PC workflow

[icicle22]

The Axio is what I'm looking at seriously.

Someone asked if it's PCIExpress. As far as I know, it'sthe 64 bit PCI-X slots that most newer workstations have. My system doens't have the PCI express.

I had high hopes for Raylight. Keep us updated on how it's working for you.

I use Premiere Pro 2. I wonder if it would work better in that?

I have used Premiere pro 2.0 for some regular old DV 24PA widescreen stuff and my initial feeling was that it was much slower than Pro 1.5.

I will try Premiere Pro 2.0 with Raylight this evening and let you know. I will also do a render of 2 identical scenes. One in Premiere with Raylight and one in FCP on my Mac-mini. This will give a better idea of performance.

 

[alpha54]

My Adobe Production Suite Professional package just arrived today; I only gave Premiere Pro 2 (used Premiere Pro 1 before) a quick spin and I'm loving the improvements!

 

[Morgan_Rozender]

Yeah, 2.0 is a vast improvement over 1.5 in my oppinion. Just not having to use up 20gigs of space for "conformed audio" files is great., the PEAK files that 2.0 makes are MUCH smaller. Also, I find the APP much faster overall, and the playback engine seems to be snappier.

Icicle22- Thanks for your efforts. I can't wait to hear your results.

 

[icicle22]

My initial feelings of Premiere Pro2 being slower are based on rendering a short DV clip with basic color correction. The clip was 10-15 seconds long and the render was taking forever. In Premiere 1.5 it seemd to only take 10-15 seconds to render an equivalent clip with effects. Not scientific. Maybe something else was going on.

Im gonna check out the MAC-MINI stuff now.......

 

[Morgan_Rozender]

It may be that the color correction takes longer in 2.0 because it's using a different color correction filter than in 1.5 .. duno just a guess.

I'm eagarly awaiting your mac-mini report.

 

[icicle22]

Ok. I did not get a chance to do a formal test. Sorry. But I can now confidently state what I have seen in real world use over 8 hours yesterday.

After importing 30+ clips into FCP from the P2 cards in my camera and dropping them on the FCP timline....I am blown away.

I can easily have color correction and gamma correction filters applied and have transitions between the clips and they all play back in realtime.....with effects and transitions......at full size! 1280x720! Holy crap.

I rendered a 1 minute 30 second clip with these filters and transitions on the timeline and it took 4 minutes! This was rendering to a final movie file....not a preview....I didn;t have ot build a preview to watch it in realtime which is amazing!

In premiere pro with Raylight it took 4and a half minutes to render an 8 second clip with a simple color correction filter! The difference is night and day! I can't believe it.

Add to this I am comparing a MAC-MINI with a 1.25ghz G4 with a gig of RAM and an external USB2 drive to a DUAL 3.0GHZ Xeon workstation with 2gig RAm and a dedicated SATA raid configuration. I cannot believe what I have seen.

I cannot even get Premiere Pro on a high end PC to playback smooth DV with 1-2 color filters applied without rendering. Yet I can apply 2-3 color effects to a DVCPROHD clip in FCP and it plays it flawlessly? Even at full 1280x720.

Did I mention I am floored? How the PC and MAC be so far apart on performance when it comes to DVCPROHD? I know FCP has a real good head start but the gap seems crazy!

Now....2 things I did find. When I tried to playback a rendered quicktime DVCPROHD in quicktime it chokes and drops a lot of frames. The same clip loaded in FCP plays flawlessly. Must be some extra stuff inside FCP to get this performance.

The other thing I found was rendering a 9 minute clip using compressor to h.264 mov took 3+ hours. I don't have a frame of reference as to if that is a long time or not. And the final thing is the MAC-MINI does not like to play 1280x720 h.264 files at all! Must be too much compression for the processor to compute in realtime as it stuttered very badly.

I will report back if I find anything new!

Thanks

 

[izoneguy]

Cool, I would like to hear what 1080p footage is like to work with.

 

[mule ferguson]

Just wondering what hardware and software everyone on the PC side is using?
It seems as if I am right back where I started.
I got the cam, but still can't edit/view anything on the pc side.

I'm useing Edius Broadcast with the HVX 200. It works wonderful. I have used Edius with the FX1 for the last year and find it a very stable platform I have the NX card and preview my foot on HDTV LCD

Mule Ferguson
Pumpkin Creek Video

 

[Barry_Green]

Did I mention I am floored? How the PC and MAC be so far apart on performance when it comes to DVCPROHD? I know FCP has a real good head start but the gap seems crazy!

This is exactly what I found. On a totally loaded PC laptop I got maybe 2 frames per second. On the bottom-of-the-line Mac G5 I can get two streams of 1080 footage playing full-screen, full-res, full-frame-rate doing cross-dissolves between them, in realtime. Off the internal hard disk! That's not even using the external G-Raid, that's just off the system's internal 160gb hard disk!

I don't know how the PC and Mac experience can be so different. But it is, and that's all that matters. The Mac absolutely SLAYS for DVCPRO-HD editing; it makes high-def just as easy to work with as DV ever was. In fact, native high-def editing is faster, easier, and smoother on the Mac than it used to be to edit DV in Premiere with my old dedicated RT2000 hardware DV "realtime graphics" boardset!

I'm no "mac head", I don't drink the Apple "kool-aid", but this was a no-brainer; the cost of the Mac is easily justifiable by the workflow and realtime performance it delivers.

Must be some extra stuff inside FCP to get this performance.

Has to be. I don't know how else it could be so obscenely superior. Yet it is. There's got to be some hardware hooks into the graphics card or something. And have you tried HDV? HDV can play back at full frame rate too, and that's downright impressive.

 

[Barry_Green]

Cool, I would like to hear what 1080p footage is like to work with.

Don't know about a Mac Mini, but I know I've seen full-screen 1080p playing back just fine on a 1.33GHz G4 powerbook.

On my G5 dual 2.0, 1080p flies. Absolutely flies.

 

[Barry_Green]

I'm useing Edius Broadcast with the HVX 200. It works wonderful.

I'm getting Edius Broadcast for my laptop; I think it looks like a very solid HVX option for the PC platform.

 

[for_mlove]

I'm extremely interested in the Edius solution. Mule, can you share a little more about your system setup? I've heard Canopus requires intense hardware to run.

Barry, I'm anxious to hear how Edius works on your laptop. I'm afraid I'm slipping into the Apple camp! I'd try their demo myself, but it would be pointless to me since the demo version won't work with DVCPRO HD..... sli...... slipping......

 

[ChuckS]

This is exactly what I found. On a totally loaded PC laptop I got maybe 2 frames per second. On the bottom-of-the-line Mac G5 I can get two streams of 1080 footage playing full-screen, full-res, full-frame-rate doing cross-dissolves between them, in realtime. Off the internal hard disk! That's not even using the external G-Raid, that's just off the system's internal 160gb hard disk!

Barry I'm editing with Cineforms AspectHD which is an intermediate codec that converts HDV to approximately the same data rate as DVCProHD and it is just like editing DV. Moves the data around, no problem. I imagine your peroformance problem was related to an incompatibility not as a result of the performance of your laptop.

I don't know how the PC and Mac experience can be so different. But it is, and that's all that matters. The Mac absolutely SLAYS for DVCPRO-HD editing; it makes high-def just as easy to work with as DV ever was. In fact, native high-def editing is faster, easier, and smoother on the Mac than it used to be to edit DV in Premiere with my old dedicated RT2000 hardware DV "realtime graphics" boardset!

Apple has supported DVCProHD for more than two years, it had better "SLAY." FCP didn't edit anything more than DV until 5x. Your comparing "apples" [pun intended] and oranges. By your own admission the last version of Premiere you used was 6.0, PPro1.5.1 is a lot more comparable to Avid and FCP than Premiere 6.0.

I'm no "mac head", I don't drink the Apple "kool-aid", but this was a no-brainer; the cost of the Mac is easily justifiable by the workflow and realtime performance it delivers.

Actually it does appear that you are drinking the Apple cool-aid, I hope for your sake it is sugar free because there isn't much protein...

 

[Barry_Green]

Not sure where you're coming from Chuck. I'm talking about editing DVCPRO-HD. On the PC I've tried Avid, I've tried Raylight in Vegas, and I'm about to try Canopus.

Right now nothing comes within a hundred miles of the way the lowly G5 handles it. It literally is night and day.

As far as HDV, I'm not talking about an intermediate codec, I'm talking about how it handles playing back an actual transport stream. Try importing a direct .m2t and see how that plays in Premiere Pro; I haven't tried Premiere Pro so I don't know. But in FCP it'll play back an HDV 1080/60i stream full-screen in realtime. Didn't try dissolves etc. but the very fact that it can play it back is quite impressive, at least compared to my experience with the same files on the PC.

And hey, I never said I like FCP. I like Vegas about 300 times more than FCP. But what I'm pointing out is there is a performance gap that is absolutely massive. Something that can't be just swept under the rug; there's some serious magic going on.

Which makes me really wonder what will happen when FCP runs on the intel platform, because then we'll even have processor-to-processor parity. It will be most interesting to see if FCP remains leaps and bounds better than the existing PC options as far as HDV and DVCPRO-HD playback capability.

 

[tak1108]

FCP didn't edit anything more than DV until 5x.

FCP has been resolution independent from the get go. From version 1 you could edit uncompressed SD. in version 3 I believe people were editing uncompressed HD on the desktop with the Cinewave, which was the first NLE that worked in HD. FCP was the FIRST to offer HD editing in an NLE.

Stop spreading FUD

 

[Green Hornet]

This is exactly what I found. On a totally loaded PC laptop I got maybe 2 frames per second. On the bottom-of-the-line Mac G5 I can get two streams of 1080 footage playing full-screen, full-res, full-frame-rate doing cross-dissolves between them, in realtime. Off the internal hard disk! That's not even using the external G-Raid, that's just off the system's internal 160gb hard disk!

......

Barry, sounds like your laptop had a lame video card.
That is very common these days that the laptop will either have shared memory, and or, just not very fast for video. A quick check is to check your refresh rate by right clicking on the desktop. If it won't go beyond 60hz, or you don't have at least 128 megs going to it, that is most likely your problem.

 

[ChuckS]

OK before this enters into a religious debate a couple of things to clear up. Barry your right PPro can not currently edit DVCProHD, that’s why the performance on your laptop was so bad. But as soon as it does, and I believe Cineform’s AspectHD will accommodate this within the next month or so, PPro2 will be as responsive on a PC as FCP on a G5 – this is a software thing not a hardware performance issue.

Also PPro2 will edit HDV natively, although I have not done this and never will. People who edit an .m2t stream natively on any computer need there heads examined.

Tak1108, yes FCP is “resolution” independent but until FCP 5x it was restricted to an 8bit color space and, with the exception of DVCProHD all other full resolution HD is at least 10bits. By reducing the 10bits to 8bits you are theoretically compressing the image. [which is why the output from things like Cinewave looked like crap.] Also FCP was not the first NLE that could edit HD, Discreet’s Flame and Smoke, Avid had a system built on the software they purchased from Parallax (I can’t recall the name), and Quantel Henry were available long before FCP could edit HD.

Regarding the FUD comment, you see I was one of the founders of the company that Apple purchased to develop Motion, you keep drinking that Apple cool-aid and I keep getting richer. So don’t misunderstand me, I’m not trying to discourage anyone from using FCP, I’m just trying to clear up some of the FUD as you put it.

 

[Andreas]

Barry, sounds like your laptop had a lame video card.
That is very common these days that the laptop will either have shared memory, and or, just not very fast for video. A quick check is to check your refresh rate by right clicking on the desktop. If it won't go beyond 60hz, that is most likely your problem.

My laptop won't go beyond 60hz and that is with Nvidia FeForceGo 6800 256MB... so I guess it has to do with the monitor. But anyway, why is this a problem ?

 

[Green Hornet]

My laptop won't go beyond 60hz and that is with Nvidia FeForceGo 6800 256MB... so I guess it has to do with the monitor. But anyway, why is this a problem ?

If you look under the advanced tabs, your system can support faster and higher resolutions, and has dedicated ram, so it shouldn't be a problem, but many laptops these days share a portion of the main ram, which is inefficient, and don't allow it to refresh the image fast enough, and therefore it is not displayed smoothly.

 

[Green Hornet]

Not sure where you're coming from Chuck. I'm talking about editing DVCPRO-HD. On the PC I've tried Avid, I've tried Raylight in Vegas, and I'm about to try Canopus.

Right now nothing comes within a hundred miles of the way the lowly G5 handles it. It literally is night and day.

As far as HDV, I'm not talking about an intermediate codec, I'm talking about how it handles playing back an actual transport stream. Try importing a direct .m2t and see how that plays in Premiere Pro; I haven't tried Premiere Pro so I don't know. But in FCP it'll play back an HDV 1080/60i stream full-screen in realtime. Didn't try dissolves etc. but the very fact that it can play it back is quite impressive, at least compared to my experience with the same files on the PC.

And hey, I never said I like FCP. I like Vegas about 300 times more than FCP. But what I'm pointing out is there is a performance gap that is absolutely massive. Something that can't be just swept under the rug; there's some serious magic going on.

Which makes me really wonder what will happen when FCP runs on the intel platform, because then we'll even have processor-to-processor parity. It will be most interesting to see if FCP remains leaps and bounds better than the existing PC options as far as HDV and DVCPRO-HD playback capability.

Barry,
Premiere Pro has come a LONG way.
In the past, it was only real time with DV due to secondary cards such as Canopus or Matrox.
Since then, Adobe has realized the need to use hardware to speed things up.
Premiere Pro 2.0 now uses the video card processor (GPU) to do many tasks.
This makes most things instant, even with HD preview, color correction, etc.

Wait time only happens when doing a render of transitions, or outputting to a file.
This is faster than real time.

Premiere Pro 2.0 has piqued my interest due to this new feature, as well as the multicam function
(good for music videos, even shot from one camera, as you can use multiple clips, resync the timecode, and use multicam for instant edit choices).
And advanced color correction in 32 bit color.

I am rusty with premiere pro, but I plan to buy some tutorials once more are available, but from researching online, the above is what I have found.
I also think the ability to send the footage embedded in a pdf file, to your client, where they can stop the footage and make comments (kind of like insert keyframe text) and send it back for corrections is amazing.

So in summing this up, the speed of premiere pro 2.0 (not the earlier versions) are based on the performance of the video card for screen previews, and based on processor for renders.

At least this is what was explained to me.