GH2 GH2 & Premiere Pro, 2 Problems: jiggly playback, choosing best sequence for HBR/30P

[Elmer_Lang]

GH2 & Premiere Pro, 2 Problems: jiggly playback, choosing best sequence for HBR/30P

Just got a GH2. Working on MacBook Pro, 2.66ghz & 8gb of ram. New to PP 5.0, used to FCP. Trying PP cause don't want huge FCP ProRes files.

PLAYBACK
Playing clips in Source or Workspace, I get noise rain and pixels flopping around. Which is odd since when I was testing cams and shot clips with Canon and Sony cams and the GH2 at B&H, the clips played fine in PP. You'd think if my processor was slow none would play right. Tho when rendered in the timeline they play ok.

Any ideas? It can't be a GH2 issue and I should return/replace while I can, can it? Either way, it'd be nice to play without having to render out the noise and flopping.

BEST SEQUENCE SETTINGS FOR HBR/30P
When I drag a clip to 'New' and it creates a sequence, it's a 60i sequence with a yellow bar. I thot PP could discern the 30p and give me a 30p sequence with appropriate settings. When I create a 1080p30 sequence and insert a clip I get a red bar.
What are the proper/best sequence settings for the HBR mode and how can I most easily set it up?

 

[VidE]

You're a bit underpowered. For perspective, I use the HBR 30p setting on my desktop (PC) with PPro CS5 and it works mostly fine. But I'm using a quadcore Q9450 CPU and, more importantly, a nVidia GTX 280 graphics card because PPro leverages the Cuda cores on the card a lot for realtime playback. I'm playing 1 track of HDV plus the GH2 track, both scaled in a standard def project and both color corrected. Playback is smooth unless I try and scrub, then it stalls.

PPro really needs those nVidia cores for the 'Mercury Playback Engine' to play back in realtime and I believe most MBPro's don't have nVidia cards. Also helps to have a quadcore CPU, (Is yours a dual or quad?) So you are probably going to have to render out the timeline. Sorry. For further info check out the Adobe website requirements. (My desktop's CPU is below Adobe's minimum but it still works).

 

[blazer003]

I have heard varying reports, but they say that playback of general clips in the timeline is not accelerated by an Nvidia card. The accelleration comes only on clips with accelerated effects, and when exporting with "Highest Quality" selected.

Right click on your window (or command click) and make sure that quality is set to full. There are also 1/2 and 1/4 options for fast playback, and that's when I get those jaggies.

 

[Lpowell]

BEST SEQUENCE SETTINGS FOR HBR/30P
When I drag a clip to 'New' and it creates a sequence, it's a 60i sequence with a yellow bar. I thot PP could discern the 30p and give me a 30p sequence with appropriate settings. When I create a 1080p30 sequence and insert a clip I get a red bar.
What are the proper/best sequence settings for the HBR mode and how can I most easily set it up?

The GH2 records HBR videos within an interlaced 1080i60 wrapper, just as it does when recording in 1080i60 FSH mode. Although the HBR video stream is in fact scanned progressively at 1080p30, there is no explicit way for a video editor to distinguish HBR files from FSH files. And since the files are encoded in 1080i60 format, Premiere Pro naturally interprets them as interlaced videos. The problem is not Premiere, it's the lack of any distinguishing metadata flags in the HBR file to identify it as 1080psf.

To work properly with HBR files, it's necessary to manually preset their correct properties. After importing an HBR file into Premiere, use the Interpret Footage command to select OFF for the Separate Fields property. The clip will then be interpreted correctly when you drag it into a 29.97p timeline.

 

[Jim Simon]

PPro leverages the Cuda cores on the card a lot for realtime playback.

Not necessarily. PP doesn't use CUDA processing at all for simple playback. It will only use CUDA for certain things like effects, scaling, frame rate changes, etc. So if the clips match the sequence, CUDA won't be a factor, that's all CPU.

 

[VidE]

Jim, from what I understand, if the codec is computationally demanding, MPE and Cuda cores are used. But your point is well made. I've never actually used project settings that matched the footage so I'm always taking advantage of MPE and Cuda. Under any circumstances, I find with Mac users, who are buying a whole computer often without thinking of much as the individual components, usually end up with ATI cards and it might help to give them a heads up on the need for NVidia Cuda tech to take advantage of all this 'easy speed' Adobe offers. Since my last post above I upgraded to an i7 3930 hexcore, a GTX560 card and 16 gigs of fast RAM and and all my 'scrubbing problems' have disappeared