Bottlenecks

R

ROne

Well-known member
I've had a good year with Edius, it's been stable - I've cut plenty of P2 programmes - sd and hd (720p25). On the whole it's been great - my system, a coreduo 1.66 acer laptop has complimented the workflow well.

Recently I've been upping the stakes - cutting programmes in 720p50 - and getting a bit more daring on the filters and colour correction. I have found though that now Edius tends to show "playback stopped" more often. I've increased playback buffers to 96 and use shift+space to start playback which often allows pre-buffered smooth playback.

My question is: how do I ascertain what is the limiting factor of my system? I'm about to upgrade to a core2duo 2ghz laptop which I'm sure will help but I think there may be something else to consider.

I've tried the usual monitoring of resources but have not been able to find a pattern to the bottleneck.

Any suggestions would be great.
 
First, I would instruct Edius to NOT stop playback if it can't keep up with realtime performance. RT is great and everything, but if it gets in the way of viewing your project because it has become too complicated for your current hardware configuration, turn that off by unchecking Settings -> Application Settings -> Playback -> Stop Playback at frame drop

Open up Task Manager and see what the CPU and memory utilizations are: a processor that is pegged at 100% is a sure sign that it is holding you back. Of course, with multi-core systems, that distinction is becoming more hazy because in some cases 50% or 25% utilization will indicate the limits of what the processor is capable of.
 
Also, is your current system a laptop? what is your hard drive. 720p25 and 720p50 should be using different size files. if you are now using 720p50 and you are doing transitions your hard drive has to handle 2 streams of that which is almost 4 streams of 720p25. (if recording pn mode of course)

Most laptop hard drives are not very fast. usually 5400rmps. so maybe going external with a firewire 800. might work. but you will need a firewire800 controller.

Aslo 1.66 coreduo doesn't sound like a super fast system. if you need the laptop then get that but a desktop allows you to get faster processors.
 
Okay - thanks for these bits of info.

My drives are external usb2-7200rpm freecoms. Pretty standard in terms of performance. I'm trying to avoid raid if possible - as I'm already mirrored on the drives and don't want to increase drive quantity. But, if I'm not going to be able to play 720p50 then obviously I will have to look at this.

I find that I can play 720p25 with no problems, unless I use region colour correction.

I find myself increasingly using the shift-spacebar to buffer 96 frames before playback. What does this tell me? - that's it's likely my drives are too slow or my processor is too slow, or could it be a combination of the two.

I will try the cpu utilization again but I couldn't get a logical reading from it the first time.
 
I have no experience editing off of drives via usb, but I would think that could be your main problem. I'm using eSATA to edit off of, and I can edit mutiple streams of any DVCPRO HD flavor.

How much Ram do you have? Maybe your drives need a defragging too.

Jason
 
ROne,
Also usb 2 is only 480mbits/sec firewire is 400mbits but firewire 800 is 800mbits/sec. I just installed a firewire800 pci card on my computer and have a WesternDigital Mybook 1TB raid 0 and it gives me 72 to 80 Megabytes/sec sustained (not megabits.) So I get 3 streams out of it with no problem. but even with my 3.4ghz. dual Xeon computer it still gives me problems after 3 streams all color corrected, some transitions, and other effects.
Wish I had a quad.
 
1GB of ram.

Jason is your system a desktop?

Hmmm . I'm resigned to using the laptop though, it works for me in terms of workflow - I'm just reaching its limit I think.

I still think I'm going to upgrade the laptop and see if there is any difference, and that will let me know whether the drives are letting me down or not.

Siniarch - when you say problems what exactly do you mean (playback issues, overloaded rendering areas?).

thanks.
 
My system is a laptop. A big one, but a laptop. Core duo 2.16, 2gig ram. It has expresscard, and PCMCIA, so I use pcmcia for p2 cards, and expresscard slot has a eSATA card in it for my editing drives.

I think your problem is using usb2. That could become a bottleneck real quickly if everything else isn't running perfectly. At least, that's my guess. You need 2 gigs of ram too.

Get eSATA if you can. No problems at all then with throughput.

When you get around to getting a new laptop (though I think the one you are using still has some life in it for DVCPRO HD, if you get a better editing drive setup) I would recommend looking for one with both slots like I described above. Most of the sony's have both, and several Acer's do too. I'd probably hold off and see how vista compatible 4.5 is though. It's getting harder and harder to find the system you want without vista on it.

Jason
 
ROne,
Yeah, that's what I mean by problems. meaning it won't play back realtime. Sometimes it seems like I just barely exceed my processor speed, and wish I could at least get a little faster processor like 3.8ghz or something. Or just be able to overclock my 3.4 chips. But unfortunately, I got a Stupid Dell. This computer just runs hot and for being such a big unit, it has little room to upgrade. Next time I'll build my own like I usually do.
 
There you go. I got my eSAta enclosure, and expresscard from newegg. If you need details on either, pm me and I'll give it to you.

I recommend the puke green colored thecus 2050 for your enclosure. For the money, it's a good deal. It's a dual enclosure, and gives you raid0 or 1 options with no software required for the raid.

Later,
Jason
 
THoff said:
First, I would instruct Edius to NOT stop playback if it can't keep up with realtime performance. RT is great and everything, but if it gets in the way of viewing your project because it has become too complicated for your current hardware configuration, turn that off by unchecking Settings -> Application Settings -> Playback -> Stop Playback at frame drop

Open up Task Manager and see what the CPU and memory utilizations are: a processor that is pegged at 100% is a sure sign that it is holding you back. Of course, with multi-core systems, that distinction is becoming more hazy because in some cases 50% or 25% utilization will indicate the limits of what the processor is capable of.
Click to expand...

Thank god we have these sites! Just read this above, had a same problem, playback stopping very easily, only 1 track possible, but now multible tracks go ok, some voice smearing though but othervise ok. My setup is ADM 4200 4GB ram, raid 0 7200 r/min, which subrisinly gave very uneven MB/s rate, low was 15 or 20, average 50 - 60 MB/s. New 10400 r/min drive gave minium 55 BM/s and average 75 MB/s and it worked better. So a made the setting "stop playback at frame drop also off and if seems to help a lot. Thanks!!
 
journalist, what codec are you editing with? If you are using something that is an acquisition codec (heavily and/or incrementally compressed), you may want to use an intermediate editing codec instead.

In Edius, you have the choice of using Canopus HQ (same specs as DVCProHD), Canopus Lossless, as well as Uncompressed RGB and a few other options. You can convert to one of these by right-clicking on the clip in the bin, selecting Convert, and choosing a format and file name.

Using Canopus HQ and your hardware, you should get realtime editing even with multiple tracks.
 
Actually Canopus HQ is higher bitrate than DVCPRO HD.
The Canopus HD codec is DVCPRO HD-compliant. :)
 
Thanks, I keep getting those mixed up. I really shouldn't, I have studied the whitepapers.
 
THoff said:
journalist, what codec are you editing with? If you are using something that is an acquisition codec (heavily and/or incrementally compressed), you may want to use an intermediate editing codec instead.

In Edius, you have the choice of using Canopus HQ (same specs as DVCProHD), Canopus Lossless, as well as Uncompressed RGB and a few other options. You can convert to one of these by right-clicking on the clip in the bin, selecting Convert, and choosing a format and file name.

Using Canopus HQ and your hardware, you should get realtime editing even with multiple tracks.
Click to expand...
Have to admit, I have never used something else expect Pana's DVCProHD, going to test Canopus HQ as well.
 
Sorry, rebeat here. I just made a test between DVCProHd vs. Canopus HQ, both 72050p and to my eye DVCPro is a clear winner. It seems to be sharper.
jussi
 
I'm not sure where the bottleneck is, DVCProHD (which you say you've been using) is a breeze to edit on my 3.2GHz P4D 840EE. I have done three DVCProHD streams + three DV25 streams + 1 WAV audio stream in realtime, using a pair of 7200RPM SATA drives in RAID1 (not RAID0) configuration.
 
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