CS5 - MPE only for native footage...

[Uwe Lansing]

... like h264, red-raw... etc? In the past with cs4 I was used to convert my 7d/550d (t2i) footage to a better editable + faster intermediate codec like "Photo-Jpeg" or "DNxHD". Now in Cs5 I´m able to put up to 4 layers of native h264 footage (pip) in the timeline - all added with mpe-accelarated effects. And they playback in realtime, without any stutter.

But when I put the same footage on the cs5-tl converted to photo-jpeg or dnxhd it begins to play back pretty choppy even after I just added 1 second pip-layer - pretty weird. So, what´s the deal here? Is the mercury playback engine only constructed for native footage, I´m doing something wrong or is it my pc?

Quad 2.4
8 gigs ram
nvidia gtx275 with cuda-hack
vista 64

Any thoughts, ideas or tips?

 

[Uwe Lansing]

Perhaps I`ve found the solution to the problem at dvinfo: http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/adobe-c...s5-observations-intermediate-codec-usage.html

If you will be editing with CS5 and Cineform v.5, it is probably not very important to have a CUDA card on board.......I believe that the benefits of CUDA and MPE relate more to editing in the native formats (like AVCHD).

If a codec doesn't use CUDA (such as CFHD), there is little additional benefit from using CUDA for decoding and encoding.

It seems the cineform blog confirms your thoughts. Cineform isn't cuda accelerated

So, it seems to be a fact that not only the effects must be mpe-accelerated but also the codecs. And obviously intermediates like Photo-Jpeg, DNxHD, CineformHD... are not...

 

[Averdahl]

I can out any GPU Accelerated filter on clips in the CineForm codec and get all CUDA goodness. For example, i can put the Three Way Color Corrector on any CineForm clip and playback it in real time, in full resolution and then get amazing render times.

At a glance your problem seems to be related to disk speed, IE that the disk/s cannot sustain the data rate demanded by four streams of DNxHD. If you are playing back the clips from a single SATA drive thats indeed the issue, not GPU Acceleration.

/Roger

 

[Uwe Lansing]

...
At a glance your problem seems to be related to disk speed, IE that the disk/s cannot sustain the data rate demanded by four streams of DNxHD. If you are playing back the clips from a single SATA drive thats indeed the issue, not GPU Acceleration.

I´m not quite sure that I get it right what you´re trying to say. Do you mean that with a "RAID 0" it would be possible to get the same smooth playback with "Photo-Jpeg" or "DNxHD" as with the native H264-footage of the 7D/550D (4 layers pip). Yes, I play it back from a single Sata III/7200 RPM...

 

[Mike Harvey]

Yes... Photo-Jpeg and DNxHD (and Cineform and DVCProHD) have much higher bitrates than the H.264 footage from your camera. Having four layers of it from a single hard drive is taxing on the hard drive as that's a lot of data being read at any given instant compared to H.264. By going to a RAID 0 setup, you're now dividing that up between two or more drives.

 

[Uwe Lansing]

Ok thanks - so, is anybody here with a Raid 0 who can playback smoothly 3-4 layers (pip) of dslr 1080p24 footage (canon) converted to Photo-Jpeg or DNxHD?