especially Adobe with the GPU accelerated debayering.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Agree with Eric. A new GPU like the 970 would boost things a bit, but ultimately the CPU and RAM in that system will be the limiting factor. The i7 3xxx series support dual-channel RAM at 1333 or 1600MHz and 1600MHz was actually quite rare early in that CPU's life cycle. You will have a difficult time feeding a powerful GPU, especially trying to do transactions with 5K+ image data, with the restricted memory pipe. Moving to DDR4 RAM on the new X99 platform ups the CPU I/O from 5GT/s to 8GT/s and boosts RAM from dual channel to quad channel and speeds starting at 2133MHz up to 3600MHz. In effect, it can provide you with 4X the internal throughput and twice as many cores at the same clock speed with a 15% increase in performance efficiency to those cores.

Not that we're saying you should run out and buy a new computer, but there are definitely limitations to what this older hardware can handle. Adding a new GPU will help a bit, although it is unlikely to give you the satisfaction you're probably hoping for.

 

[Jake Wilganowski]

I get realtime playback 1/4 res Dragon 6k full frame 6:1 30fps on the latest MBP maxed out with the footage living on the internal drive in premier. Just for reference.

 

[Eric Bowen]

Yes that is Haswell Mobile versus Ivy which was the previous gen. There is a difference there although the desktop Ivy will still outperform by a margin depending on the mobile chip.

 

[Luke Humphrey]

The problem is that rudimentary perf monitoring via the task manager show neither the CPU or RAM being a bottleneck, at least in utilization. This leads me to believe the vid card is the bottleneck.

Thoughts? RAM is DDR3 1600. This is trying to play ~60s of 6K 48fps 10:1 footage.

 

[Eric Bowen]

The 450 Card would be the bottleneck compared to the other specs. However if you change to a 970GTX card then the CPU and ram would be the bottleneck in pushing the 970GTX card. That card has far more processing capability than the 450

 

[Luke Humphrey]

Got it - thanks. Well I'll start with the card, then if I need more I'm looking at the below. It seems to offer the biggest bang-for-the-buck per component and I'm on a limited budget. Appreciate any comments on what I've chosen here.

 

[Tom Lowe]

When you are dealing with 5K or 6K footage, more vram makes a huge difference.

 

[Brian Merlen]

just buy a rocket x...super computers are great for f55, or arri raw, stuff like that...but my laptop and rocket x can do 100fps transcodes of 4khd from single drive to single drive...i imagine throwing a rocket x internally in an actual pc thats already high end and using raid storage not single drives would be insanity...at a certain point given the speed boost rocket x was just given the other day i think people are barking up the wrong tree by refusing rocket x...it will just mean that your cpu and gpu can get used on other things, the compositing, effects, multiple layers, stuff that it can address while rocket x does the playback and encoding...makes so much more sense to me after seeing how great it runs even externally with a laptop...my set up is very powerful for the mobility it has. i love it... imagine with a trash can it would be insane.. (or one inside your pc, even better performance i bet)

 

[Marc Wielage]

I'm editing Dragon footage on my system in a very large project file. It's slow to playback in real-time on the timeline (playing back at 1/8 resolution).

You might take a cue from David Fincher's editing associate Kirk Baxter on Gone Girl and do your preliminary edit in a simpler low-res codec, then conform the 6K files at the very end of the process.

For the creative edit, footage was converted to 2.5K ProRes files, corresponding to a 5K center extraction, and the editors viewed a 1920×1080 timeline.

http://www.studiodaily.com/2014/08/...-and-editorial-pipeline/#sthash.A7YS0CzT.dpuf

The computer will react many times faster if it's not laboring to debayer 6K files (even in 1/8th resolution) and editing multiple time lines at the same time.

 

[Brian Merlen]

yes offline online workflows also help...you can essentially cut any resolution you want...as long as its dnxhd36 and you reconform...

 

[Luke Humphrey]

Thanks - yes redrocket x is def out of my budget right now. I haven't done an offline file workflow in a while, so will have to play around with that in Premiere (last time I tried it was with 5DMKII video files when that first came out...it was kind of a pain on whatever version of Premiere was out then). I'll have to look at the dnxhd36 codec - as I understand it ProRes is not avail on a PC.

 

[Luke Humphrey]

Curious Marc, isn't that article contradicting itself? It says they used ProRes intermediates, then it says the Quadro-based workflow also supports 4 streams of 6k playback. Why down convert then?
Also it lists most of their workstations as HP PCs. Can you use ProRes on a PC? I thought you could not.

Red footage was converted to DPX using a GPU-accelerated system for efficient delivery to VFX. For the creative edit, footage was converted to 2.5K ProRes files, corresponding to a 5K center extraction, and the editors viewed a 1920×1080 timeline. The Quadro-based workflow also supported up to four streams of 6K multi-camera playback with repositioning, stabilization and color-correction happening in real time, Nvidia said, and also allowed real-time downscaling of 6K footage to 4K.

 

[Luke Humphrey]

UPDATE: I just installed the GTX 970 into my existing system and upgraded APP to 8.1 (just came out). Playback is now smooth on 1/8 6k, even on HDRX clips. 1/4 resolution is even decent on a lot of these clips, but I do see the occasional CPU spike which suggests a faster CPU would now help if 1/4 real-time is desired (1/8 will work for me though). Memory usage holds steady at about 23 GB utilization of 32 total avail.
Very happy about this.