AF-100 AVCHD Footage Is A Pain in the @#!$

Erik Naso

Veteran
I’ve had nothing but horrible playback from AVCHD footage on my Mac Pro with a Quadro 4000. Everything else I edit like P2 and ProRes is great but never AVCHD. What gives? Am I alone?
 
Eric, what mac pro do you have?
i have a 2009 mac pro with a quadro 4800 and the scrubbing/playback is horrible with avchd and p2 footage. i also have a 2008 mac pro and the srubbing/playback on the p2 files is butter smooth.
 
CS6 plays back fine on my windows 7 laptop. Do you have mercury engine set to use CUDA or software only?
 
On the 2009 it's set to cuda and the 2008 is software. Would the cuda card degrade scrubbing performance?
 
have a 2009 Mac Pro. I think I may need to do a reinstall. Grrrr! Current Cuda drivers installed.

Just in case it hasn't been mentioned, CUDA does not currentlt assist H.264 decoding operations, thats still strictly CPU-dependant.

Are you using the MTS file Eric or are your wrapping them in a container with something like Clip Wrap?
 
Just in case it hasn't been mentioned, CUDA does not currentlt assist H.264 decoding operations, thats still strictly CPU-dependant.

Are you using the MTS file Eric or are your wrapping them in a container with something like Clip Wrap?
I’m editing .mts files from the card structure. Should i be doing this different?
 
Nope, often ClipWrap will pass MTS files over to the Quicktime engine, resulting in degraded performance (at least last time I tried it) so that was a possibility. The way you're doing it is best.
 
Erik, have you tried turning the Mercury Hardware engine off and going software only? I have a couple of projects that I had to do that to, and, strangely enough, AVCHD performance was greatly improved.
 
Erik, have you tried turning the Mercury Hardware engine off and going software only? I have a couple of projects that I had to do that to, and, strangely enough, AVCHD performance was greatly improved.
Intresting. I’ll try that. My i7 MacBook Pro 17” was performing better than the Mac Pro so maybe that is it.
 
On the 2009 it's set to cuda and the 2008 is software. Would the cuda card degrade scrubbing performance?

I had an older 17", and while it had 'cuda' compatible card, it did not have the requisite memory onboard, so cuda was not available. I just got my 'fancy' new machine had the project I loaded in, and played a few clips and sequences. No problem even in 'red' zoned sequence regions.

I'm not doing anything in terms of filters or effects as yet, so I'll have to test that later.

The one really big issue is the m-audio Fastrack Pro 1.8.1 driver apparently has not been rolled for Mountain Lion, which is the OS that came installed... so the audio via that path plays for a bit then craps out, and either restart the computer or power cycle the Fasttrak is required to restore the audio path...
 
I was told by a 3rd party developer that there was a bug in using cuss. Hopefully this was fixed in the 6.02 patch I installed yesterday.

Cuda not cuss. Damn you autocorrect
 
Back
Top