Cannot get smooth playback video 5d2

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translumination

Active member
I recently acquired a mac mini with 8 gigs ram and nvidia 9400 graphics card running snow leopard. I would've thought this would be more then enough to playback h.246 smoothly with quicktime but it doesnt. I cannot get a smooth picture on either my 30" or 24" lcd. I've scoured the net for a solution but there seems to be a hotch potch of answers with re encoding or using VLC(doesnt help) etc.

Does anyone have a solution to this?

I use to be able to run it smoothly on my macbook but then I upgraded the software and at some stage it just started being stuttery again. I am getting desperate enough to try loading older versions of quicktime to see if it'll work.
 
You need to transcode it into a format that's more user friendly for FCP. There are tutorials out there on the topic. Google: F-Stop Academy.
 
This is a common misconception: there are thousands of threads out there on the net with a similar concern to you: "I just got a really fast compuer and I can't play back h.264 at 48mbit/sec, but my cousin has an 8.5 inch netbook that he fished out of a dumpster and it plays back the footage... what's going on?"

The answer is this: it's all about using the GPU in your graphcis card. Computer processors are simply not designed to pull apart complicated video streams at high bitrates in real time, they churn and churn at the task and still fail. Your graphics card, on the other hand, probably has the ability built into it on a little $5.00 chip designed especially for the purpose, that can be used by software that knows ow to talk to your graphcis card. So, you have two options:


TRANSCODE to a format that your computer can play back using the CPU. These are usually high-bitrate but low-complexity codecs. On the Mac, ProRes is the preferred codec. On the PC, get cineform.

USE A GPU-ENABLED PLAYER, which, strangely, VLC is not. Media Player Classic Home Cinema works well with most NVidia cards, and there is a pot pourri of options for other cards.

At the end of the day, most people find that the best h.264 player they own is their camera, which has the h.264 codec playback capability built in!
 
I sifted through "thousands" of blogs and I was hoping there was something abit more elegant than transcoding. I am not editing at this stage and I would transcribe it for that. But to trancribe hundreds of gigs just to watch it? I am sure the hardware on modern computers are more than enough to read these files. There must be something in the implementation of the software as there are so many people who just cannot view them properly.

Thanks for the replies.
 
translumination said:
I am sure the hardware on modern computers are more than enough to read these files.
Click to expand...

Actually, no, it's not. h.264 was not built for this purpose. It's a delivery codec, best used for pushing small amounts of data through a small pipe. AKA delivering web video, iPod video, video teleconferencing, etc. We are asking this codec to do things it was simply not designed to do.

Some codecs are easy to encode quickly but rather hard to decode. Thus they compress well in real time, but take massive power to decode.

Some codecs encode badly and need time to chew on things, but decode rather easily. (Think ProRes)

Some codecs encode and decode quickly. But these generally can't compress all that much.

h.264 is about as bad as it gets for decoding. But it encodes pretty well. Which is why it was a natural for manufacturers to stick in cheap camcorders and give everyone HD for $600. But decoding it, without hardware assist is a BEAR. This is why transcoding is considered a necessary step.


translumination said:
There must be something in the implementation of the software as there are so many people who just cannot view them properly.
Click to expand...

No. It's that the codec was never built for what we are asking it to do. I can get realtime performance up to the 24 Mbps of the HMC150 and similar cameras. But the 5D and 7D just crush my computer when trying to play back in the NLE. I can actually play the clips back in real time on my laptop and PCs when I don't have the overhead of the NLEs. But then, I bought and speced my computers just for this task, graphics card included.

And yes, VLC does a terrific job.
 
I seem to be able to get it to play smoothly by disconnecting the second monitor from the mac mini. I didnt even turn on the second monitor when it was connected but disconnecting it seems to have done the trick. Funnily the laptop has decided to playback smoothly again. This is rather mystifying as I definitely didnt change anything. I hope it stays this way. Gremlins on 2 machines?

Non of my PC friends can get smooth footage and they are still seeking a solution. I get video with no audio playing VLC on the mac. Seems I've added my load to the other couple thousand on this subject without illuminating much on it.
 
translumination said:
I seem to be able to get it to play smoothly by disconnecting the second monitor from the mac mini. I didnt even turn on the second monitor when it was connected but disconnecting it seems to have done the trick. Funnily the laptop has decided to playback smoothly again. This is rather mystifying as I definitely didnt change anything. I hope it stays this way. Gremlins on 2 machines?

Non of my PC friends can get smooth footage and they are still seeking a solution. I get video with no audio playing VLC on the mac. Seems I've added my load to the other couple thousand on this subject without illuminating much on it.
Click to expand...
You are asking the video card to do double work with the second monitor plugged in.
 
For logging purposes you can view the original files with Quicktime.
Buy you'llneed to transcode before importing into FCP.
MPEG streamclip works for me.
 
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