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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 :)

Super slow rendering in CS5.5 with native R3D files

  • Thread starter Thread starter Leonard Caspari
  • Start date Start date
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Leonard Caspari

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Hi guys, I'm currently having big troubles rendering my edited movie out of Premiere Pro or After Effects CS5.5. The movie is only 14 minutes long but the estimated rendering time for a 4,5k ProRes clip is 72 hours and increasing.

The film was edited in Premiere Pro with the native R3D files and afterwards the individual scenes were replaced by compositions and send to After Effects for grading and retouching. So now I have linked compositions within Premiere Pro.
I started the rendering process yesterday and today after 20 hours only 50% of the movie was finished rendering. The film was rendered to ProRes 4444 at 4480x1920, with max bit depth and with uncompressed audio.
Today I tried to lower the resolution and see if the rendering would be faster this way, but the total rendering time went up to 72 hours and beyond. So I am a little baffled. I also tried rendering the compositions out from After Effects, but no luck either.

The machine I'm editing and rendering on is a Mac Pro with a 12 core and 16 GB of RAM.

When checking the system's hardware load it says that Premiere uses 12GB of RAM (as designated in the settings), but when rendering with After Effects it says that only 4GB of RAM are being utilized. The preferences are however set to 12 GB for After Effects. I also enabled rendering of multiple frames. Turning it off doesn't change anything either.

So does anyone perhaps have a clue on what might be wrong? Is it some preference in one of the softwares?
Or is it the harsh reality of what happens when you edited native R3D files in Adobe CS5.5?

I just can't believe that the Mac Pro couldn't perform better at the given task.

Side note: Beyond Colorista II, Mojo and some retouching / wire removal plugins on some shots, barely any effects were used.

Any help is highly appreciated! I'm running out of time and the premiere of the film is in less than a week.

Thanks.

Leo
 
Hi Leo,

This does sound high, but not so high as to be unbelievable. 4.5k graded files do require a fair bit of grunt to spit out. My guess is that you don't have a Red Rocket installed?

I think the reason you would be finding that the lower resolution export had a longer export time than the full res, is because premiere would be rendering the image in full and then downscaling it as the last step in the process. Hope that makes sense.

Maybe try to export a 1min section and see what the estimated render time is for that? Might help you spot if something is off?
 
The Mac Pro does not have a Redrocket installed and the GPU is an AMD card.

Might it be due to the external hard drive? It's connected through FireWire 800.
 
The external drive is going to be a huge bottleneck for you. Also, are you aware of the NVIDIA/CUDA video card advantages in CS5? Do a YouTube search...lot's of demos out there.
My recommendations:

1. Buy a big,fast internal hard drive for your project. Perferably two of them, one for source material, the other for destination renders.
2. Buy NVIDIA video card. You won't believe what a few hundreds dollars in this technology will do for your workflow in CS5.
 
There is no CUDA acceleration with the After Effects comps. My guess is that's where the slowdown is occurring. Had this been done all within Premiere Pro, the rendering would likely be faster, even without an NVIDIA or RED Recket card. The Mercury Playback Engine feature pertains to Premiere Pro, but none of that accelerates raw decoding. The rendering may also be faster going to DPX or some other type of uncompressed file than back to ProRes. Plus the bottleneck to/from a FW800 drive. That's a huge problem.

- Oliver
 
I'll try and copy all the files to the internal hard drive and then render to DPX tomorrow. Hopefully that will make the difference.
 
It does sound a bit high, but I'm not too surprised - 14 minutes does take it's time, and Colorista makes things slower considerably. I agree with the posters above, one thing you really need to get rid of is the FW800 connection, slows things down considerably. Also, the Mercury Playback Engine does require specific GPU's. Yeah, and ProRes as a master for a movie above 5 minutes - not really sure about that. Let us know what the internal drives do for you...
 
Tobias Straka said:
Also, the Mercury Playback Engine does require specific GPU's.
Click to expand...
MPE involves a lot of different optimizations. Having the CUDA-enabled NVIDIA cards is only a small part of it. The CUDA cards specifically accelerate scaling and certain native effects in Premiere Pro only. Adobe has been going through great lengths lately to clarify that MPE is much more than simply putting a Quadro 4000 card into your Mac.

http://provideocoalition.com/index....e_apples_new_macbook_pro_17_with_thunderbolt/

- Oliver
 
Here's a trick: render out your files at 1080p (assumed destination res) THEN apply Colorista. Colorista, while very powerful, is not really aimed at Red users (look at their demo videos, they seem to assume the whole word shoots only on DSLRS) and is VERY slow when rendering 4K raw files.
 
Rob Ruffo said:
Here's a trick: render out your files at 1080p (assumed destination res) THEN apply Colorista. Colorista, while very powerful, is not really aimed at Red users (look at their demo videos, they seem to assume the whole word shoots only on DSLRS) and is VERY slow when rendering 4K raw files.
Click to expand...

It does seem that way.

Placing the project on the internal drive and rendering to DPX did increase the rendering speed, but it was still somewhat slow.

I guess I'll avoid extensive use of Colorista II in future projects. Thanks everyone.
 
Why avoid Colorista ?
It's fine in 1080, and if you are heading for the big screen, you'll want to go for one of the full-blown grading systems anyway.
 
Your biggest bottleneck here does seem to be the hard drives, or lack thereof.

I have discovered that you really need separate drives:

1. one for OS and programs
2. one for a scratch drive
3. one for a cache drive
4. one for a render drive
5. one for media/assets-preferably raid

These need to be at least Sata/eSata. The other thing is your memory settings might be a little off.
Plus, don’t forget that the OS needs a minimum amount of memory to work and will try to take priority so if you are running out of memory at any point,
you will start using virtual memory which is wicked slow.
I know 16GB sounds like it should be enough memory but even my 24GB runs out more often than I ever thought it would.
I agree with the others about rendering out to Pro Res, etc. You’re taking huge native files and rendering/transcoding as well
as any round trip with AFX can and will slow things down considerably.

Now where did I put that new dual-socket, 192GB, SSD raid workstation . . .

Oh yeah, in my dreams.

Cheers.
 
Leonard Caspari said:
Hi guys, I'm currently having big troubles rendering my edited movie out of Premiere Pro or After Effects CS5.5. The movie is only 14 minutes long but the estimated rendering time for a 4,5k ProRes clip is 72 hours and increasing.

The film was edited in Premiere Pro with the native R3D files and afterwards the individual scenes were replaced by compositions and send to After Effects for grading and retouching. So now I have linked compositions within Premiere Pro.
I started the rendering process yesterday and today after 20 hours only 50% of the movie was finished rendering. The film was rendered to ProRes 4444 at 4480x1920, with max bit depth and with uncompressed audio.
Today I tried to lower the resolution and see if the rendering would be faster this way, but the total rendering time went up to 72 hours and beyond. So I am a little baffled. I also tried rendering the compositions out from After Effects, but no luck either.

The machine I'm editing and rendering on is a Mac Pro with a 12 core and 16 GB of RAM.

When checking the system's hardware load it says that Premiere uses 12GB of RAM (as designated in the settings), but when rendering with After Effects it says that only 4GB of RAM are being utilized. The preferences are however set to 12 GB for After Effects. I also enabled rendering of multiple frames. Turning it off doesn't change anything either.

So does anyone perhaps have a clue on what might be wrong? Is it some preference in one of the softwares?
Or is it the harsh reality of what happens when you edited native R3D files in Adobe CS5.5?

I just can't believe that the Mac Pro couldn't perform better at the given task.

Side note: Beyond Colorista II, Mojo and some retouching / wire removal plugins on some shots, barely any effects were used.

Any help is highly appreciated! I'm running out of time and the premiere of the film is in less than a week.

Thanks.

Leo
Click to expand...


Couple things... One the disks need to be fast... Two the main way AE uses multiple procs is a feature called MultiProcessing... This isn't used when AE is serving frames to ppro. So you won't get parallel encodes. If you are just going to replace all your scenes with AE comps so that you have nothing but AE comps in your ppro sequence then dynamiclink is not for you. In this case just import the project into AE and turn on MP and go to town. You will get much better performance this way.

Cheers

Dave
 
Leonard Caspari said:
It does seem that way.

Placing the project on the internal drive and rendering to DPX did increase the rendering speed, but it was still somewhat slow.

I guess I'll avoid extensive use of Colorista II in future projects. Thanks everyone.
Click to expand...

He is right Colorista does not Render fast. How did Dave's Idea work for you?
 
I just had to experience this for my self. Colorista sucks big time on large files. Even if it's applied in a 4K composition which is going to be scaled down to full HD later it throttles After Effects completely. One thing that helps always is to turn off the GPU renderer in Colorista and set it to CPU. But still if I have to work with large compositions I don't use it anymore. As Rob said applying it to a 1080 clip works perfectly and very fast.

And Uli, just because one works in 4K doesn't necessarily means you immediately want a full blow grading system. We have to work in 4K+ for big installations where the 4K+ sequence gets split up in the end to 4 full HD formats. Would be great if Colorista could handle the 4K sequence well. Most of the times it does but the render times are just too long. Especially compared to Davinci but we don't have the time to export for Davinci grade and export again ... Thats why sometimes it would be great not to have to use the full super duper blown grading system ...
 
This might have been brought up but do you have your Mac Pro set to 64bit?
 
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