R3D slower in Premiere than RedCine-X

D

DDirector

Veteran
Without a RedRocket Card I can play R3D files on RedCine-X at 1/2 resolution without any problems. It plays smoothly in full time.
However, if I have the footage imported to Adobe Premiere Pro CS6, it lags a lot and is unable to be played at 1/2 resolution. Even if I take it down to 1/4 it lags sometimes a little.

Is there a feature on Premiere that is not allowing me to use the full or more performance of my computer to play the R3D files?
Or maybe I need to upgrade/install something onto Premiere?
Don't understand why it would play smoother in RedCine-X as to in Premiere.

Intel i7 3820 (3.60GHz)
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 670 2GB
 
hmm. sucks. I thought that no matter which program you used it would be the same.
But, is there maybe a way in the settings of Premiere that would allow for better performances?
 
Do you have your video card enabled in premiere? I recently installed an Nvidia card thats not on the standard list and there were a fews things I had to do before it worked.
 
you can render the sequence and you'll get half/full res playback, but I don't think that's what you were asking...
 
DDirector said:
How do I know if it is or isnt?
Click to expand...

In Premiere

Go to Project Tab > Project Settings > General

The first item says Video rendering and playback.

If your video card is enabled there is a drop down menu with two options:

Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration (CUDA)

and

Mercury Playback Engine SOftware Only


If you only have a non selectable box with the Software Only showing - then Premiere is not recognising your card as supported. I'm Mac so I wont go through the next part as in the whole process. Instead follow this which should point you in the right direction. http://forums.adobe.com/message/4552694
 
Your video card has no impact on R3D decoding speed in PPro, it's all on the CPU.

The biggest thing that could be hampering you is your sequence settings being different from your source footage forcing Premiere to do weird scaling which slows things down.

And what is your storage situation? Remember that to play a fade or cut basically your HDD needs to spit out two streams at the same time whereas in REDCINE you are only ever really playing one stream at a time.
 
Noel Evans said:
In Premiere

Go to Project Tab > Project Settings > General

The first item says Video rendering and playback.

If your video card is enabled there is a drop down menu with two options:

Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration (CUDA)

and

Mercury Playback Engine SOftware Only


If you only have a non selectable box with the Software Only showing - then Premiere is not recognising your card as supported. I'm Mac so I wont go through the next part as in the whole process. Instead follow this which should point you in the right direction. http://forums.adobe.com/message/4552694
Click to expand...

THANK YOU!
It was not enabled. It is a different step in Windows than on Mac. And it was Super easy and quick to do.
I checked before and after how the footage looked, its working smoothly now and fast! :) THANKS
 
Noel Evans said:
This is inaccurate. ALL video video played through Premiere Pro that has CUDA hardware enabled is also processed through the GPU.
Click to expand...

Can you elaborate Noel?

As far as I have ever understood, R3D decode happens on the CPU and the CPU only as Graeme has stated multiple times that GPU's are not set up for the task as well as a CPU. And as the debayering is the most intensive part of the process in slowing playback - this is where your bottleneck is going to happen.

It may happen that PPro passes everything through the GPU and if you have effects on the footage that does get processed on the GPU, but basic decoding of R3D is a CPU or RedRocket only endeavor.
 
Noel Evans said:
ALL video video played through Premiere Pro that has CUDA hardware enabled is also processed through the GPU.
Click to expand...

That depends on what you mean by 'processed'. Yes, it goes through the GPU to get to the screen. But decoding for playback is not 'accelerated' in any way by the GPU. Effects, scaling, field order and color space conversions, those things can be handed off to the GPU, but decoding (and in this case, debayering) is done entirely and only on the CPU.
 
OK we're crossing borders here. Im talking about playback which relates to the OP. You guys are talking about transcode which is a different discussion.
 
No, we're talking about playback as well. The GPU doesn't help with playback. It handles things that can make playback difficult, like effects, scaling and such, but doesn't help at all with the playback itself.
 
Hmmm... I'm also having a little bit of trouble... I'm on 3.5Ghz i7 mac pro, 32gb ram, geforce 660ti 2gb ram GPU.... but playback of rd3 5K files is a bit choppy even at 1/4 res, whereas red cine playsback fine after a little buffering... CUDA is enabled on the project settings... hmmmmm....
 
qwerty123 said:
Hmmm... I'm also having a little bit of trouble... I'm on 3.5Ghz i7 mac pro, 32gb ram, geforce 660ti 2gb ram GPU.... but playback of rd3 5K files is a bit choppy even at 1/4 res, whereas red cine playsback fine after a little buffering... CUDA is enabled on the project settings... hmmmmm....
Click to expand...

5k raw playback is exponentially harder than 4k.

I have a rocket and a 500Mb/sec raid 5 sas drive and 5k can sometimes choke.

Also, did you check to see if that Nvidia card was supported? Not all of them are.
 
Yes I checked... it's not officially supported, but does work.

I'll give it a shot with some 4k files and see what I come up with :)

... In general, how does one test cuda performance in Premiere? I have an Istat monitor and my 660ti looks like it's only using about a 1/3 of its memory in processing the r3d files.... ???

UPDATE: I tried playing back a 5k r3d file with and without CUDA accelaration enabled under the project settings menu, and there's really NO difference between the playback! If anything, not using CUDA seems to make it work better....

So I think that this confirms what Jim and William have been saying. And this appears to be confirmed by this official Adobe page: http://blogs.adobe.com/premierepro/2011/02/cuda-mercury-playback-engine-and-adobe-premiere-pro.html

At the same time the OP reports having better performance once he enabled CUDA... perhaps he changed something else like having the correct sequence setting? Otherwise, I'm very confused....

ANOTHER UPDATE: 4.5K played back at 1/4 resolution is very smooth; 1/2 it's choppy. I think it just might be the power required to playback 5k... the GPU i think doesn't help....

mcgeedigital said:
5k raw playback is exponentially harder than 4k.

I have a rocket and a 500Mb/sec raid 5 sas drive and 5k can sometimes choke.

Also, did you check to see if that Nvidia card was supported? Not all of them are.
Click to expand...
 
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