Premiere Pro Mercury Playback question

[Jamie_F]

Hello all.

I've been trying to test the mercury playback engine in Premiere Pro on my Macbook Pro i7 w/4gigs RAM.

I have gone into the terminal and added my card successfully to Adobes list and was able to pick GPU acceleration. I have manually set my card status to Nvidia only. I also double checked in the terminal what my default operating system loads as, 64bit.

During playback on native 4k red files with GPU acceleration turned on I'm actually getting worse performance than software only. In 1/4 Res in software only it plays back most of the clip stuttering near the end, 1/8 is flawless, when GPU acceleration is turned on it stutters for the entirety of the clip in any res I choose. This is why I believe there is a step I'm missing.

Being completely new to CUDA and mercury (switching from FCP) I'm not sure why my performance is worse (drivers are updated). A little box needing a check or not. Booting the OS in 64bit manually (although it's loading this by default as far as I know, EFI64), or the Macbook Pro i7 is just too limited in cpu power or I need another 4 gigs of RAM which I will procure soon. Maybe it's just card support? Nvidia GT 330m...I understand it's for accelerating effects but why is playback then worse...

I'm ok working in 1/8 res, but of course if there is a way to exceed this with the hardware I have, I'd love to know if its capable before I move forward.

Kindly excuse my newbness on this.

Many many thanks.

Jamie

 

[David McGavran]

Hello all.

I've been trying to test the mercury playback engine in Premiere Pro on my Macbook Pro i7 w/4gigs RAM.

I have gone into the terminal and added my card successfully to Adobes list and was able to pick GPU acceleration. I have manually set my card status to Nvidia only. I also double checked in the terminal what my default operating system loads as, 64bit.

During playback on native 4k red files with GPU acceleration turned on I'm actually getting worse performance than software only. In 1/4 Res in software only it plays back most of the clip stuttering near the end, 1/8 is flawless, when GPU acceleration is turned on it stutters for the entirety of the clip in any res I choose. This is why I believe there is a step I'm missing.

Being completely new to CUDA and mercury I'm not sure why my performance is worse (drivers are updated). A little box needing a check or not. Booting the OS in 64bit manually (although it's loading this by default as far as I know, EFI64), or the Macbook Pro i7 is just too limited in cpu power or I need another 4 gigs of RAM which I will procure soon.

I'm ok working in 1/8 res, but of course if there is a way to exceed this with the hardware I have, I'd love to know if its capable before I move forward.

Kindly excuse my newbness on this.

Many many thanks.

Jamie

Just a couple thoughts. You don't need to boot into 64bit OS. 4gigs of RAM is a bit light. And the info about terminal? Are you trying to get an unsupported card to work?

Cheers

Dave

 

[Tim Hole]

What is your GPU? Is it a verified model?

EDIT: Sorry David got there first

 

[Jamie_F]

Just a couple thoughts. You don't need to boot into 64bit OS. 4gigs of RAM is a bit light. And the info about terminal? Are you trying to get an unsupported card to work?

Cheers

Dave

Thanks Dave. I found a thread on the Adobe forums on initiating support for cuda enabled cards and instructions to add my card (specifically) to the list. Otherwise I would have never attempted it. So I thought I'd give it a go and test to see if mine would work. I added an addendum to my original post thinking card support would be the culprit as I was under the false impression by the thread my card was supported but I had to manually add it. I've been reading a lot more on this and it appears that some cards that aren't listed work others not. Not that my hopes were high, I just thought maybe there might be a step I'm missing, or I just wanted to confirm it's not supported.

 

[Uli Plank]

Hi Jamie, I've tested CS5 extensively on different hardware for a very respected German magazine. While your MBP would work acceptably with HD, it's not up to the task with R3D originals. Not only is the RAM insufficient, but even if you activate your card by the hack, it has not enough graphics memory either.

For any serious work, get a quad core with 2 GB RAM per core minimum and 1 GB graphics memory.

Sorry for the bad news.

 

[Jamie_F]

Hi Jamie, I've tested CS5 extensively on different hardware for a very respected German magazine. While your MBP would work acceptably with HD, it's not up to the task with R3D originals. Not only is the RAM insufficient, but even if you activate your card by the hack, it has not enough graphics memory either.

For any serious work, get a quad core with 2 GB RAM per core minimum and 1 GB graphics memory.

Sorry for the bad news.

Thanks Uli. I wasn't expecting full or even half res. I was hoping for 1/4 res at best. 1/8 is fine for the offline though. Thought this might punch it up enough. I wasn't expecting what I did to be a hack though lol. Things move quick in this game and sometimes work-arounds are found, even on Adobe forums

Many thanks all.

 

[Felix K.]

Another bottleneck might be the harddrive? Or did you use external drives?

 

[Jamie_F]

Another bottleneck might be the harddrive? Or did you use external drives?

Could be. I'm not using an external although I will soon using F800, and I have partitioned the drive for bootcamp. Although I still have over 330g's free.

I'm going to buy some Ram this week and see if there is an improvement.

 

[Frank Glencairn]

Not with that graphic card in your little Mac. You need at least 1 gig DDR5 or at least DDR3 memory on the card and a minimum of 69 Cuda cores. And even than, it would get hot as hell. Even in a normal PC housing you need good ventilation and a card with two fans and heat pipes.

Sorry, but it just doesn't work with a Macbook.


Here is some in deep information: http://www.studio1productions.com/Articles/PremiereCS5.htm

Frank

 

[Jamie_F]

Not with that graphic card in your little Mac. You need at least 1 gig DDR5 or at least DDR3 memory on the card and a minimum of 69 Cuda cores. And even than, it would get hot as hell. Even in a normal PC housing you need good ventilation and a card with two fans and heat pipes.

Sorry, but it just doesn't work with a Macbook.


Here is some in deep information: http://www.studio1productions.com/Articles/PremiereCS5.htm

Frank

Quite the info there. Thanks!

I'm hoping to upgrade to a tower in the near future anyways.