Rendering Uncompressed HD

H

hanguolaohu

Active member
I started editing an HD animation show recently and during the online I've been receiving Uncompressed HD files to edit with. Although I'm working on an 8 core Mac Pro 2.8ghz with 16gb of ram, Kona 3 card, and two 1TB HD's spanned as a RAID 0, whenever I drop a file in the timeline, I get the red render bar which halves my editing speed. We're supposed to receive a 5TB Raid 5 machine to speed things up, but I'm not sure whether that will get rid of the red render bar.

I'm beginning to wonder how efficient this workflow is. The previous editor output the final Quicktime outputs to Prores HQ which then go onto HDcam.

My questions are:

1. What's the point of receiving Uncompressed if we're gonna output to Prores HQ eventually?
Would be there significant quality degradation if I received the online files in DVCProHD or Prores HQ?

2. Given my setup, is there any way to avoid the red render bar, so I can preview footage without rendering each time?

3. When we have shot fixes I've needed to create H.264 lorez outputs that include shot and frame # over the footage so the director and animators can review the material. These come in the form of Outline Text tool. That would affect rendering as well, correct?

Any advice would be much appreciated!

Thanks,
Alex
 
Two 1 tbyte disks in raid0 will not do a single track of uncompressed HD in realtime on their entire surface. The 5Tbyte raid0 will generally do 2 tracks but it depends on the disks, the controller and the interface.
 
David S. said:
I'd suggest transcoding your source video to ProRes 422 or HQ.
Click to expand...

+1


Also it boggles my mind that people think a Mac Pro means they do not have to render.... Truth of the matter is, you will ALWAYS have to render working in FCP. The only difference with faster computers is that they will render the files faster, but you still have to render.

Now if you transcode your footage to Pro Res you do not have to render ANYTHING as it will play natively on your system. If you were to add any filter effects or color correction though more than likely you will have to render though.

I think Apple is coming out with the new Mac Pros soon, so lets see how that goes.....
 
I have a raid0 on two 1TB disks (software raid) and a black magic card on my.

In Premiere CS3/4/5 it plays uncompressed HD just fine - one or two layers on timeline, scale, crop, move, slowmo, speedup, transitions andwhatnot without any problems.

I have to render color grading, blur, special FX thou. But I usualy aply them after the editing is done.
So on my configuration you can edit uncompressed HD with ease, cause it´s easy on the CPU, but you need
a fast throughput.

I build that PC about two years ago, so it´s not the fastest machine on the planet.

Frank
 
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Postmaster said:
I have a raid0 on two 1TB disks (software raid) and a black magic card on my.

In Premiere CS3/4/5 it plays uncompressed HD just fine - one or two layers on timeline, scale, crop, move, slowmo, speedup, transitions andwhatnot without any problems.

I have to render color grading, blur, special FX thou. But I usualy aply them after the editing is done.
So on my configuration you can edit uncompressed HD with ease, cause it´s easy on the CPU, but you need
a fast throughput.

I build that PC about two years ago, so it´s not the fastest machine on the planet.

Frank
Click to expand...

Full RGB? 2x1TB will do it for 1TB or so but when the array gets to 70% full it will skip. A good 2x2TB almost does it on the full volume.

RGB is a little cheaper than YUV in processing. There is nothing cheaper actually:) It's what the editor converts to anyway.

There is no excuse for not going full uncompressed with modern disks if the material is not 100 hours.
 
The Black Magic card works with both YUV and RGB but I always use (8 bit) RGB - Sometimes 10 bit if color critical.

Yes, at 80%full it slows a bit down, but still workable.

Buit most of the time I work with commercials and industrial stuff under 20 Minutes, so it´s a no brainer.


Otis Grapsas said:
There is no excuse for not going full uncompressed with modern disks if the material is not 100 hours.
Click to expand...

I second that. Whenever possible I work uncompressed (RGB out off the camera into the computer). Thou that means I have to schlep that PC on the set.
Cumbersome as hell, but worth it IMHO.



P.S. If you need a REALLY FAST (beyond 400 MB/sec) but afordable raid, this here works darn good:
http://lifezero.typepad.com/blog/2008/10/super-fast-4tb-raid-for-under-2k/comments/page/2/#comments

Frank
 
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