Realtime AMA 5D/7D footage

Jason Adams

Jason Adams

Section Moderator
Is anyone getting real time playback of 5D/7D footage.

I saw a demo at NAB but it seems people are having limited real time performance.
 
Even on my octo core MacPro, things bog down after a few dozen clips. H.264 is just not meant to be edited natively. Use AMA to access the footage, then transcode to DNxHD 145.

Native format support is overrated. If you want good performance, you have to edit with what the NLE supports.
 
I don't want to edit all in H.264, but I am in a little off put by the AVID marketing machine touting No Transcode, No Re wrap edit instantly.

AMA is a huge work flow improvement but they made me feel as if I could do with my DSLR what I could with p2. Sounds like AMA is a great "review tool" not a an edit tool.

How about instead of Avid Media Access we call it Avid Media Preview.
 
You can edit H.264, it's just slower, not as snappy. And you need a good NVidia card to make sure it is smooth. But there are other disadvantages to editing AMA'd footage native...you can't export an OMF or AAF to audio post. It doesn't work with AMA footage. Yeah, I've tested it.
 
Al I am after is one stream of realtime playback. I want to be able to do a quick assemble on the fly. Then transcode to my edit raid as DNxHD.

Shane are you getting one stream of playback?


I can't get an answer out of Avid on the SYS REQ to playback EOS footage via AMA. many people who well exceed the SYS REQ are not getting smooth playback in the preview monitor.

AVID had said that the process is more processor intensive, but I can't seem to get a magic formula out of them.

Thanks
 
I can get one stream, but it is sluggish. Now, I have seen it work on laptops...NEWER ones, with NVIDIA cards, but I don't have a new one. I am running it off my tower. When I had an ATI 4870 card in there, performace sucked. BAD. I replaced it with an NVIDIA and got a marked improvement. With just the GT120 card. A better one will do even better.

I'm not sure what the SYS REQ are, but H.264 is just not built for editing. The only way CS5 is dealing with it is via the Mercury Engine...more power. I can edit the footage for a quick assembly of 10 min or less. But I'd hate to do it for a large project. AMA really is designed to give you ACCESS to the footage, so that you can convert it to Avid files. That's what I got from Avid.
 
From what I see here and on some other boards the - so called - "industry standard" in his newest release still can´t catch up with the "consumer and hobbyist" applications.

At least AVID was able to implement some functions that those "cheap consumer products" could do since years.

I don´t want to start an other NLE war here, but this sounds like a typical bait and shift to me.

Frank
 
Jakobim... Can you also post your system specs.

I have been researching this endlessly for days I am trying to nail down the specs for an h.264 optimized media composer.

Again, I don't want to edit my projects in native h2.64 I want to be able to do a quick rough assembly or dailies edit w/ TC on set.

What is the most important thing for H.264 performance. GPU CPU RAM ?
 
Jason - what quality if you timeline set to? If it's green/green, knock it back to green/yellow. If it's green/yellow, knock it back to yellow/yellow. It will help with playback, and if you're just doing a rough assembly you don't need to see the footage in full quality anyhow.
 
I always edit in Green Yellow. But I see no real performance difference between the three with AMA clips.

Thanks for the tip. I appreciate it.
 
Yeah, speaking of which I was pleasantly surprised to see how smooth Adobe Premiere CS5 handled native XDCAM (been a while since I used anything but avid)

If only I could modify the keyboard commands to be exact to my avid keyboard :-P

I JUST got MC 5 - as in it's arriving this afternoon. Once I load it up, I'm going to test it out on some 5d footage I have and get back to you about the specs of the laptop (PC) how it runs, etc.

-Joe
 
overclocked I7 920 4.0 / 12mb ram / p6t deluxe MB / 4800 nivd card / raid 2 x 500gb WD blacks 4 x 1tb WD blacks

jason.adams said:
Jakobim... Can you also post your system specs.

I have been researching this endlessly for days I am trying to nail down the specs for an h.264 optimized media composer.

Again, I don't want to edit my projects in native h2.64 I want to be able to do a quick rough assembly or dailies edit w/ TC on set.

What is the most important thing for H.264 performance. GPU CPU RAM ?
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