Premiere Pro H265 performance - upgrade CPU?

M

Martin.G

Well-known member
Hi

Im getting tired of the choppy playback on H265 files in Premiere. They play smooth as butter in native Windows playback. But Premiere just cant handle H265 smoothly.

Have any of you tried the newest AMD 3900X processor with playback and rendering with 4K H265 footage?

Considering an upgrade from i7 5930K. Already have the graphics card.
 
mcgeedigital said:
I'd try to convert the files to DNxHD before doing the upgrade and seeing if that helps.
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+1 As mcgee suggested. Use Avid, ProRes, Cineform or similar.

H.265 is not a nice codec to edit with under the best of circumstances. You begin to understand why when you realize that in 4K UHD that it requires 80 x the processing power to work with vs AVC HD. Page #22.

_https://www.smpte.org/sites/default/files/section-files/HEVC tutorial C.pdf

Also check out Voukoder. Looks like it is showing a decent increase in render speeds with Premiere. Not sure how it performs on actual playback though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2i8pAZmH7q4

The problem with Premiere is that it's performance suffers diminishing returns the more cores it has to use. Premiere like many other editing apps was never ever really configured to work with H.264 let alone H.265. You only have to look at Panasonic's fairly detailed list of NLE apps and their capacity to handle H.265 to see that most NLEs have limited capability to handle HEVC natively and this doesn't only apply to Panasonic's H.265 but H.265 in general. Just go down the right hand column and look under the 'detailed information' headings and regardless of what NLE it is they all have limitations listed. At one of my clients facilities I was having problems with HEVC on their dual processor 16 core boxes with 128GB ram on each of them. In fact I got better performance by disabling one processor and disabling cores. They were Xeon boxes

https://pro-av.panasonic.net/en/products/au-eva1/support/nonlinear.html

If you are going to build a new NLE box it's well worth visiting these guys for good advice. Over the last few years I've built a number of boxes based very closely on their recommendations and so far all performed as I hoped. Pay attention to their multi-core points. The last system I built I also OC'd to 5.1 GHz and de-lidded using liquid metal and its running an OC'd 1080Ti and optimized RAM and it flies with 4k 50/60p H.264, XAVC, AVC-Inta, ProRes, DNxHD, Cineform etc. Chuck H.265 at it and it is still a very unsatisfactory system for HEVC editing. Resolve being the best.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/recomm...-Premiere-Pro-CC-143/Hardware-Recommendations

Chris Young
 
Thanks, but no thanks. This wasnt the advice i was hoping for :grin:

I really dont like proxy editing. Coloring in Davinci with smooth playback is the way to go for me. DNxHD files get humongous when recoded. So for small projects i still use online editing.

Guess i have to bite the dirt on larger projects and calculate transcoding and harddrives into the budget.
 
Martin.G said:
I really dont like proxy editing. Coloring in Davinci with smooth playback is the way to go for me.
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Proxy editing in Premiere is about as simple, easy, and painless as it gets. Even on big projects, rendering to half or quarter resolution/scale ProRes is pretty quick. I can't help but wonder if you're possibly making the process more complicated than it needs to be.

Most of my projects are round-tripped to Resolve, as well. I don't understand the necessity for smooth playback while grading, but ok. If you prioritize that above affecting your original source files, then an intermediate codec is the way to go.

When you make the choice to go with H.265, you have to compromise somewhere else down the line. In my opinion, your money would be better spent on a camera that doesn't limit you to H.265 (for what you need it to do) than on a super-GPU and/or upgraded system that will yield only marginally better results.
 
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I'm on an iMac Pro, which can play back 4k RAW files at full res without missing a beat, and I can't play back h265 files from my XT3 smoothly. I don't think it's a power or speed problem; I think it's an optimization problem.
 
Martin.G said:
Thanks, but no thanks. This wasnt the advice i was hoping for :grin:

I really dont like proxy editing. Coloring in Davinci with smooth playback is the way to go for me. DNxHD files get humongous when recoded. So for small projects i still use online editing.

Guess i have to bite the dirt on larger projects and calculate transcoding and harddrives into the budget.
Click to expand...

Good luck with that.

h.265 is not optimized for post production.

Period.
 
Martin.G said:
Hi

Im getting tired of the choppy playback on H265 files in Premiere. They play smooth as butter in native Windows playback. But Premiere just cant handle H265 smoothly.

Have any of you tried the newest AMD 3900X processor with playback and rendering with 4K H265 footage?

Considering an upgrade from i7 5930K. Already have the graphics card.
Click to expand...

There is an option for hardware accelerated decoding in 'Media' section of preferences.

If the option is dimmed in the Preferences panel, it means that either the CPU doesn’t support Intel® Quick Sync or the Integrated GPU is not enabled or the Intel® graphics drivers may need an update.
Click to expand...
 
The proxy workflow in premiere is far from perfect. Last I used it it does not honor “interpret clip” speed settings which caused havoc with my projects when coming back online. Awful.

For ingest settings, it’s also annoying, if you pull footage in without ingesting / transcoding it’s quite annoying to transcode after the fact without going to proxy workflow which as mentioned doesn’t honor interpret speed settings last I used it.

I too am looking at Threadripper 3 either in December or January depending on taxes. But I plan to transcode. My planned setup is:

TR 3960x
128gb RAM
1 TB PCI E 4 boot drive / premiere drive
2 TB PCI E 4.0 m.2 drive for cache
Use existing GTX 1080 TI

Qnap server with 8x10 TB ironwolf pro via 10gbe

I think that’s the only way to go. Setup a transcode workflow outside of premiere to make everything a large file size on a giant QNAP RAID 6. I’ll use external HDDs to backup the original h.265 files for smaller backups.

I would recommend you invest in threadripper and QNAP (I know:.. $$$$). Then setup an automated transcode workflow. You’ll have to wait longer to start editing but you avoid the proxy workflow as well, the h.265 files are only for smaller backup sizes and affordable in camera media. Sucks to drop $4k on a QNAP but it will last a long time.

I’m doing 8 10TB drives because you need 8 drives to get good performance in RAID 6 and anything less defeats the point, say the qnap pros I’ve talked to. As well, that will only give around 50 TB of useable space all said and done. 4K dnx or ProRes will way through that.
 
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