Log and Transfer Speed

B

Benjamin Eckstein

Well-known member
I could do this test myself, but my laptop is in the middle of a log and transfer session that I don't want to stop.

But I set 2 16GB cards (that had been offloaded to a drive) to convert to ProRes overnight and they are JUST finishing this morning. This is on an i7 MBP.

My question is, do people know if L+T is faster when pulling directly off the SDHC cards? I would think it would make little to no difference (in fact I'd think it would slower since the data transfer from a card is faster than (in this case) the internal drive.

With my 7D stuff I found MPEG Streamclip to be a bit faster than L+T but that doesn't work for the AF-100 files, right?

Thanks,
Benjamin
 
I've just shot my first "real" footage with my AF100.

Up to now all my tests have been short, no more than a minute or so each, so I haven't really noticed Log & Transfer speed. Now I am trying to pull in a single 20 minute take, and it is taking a very long time: nearly three hours, and it is only half way through. I'm on a Mac Pro (3,1) with 2 x 2.8 Quad Core Xeons 16 GB 800 MHz DDR2 and Geforce GTX285 1 GB graphics card with 4 TB RAID5 and hardware raid card, using Final Cut Pro 6.0.6. Activity Monitor is only showing around 110% activity (out of 800% max).

Should Log & Transfer really be THAT slow??? It seems improbable that the limitation in disk speed even though both the raw footage and destination are on the same drive- for me, this is a fast, hardware RAID arrangement, not a single laptop drive as for Benjamin.

L&T wait times have never been an issue in my work flow up to now, but if it is going to take 6+ hours to L&T 20 minutes of footage I'm going to have to switch to Premiere Pro CS5 which I've recently bought, and which let me play through the footage at full res with colour correction immediately after copying the SD card.

What can we do to speed up these times? MPEG streamclip? Clipwrap? Compressor? Does FCP 7 do it quicker? Magic Bullet Grinder? If L&T is the only/best way to get AF100 footage into FCP, that's the final nail in FCP's coffin for me :-( which is a shame because I like it.

Cheers, Hywel
 
Log & Transfer does not support AVCCAM in FCP 6. You need to convert to Proes (assuming that's what you're going to) using either Clipwrap or Toast. Also, FCP 6 doesn't support Prores LT, so you'll need to come in as regular Prores.
 
Umm.

I have previously transcoded all my AF100 test clips (dozens of them, although all quite short) with FCP6, so it does at least partially support it. It might be that it has an issue with longer clips? But I did all my earlier tests with FCP6 and it worked just fine! (To ProRes of course, not ProResLT).

Interestingly, importing to Premiere Pro CS5 and exporting to ProRes takes about 15 minutes, so my workaround for the moment (as I have to integrate AF100 footage into existing FCP projects) is to export from Premiere Pro so FCP can read it! Silly. Ah well, maybe I should upgrade to FCP7 if that'll fix it, even though I was holding off on that until I saw whether there is an FCP big upgrade in the next couple of months.

Cheers, Hywel.
 
Hywel, my bad, it's older non-intel macs that don't support AVCCAM. Still, others have also cited the painfully long import times using fcp. I looked around and ordered toast pro, which wound up costing much less than an upgrade ($67 on amazon). Haven't got it yet, so can't report on transcode times, once I do I'll let you know.
 
Hi,

Thanks... I know it is a particularly daft workaround, but I'll be using Premiere Pro CS5 as the transcoder to ProRes for the moment (just while I edit projects which I want to do in FCP for continuity with existing work) then look at switching to CS5 as my main workflow editor, unless Apple really rings the bell on an FCP update in the next few months. It is hard to argue with that sort of performance difference.

Cheers, Hywel.
 
DrHST said:
Log & Transfer does not support AVCCAM in FCP 6. You need to convert to Proes (assuming that's what you're going to) using either Clipwrap or Toast. Also, FCP 6 doesn't support Prores LT, so you'll need to come in as regular Prores.
Click to expand...

You can log and transfer AVCCAM in FCP 6, you are mistaken.

EDIT:

DrHST said:
Hywel, my bad, it's older non-intel macs that don't support AVCCAM. Still, others have also cited the painfully long import times using fcp. I looked around and ordered toast pro, which wound up costing much less than an upgrade ($67 on amazon). Haven't got it yet, so can't report on transcode times, once I do I'll let you know.
Click to expand...

Sorry I should have read farther.
 
Hywel said:
I've just shot my first "real" footage with my AF100.

Up to now all my tests have been short, no more than a minute or so each, so I haven't really noticed Log & Transfer speed. Now I am trying to pull in a single 20 minute take, and it is taking a very long time: nearly three hours, and it is only half way through. I'm on a Mac Pro (3,1) with 2 x 2.8 Quad Core Xeons 16 GB 800 MHz DDR2 and Geforce GTX285 1 GB graphics card with 4 TB RAID5 and hardware raid card, using Final Cut Pro 6.0.6. Activity Monitor is only showing around 110% activity (out of 800% max).

Should Log & Transfer really be THAT slow??? It seems improbable that the limitation in disk speed even though both the raw footage and destination are on the same drive- for me, this is a fast, hardware RAID arrangement, not a single laptop drive as for Benjamin.

L&T wait times have never been an issue in my work flow up to now, but if it is going to take 6+ hours to L&T 20 minutes of footage I'm going to have to switch to Premiere Pro CS5 which I've recently bought, and which let me play through the footage at full res with colour correction immediately after copying the SD card.

What can we do to speed up these times? MPEG streamclip? Clipwrap? Compressor? Does FCP 7 do it quicker? Magic Bullet Grinder? If L&T is the only/best way to get AF100 footage into FCP, that's the final nail in FCP's coffin for me :-( which is a shame because I like it.

Cheers, Hywel
Click to expand...

Weird, I used the same Mac Pro (with FCP7) and no raid, just ingested from a disk image of the SD card straight to a eSATA connected drive and ingest is definitely more along the lines of 2-3x real time. And these were 10 minute clips.
 
I'm wondering if there is a specific problem with this clip, as it has frozen or crashed twice now. I'll test again with the next batch of live footage I shoot. At least PPro ingested and exported it fine so there is a workaround for me for the moment.

It may be a specific clip issue as the ingest seemed real-time-ish with the shorter clips I L&T'd... sufficiently quick that I'd not noticed it as an issue for me before.

Cheers, Hywel.
 
I just logged in a 16 minute clip into fcp7 transcoding to apple prores(lt) using my macpro 2 x 2.26 quad core xeon with 16gb of ram and it took a little over 2 minutes. If I did the same clip on my macbookpro it probably would be close to realtime.
 
... just to confirm that L&T is working for me (with FCP6) on footage from my second real shoot. I don't know why L&T was so slow and crash prone on the other clip, possibly it doesn't like 20+ minute single clips, or maybe some issue with that particular clip but all is working well (and acceptably fast) now.

Cheers, Hywel.
 
Had the same problem last night with a 15 minute clip on my fcp 6.0.4 and 2.5 ghz intel core 2. The 15 minute would take over an hour to convert and then it would fail everytime. To ingest about 1.5 hours of footage took me from 10pm to 4pm on my fcp. I am going to try Clip Wrap now and see if that works for the one clip that didn't work.
 
Used ClipWrap. Worked great. a 15 minute clip took almost 30 minutes to transcode.
Case closed.
 
About FCP L&T times -- it depends on what version of FCP, and whether or not you used LPCM audio. Earlier versions of FCP didn't properly support LPCM.

Understand that prior to the AF100, there was no such thing as LPCM in AVCCAM footage. So any version of FCP prior to the AF100's release, wouldn't necessarily work with AF100 LPCM footage. They should work with AC3 audio, no problem, but if you used LPCM footage it may work, it might be much slower, or it might even crash.

Any FCP user, wanting to use LPCM audio, and who uses an AF100, should upgrade to at least version 7.0.3 of FCP. It's my understanding that the 7.0.3 release fixes any LPCM audio issues.
 
Thanks Barry!

FCP 6.0.6 seems to work for short clips with LPCM, but long clips seem to crash. Decision time... stick with FCP, pay Apple for upgrade to 7, only to have them launch another update "early this year" (damn it Mr. Jobs, we need roadmaps...)? Or switch to PPro CS5 which I've been testing out and which seems at first blush to do everything FCP does but a bit quicker?

Cheers, Hywel.
 
Well, an intermediate decision would be to just use AC3 audio until you know the answer about what NLE (6, 7, upgrade at NAB, or CS5) you want to go with. I believe 6.0.6 will work perfectly with AC3 audio, won't it?
 
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