R3D scaling in Premiere causing flicker in playback / export

[Will Duncan]

I'm currently working on a television series and a number of shots used are RED files. In playback the files flicker through SDI output, and the same flicker is baked in to the exports as well. The project output is 1080i and it's my assumption that both CUDA and OpenCL are having an issue dealing with R3D files scaled above 50% and some type of frame / interlaced issue. Any file we have that is 50% or smaller doesn't flicker though. The flicker doesn't occur on the computer screens / Premiere panels, so editors who don't a broadcast monitor never see the problem.

We first started noticing it on our Windows clients.

Windows 10
i7 6900k
64 Gb RAM
Dual Nvidia Titan Ti's (running SLI and typically used for Resolve and encoding workloads)

Early attempts to fix the flicker problem were to switch back to Mac, which isn't ideal due to a complex server infrastructure and a lot of reconnections. Bouncing between platforms adds up to 2 hours of work in some cases. But even in OpenCL on a Mac, the flicker persisted. We cleared caches and let previews rebuild, but no joy.

Switching over to the Software only engine on PC or the Metal Engine on the Mac does appear to solve the problem. The software engine made a 15 minute export jump to 2.5 hours though. Working on deadline that's a bit nerve wrecking.

Lumetri color is used in the projects throughout for a quick color pass from editors, although I haven't isolated it to specific clips and my assumption is if it is an issue it doesn't matter where on the timeline it is. http://www.reduser.net/forum/showth...C-2017-Lumetri-Red-files-flicker-after-export is the only other post with a similar problem that I've found. Choosing deflicker on red files didn't work for me and we narrowed the problem down to scaling. It could be the same issue though.

Dropping back to a Mac works, but our trash cans are prone to overheating and we have to really watch shows with extreme vigilance to look for problems on exports.

Has anybody managed to fix this for CUDA?

Thanks.

 

[Daniel Kelly Brown]

I suggest trying one or both of the following-

1) Render the problem .r3d clips out to prores at their original res and try scaling up on them from your timeline

2) If your rendering straight from primiere try from media encoder instead and vice verca if from media try straight from primiere.

 

[Marc Wielage]

What if you were to work entirely in 1080p, render it out in progressive, then convert that file to interlace at the very end of the project?

 

[Will Duncan]

Thanks for the feedback. The solution ended up being to build a new sequence in progressive and past the timeline over, exporting to interlaced worked fine. Prior to, with deadlines looming and a severe lack of sleep, we were probably just adjusting sequence settings in the preferences and importing the sequence into new projects or something. Poor power of deduction when troubleshooting at that point.

However, it did in the end impact both PC and Mac with CUDA and OpenCL when on an interlaced timeline.

Adobe has yet to respond or acknowledge if is a bug.