C300: Fast C300 II 4K Editing

J

jcs

Veteran
A while ago I noted that FCP X was faster editing 4K material on a 2014 MBP and GT 750M GPU vs. Premiere Pro CC 2015 (latest) on a 12 Core MacPro and GTX 980ti. Today I tried FCP X on the MacPro in FCP X with C300 II 4K files. 4K editing was blazing fast- scrubbing instantaneously. This is full 4K resolution, native files (dual 4K displays). Curious to find the limit, I began stacking 4K clips and was able to get 6 4K clips (cropped so all 6 clips had visible elements) before there was visible slowdown (still usable!). 5 4K clips were fully real-time.

On the same hardware & OSX, Premiere Pro CC 2015 can play one 4K clip in real-time. On the same hardware and Windows 10, playback resolution must be set to 1/2 to get near real-time performance.

Resolve 12 (latest) wasn't able to play the C300 II 4K file in real-time on the MacPro in OSX.

For fast 4K editing, FCP X is currently the champ.
 
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FCPX does a lot of things right. I assume you're using the "optimized for performance" setting.

I did a video 2 years ago explaining how my 2010 6 core Mac Pro could play back 5k RED footage from normal HDs. The performance has always been there. At the time there was some confusion since most people were so hell bent on hating FCPX.

I think the beauty is that FCPX's on the fly scaling always reverts to full resolution when the playhead isn't moving.


https://vimeo.com/82691196
 
new MacPro's graphic cards D700 will be used both (by FCPX) or just one (Premiere), makes quite a difference already
 
Eric Coughlin said:
Is there a laptop setup that can edit C300 Mark II 4K smoothly?
Click to expand...

2014 MBP Retina 2.6GHz Core i7 16GB GTX 750M plays real-time(ish) at 1/2 playback resolution in OSX with Premiere Pro 2015 (latest). In FCPX it's fully real-time, snappy scrubbing, etc. Cross fades stutter a tad until they are rendered in the background then everything is very smooth. FCPX really maxes the CPU when playing, so doesn't appear to be using the GPU much (and make sure to have the charger for any serious edits).
 
Changing Premiere Pro CC 2015's Renderer to Mercury - OpenCL (from CUDA) resulted in real-time playback of 4K material at full resolution! This is in OSX El Capitan, GTX980, latest drivers. Simultaneous playback on a 2nd 4K display didn't slow down.

Adding a third display (1080p HDTV) continued to run without slowdown.
 
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How are you guys getting the footage into Final Cut X? Are you transcoding to ProRes first? I tried it out and was unable to get any clips to be recognized in the original XF-AVC format.

Eric - DaVinci now supports all of the formats from the 300 MK II including 2K 12 Bit RGB. This was done in 12.2.2
 
jcs said:
FCPX (latest, on El Capitan) plays footage native, in real-time.
Click to expand...

Is that a fact? or do you have a plugin installed?
i just tried to pull in some footage with the latest updates of everything... xf-avc utility works fine to playback... but after "back up" via xf-avc utility, i locate the folder of the files in FCPx import and it displays no media files.... would love it if worked natively, but i don't think it's as seemless as you stated.... but i really hope i'm wrong... will troubleshoot more tomorrow.

thoughts?
 
implicted said:
Is that a fact? or do you have a plugin installed?
i just tried to pull in some footage with the latest updates of everything... xf-avc utility works fine to playback... but after "back up" via xf-avc utility, i locate the folder of the files in FCPx import and it displays no media files.... would love it if worked natively, but i don't think it's as seemless as you stated.... but i really hope i'm wrong... will troubleshoot more tomorrow.

thoughts?
Click to expand...

I didn't install xf-avc utility or any other plugins for FCPX. Just added the native C300 II clips and it's amazing fast, like ProRes. I'm using a 2010 2.93GHz 12-Core MacPro, 24GB RAM, SSDs, and a GTX 980ti 6GB (PC eVGA version modded by macvidcards.com for OSX). FCPX closely saturates all CPUs when scrubbing/playing, and is very smooth, fast, seamless. PP CC with Mercury-OpenCL renderer uses maybe 1/5 CPU load, and can now play real-time on 3 displays, however scrubbing isn't as seamless as FCPX.
 
jcs said:
A while ago I noted that FCP X was faster editing 4K material on a 2014 MBP and GT 750M GPU vs. Premiere Pro CC 2015 (latest) on a 12 Core MacPro and GTX 980ti. Today I tried FCP X on the MacPro in FCP X with C300 II 4K files. 4K editing was blazing fast- scrubbing instantaneously. This is full 4K resolution, native files (dual 4K displays). Curious to find the limit, I began stacking 4K clips and was able to get 6 4K clips (cropped so all 6 clips had visible elements) before there was visible slowdown (still usable!). 5 4K clips were fully real-time.

On the same hardware & OSX, Premiere Pro CC 2015 can play one 4K clip in real-time. On the same hardware and Windows 10, playback resolution must be set to 1/2 to get near real-time performance.

Resolve 12 (latest) wasn't able to play the C300 II 4K file in real-time on the MacPro in OSX.

For fast 4K editing, FCP X is currently the champ.
Click to expand...

Did FCP X transcode the footage into it's own native form? I would think FCP has the tendency to do this where as CC tries to mash up all the native files together onto the same timeline?
 
jcs said:
I didn't install xf-avc utility or any other plugins for FCPX. Just added the native C300 II clips and it's amazing fast, like ProRes. I'm using a 2010 2.93GHz 12-Core MacPro, 24GB RAM, SSDs, and a GTX 980ti 6GB (PC eVGA version modded by macvidcards.com for OSX). FCPX closely saturates all CPUs when scrubbing/playing, and is very smooth, fast, seamless. PP CC with Mercury-OpenCL renderer uses maybe 1/5 CPU load, and can now play real-time on 3 displays, however scrubbing isn't as seamless as FCPX.
Click to expand...

Screen Shot 2016-01-07 at 11.22.20 AM (2).jpg

My results seem to be completely different. El Capitan and latest updates of everything... i get only a sliver of card reading "RED" and when i select the folder that I backed up the footage to on external drive, I only get a spinning circle of no end "BLUE"

Hopefully there is some resolution. FCPX and C300 Mark II footage doesnt play well together from my experience... weirdly though... FCPx worked very well with Canon XC10 footage.. same codec.

Thoughts?
 
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jcs said:
I didn't install xf-avc utility or any other plugins for FCPX. Just added the native C300 II clips and it's amazing fast, like ProRes. I'm using a 2010 2.93GHz 12-Core MacPro, 24GB RAM, SSDs, and a GTX 980ti 6GB (PC eVGA version modded by macvidcards.com for OSX). FCPX closely saturates all CPUs when scrubbing/playing, and is very smooth, fast, seamless. PP CC with Mercury-OpenCL renderer uses maybe 1/5 CPU load, and can now play real-time on 3 displays, however scrubbing isn't as seamless as FCPX.
Click to expand...

Really? FCPX does not want to know about any 12 bit clips from C300KMKII on my machine. Mac Pro (Late 2013) 3 GHz 8-Core Intel Xeon E5, 64 GB 1866 MHz DDR3 ECC, AMD FirePro D700 6144 MB.
Never really wanted to work full time with Premiere but I have no option. Starting to really like Premiere and I don't want to. FCPX just runs so much more smoothly and glitch free, on my Mac anyway.
 
This is tricky- my day job is a developer (lots of video-related work) and this machine has been continuously upgraded since 2010. On this same machine VLC chokes on C300 II 4K files in Win 10, and plays easily real-time in OSX El Cap. VLC is open-source, based on ffmpeg libs- not clear why the OSX build is so much faster. Perhaps OpenCL is a factor (not available on Win10 with an NVidia GPU).

I'll try 12-bit 444 clips on FCPX and PP (with OpenCL). I did notice that PP in Win10 choked on higher bit files too (444). H.264 has an amazing amount of variability in the spec: I suspect that only the most common spec combinations have fast CPU/GPU code paths. 12-bit 444 H.264 while ancient in spec terms is relatively new in market terms. 12-bit 444 H.264 (and even H.265/VP9) are very welcome additions to mainstream camera capture as the quality rivals RAW at much lower bitrates. Modern GPUs can easily chew through even H.265/VP9 like butter with proper GPU code paths. The challenge with these amazing new(ish) codecs is efficient implementation in cameras. The C300 II appears to be use somewhat older tech (two Canon ASICs) which aren't cutting edge, unlike the Samsung NX1, which produces high quality 4K H.265 for $<1500. In an alternate universe where Canon, Sony, and Samsung combined tech, we'd have an amazing low-light 4K camera with tiny files and amazing battery life, with NLEs that easily played the footage in real-time :). This is technically easily feasible in our universe right now!
 
jcs said:
FCPX (latest, on El Capitan) plays footage native, in real-time.
Click to expand...

Have just upgraded to El Capitan and FCPX does not play any 12 bit footage. It does not even recognise 12 bit footage so it can't even be imported. Obviously one of the major selling points of the C300MKII was 12 bit footage. Pity my editing software of choice is not capable of handling what you would assume it should, quite easily. Big, BIG FCPX FAIL!!!!

This limitation is really unacceptable considering codec has been around for quite a while now. Getting to know my new friend Adobe Premiere better and better as each day goes by.
 
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