Native 7D editing on 2007 MBP

T

thabo

Well-known member
I've been playing around with the H.264 & AVCHD native editing features of Primere Pro CS5 with 1080p 30 footage but have noticed that when playing back it maxes out the CPUs even though my Playback and Paused Resolutions are set to 1/4.

Just wondering if this is due to the machine being pretty old, 2007 MBP with 6gigs of ram and an 8600 GT graphics card. I'm running Snow Leopard. Editing AVCHD from my HMC40 seems to tax the processors less than the H.264 from the 7D- funny as this was always the opposite when playing back AVCHD natively (using Movist) on this machine.

Your thoughts.
 
2.6 Core 2 Duo with 6 gigs of Ram and 8600GT graphics card 256Mb. It's obviously not doing CUDA but Open GL yes. Playing an identical ProRes422 file in FCP and PP - 25% CPU usage in FCP and 80% in PP even with PP set to lowers resolution on playback. Me thinks mercury needs a really new machine.
 
As said elsewhere, the h.264 & AVCHD codecs were not designed for editing but shooting. And that is a bit of a old machine / card. I would expect playback of those codecs when viewing outside FCP as u mention would work fine. Inside the mercury engine would do it's best to offload given the card it sees, but it still needs to convert. The 7d, which I also own, is pulling more detail than the 40, I would imagine. What are the file sizes?

But, looking at processor load is tricky, as it could be that it's not "taxing" the machine but being more efficient in using the processors. Do u mean that the core duo proc is not being taxed, or your graphic card? I assume u mean the duo core. I also edit on Vegas on Win7 64 and it's 'desirable to see it using all the cores to do certain functions of it's work, but it doesn't offload graphics processing unless it sees CUDA. It could also be,but I'm unclear on this, that you are seeing some difference between FCP's 32 bit code & 64 bit PP and the way it handles the different codecs. Does PP render any of these faster? Lastly, Apple is coding solely for Mac os. Adobe coding, given cross platform is likely to less optimized for the platform. But these are simply theories.
 
I am looking at my %CPU in Activity monitor and as I stated several times I have a 2007 Intel Core two duo - http://support.apple.com/kb/sp13

Ok guys I've figured it out. It seems there is a setting to in PP CS5 to render: "Render Entire Work Area" and after PP does its thing my CPU cycles are noticeable lower. If I trim the clips they are still green / rendered but obviously if I extend them and add transitions then they have to be re-rendered.

I wonder what the files are being converted too when they are rendered?

I am aware of the entire transcode, AVCHD / H.264 is not an editing codec BUT I'm giving PP a whirl to edit home movie shoots without having to transcode and generate hundreds of gigs of extra footage. And yes, I'm sure I need an i7 processor as all the demos of the wonders of the mercury engine have been produced on the latest and greatest MBP.

Overall I like PP but when the new version of FCP comes out in 3 months I'm sure the race will be on again. CUDA needs a 1gig graphics card and no laptop has this (ok if you classify a laptop as a 10lb brick with a 1 hour battery life then perhaps).
 
The clip in FCP is transcoded to prores. Prores is not CPU intensive.

AVCHD is CPU intensive. The price you pay for being able to edit AVCHD natively in CS5 is that you need a faster machine.


If you take the same Prores clip that you're editing in FCP and put it into CS5, it will use hardly any CPU.

Minimum specs to edit AVCHD natively are a quad core CPU but, even then, it runs like ass. I have a very powerful system but I still transcode to Prores on my hackintosh to keep editing nice and smooth.
 
Jim Simon said:
there are about 30 different Core 2 Duo models. Which one do you have?
Click to expand...

I have no clue what you are asking. The OP has indicated that he has a 2007 MacBook Pro with an 2.6 GHZ Core 2 Duo Intel processor.

What Model number are you looking for? Intel hasn't provided any further specs.
 
I think I've figured it out. I applied a color effect to a clip and it made the clip totally unplayable even at 1/4 playback resolution. I then discovered Sequence > Render .... options and after rendering the offending clip it not plays back OK. I seem to recall being able to doing some color correction on a prores clip and not having to do any rendering.

Ok, so I need a quad core i7 or just convert to ProRes if I want to do anything but the simplest of editing with my current machine. Guess that's ok.

One more thing: I wonder what format PP is rendering the sequence to?
 
I have the same model Mac Book Pro as you do, and yes, it's slow rendering even the vaunted ProRes. To edit effectively without doing an overnight render (sort of joking a bit), you likely will need a quad core. Or just dump all the footage into Compressor or Adobe's equivelent to take it to ProRes or Adobe's preferred lightweight editing codec, use Prores LT or something like that, and come back later. If you are doing non essential work, home movie or extremely low budget solo work, just convert to Prores (or the Adobe equivilent), or buy a new machine. Or become patient. I ended up buying a MacPro for serious editing tasks (like most of them). All better now.
 
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