FS5: To be FS5 ready. The tale of the LONG GOP codec.

But wataminute... Someone told me that they were able to edit five streams of XAVC 4k with no dropped frames on their 3 year old Macbook pro. So that wasn't true?
After tweaking parameters in Premiere s debug console, I was able to get reasonable 4k multicam on a dual Xeon. It actually runs pretty good on my old C2quad, too.

The most 2160 p streams I've edited was five ProRes streams as overlays. 30% CPU utilization. Room for more prores. Looks better and sharper without macroblocks showing in hq mode.
 
basspig said:
But wataminute... Someone told me that they were able to edit five streams of XAVC 4k with no dropped frames on their 3 year old Macbook pro. So that wasn't true?
After tweaking parameters in Premiere s debug console, I was able to get reasonable 4k multicam on a dual Xeon. It actually runs pretty good on my old C2quad, too.

The most 2160 p streams I've edited was five ProRes streams as overlays. 30% CPU utilization. Room for more prores. Looks better and sharper without macroblocks showing in hq mode.
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The OP is severely drive limited so it's no wonder he's having issues which are only compounded by XAVC-L in PP.

My MBP eats 4K for breakfast off its internal flash drive (1.8GB/s) but I haven't bothered measuring the upper limit of streams.

XAVC-L is as optimised as it can be in FCPX but that doesn't mean it's as easy to work with as XAVC-I. FCPX has fall back positions if the footage is too heavy for the system, selecting better performance over better quality can help if not then there's the painless proxy workflow but neither measure can overcome a system with slow media drives.
 
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Nirv said:
The OP is severely drive limited so it's no wonder he's having issues which are only compounded by XAVC-L in PP.
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Drive limited for 12.5MBps footage? I have a tough time believing any hard drive would ever be a bottleneck for playing back highly compressed 12.5MBps footage.
 
IronFilm said:
Here is a thought: as it is a long term 5yrs purchase, why not just use the FS5 as mainly a 1080 camera for the next year or two, then after that point you can pick up a new PC with lots of SSD space for pennies on the dollar compared to what they're going for now. Then for the next 3 or 4 years of ownership you can use it as a 4K camera. As I presume you don't have the demand to use it as a 4K camera *right now*, and besides I do see the FS5 as mainly a 1080 camera anyway (competing against the C100 mk2, also 1080 camera) with 4K only tacked on as an extra "bonus" when you absolutely must use 4K.
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What you're saying makes sense, but part of the plan for me is that I will be doing away with the need for hiring a second camera for many interview situations, punching into the frame on a HD timeline. So I still need to be using the 4k footage and not just a HD pro-res or proxy file.

Nirv said:
The OP is severely drive limited so it's no wonder he's having issues which are only compounded by XAVC-L in PP.

My MBP eats 4K for breakfast off its internal flash drive (1.8GB/s) but I haven't bothered measuring the upper limit of streams.

XAVC-L is as optimised as it can be in FCPX but that doesn't mean it's as easy to work with as XAVC-I. FCPX has fall back positions if the footage is too heavy for the system, selecting better performance over better quality can help if not then there's the painless proxy workflow but neither measure can overcome a system with slow media drives.
Click to expand...

Yeah the internal drive has been one of the issues. All things considered I've ordered a suitable 2009 model mac pro for a reasonable price, taking into consideration it's a computer to marry with the FS5 and future proof me for the next 5+ years. I would have preferred to keep the imac, but for me managing a proxy workflow wasn't appealing in the slightest.
 
Are you buying the FS5 for it's smaller size? If not, why not pay up for the FS7, get a better and more easily editable codec and save on computer and HD upgrades?
 
The FS5 suits my needs more as a pick up and go camera, I do corporate video and weddings, a bit of everything really - except short film. I've considered the FS7 but the 5 is just better suited to me.
 
Modern compressed codecs are all about the processor speed and the NLE's software decoding. Drive speeds are irrelevant unless you have a lot of streams to edit at once. Old style spinning hard drives now easily do over 130MBps. Spend you bucks on processing speed.
 
mattjeh said:
What you're saying makes sense, but part of the plan for me is that I will be doing away with the need for hiring a second camera for many interview situations, punching into the frame on a HD timeline. So I still need to be using the 4k footage and not just a HD pro-res or proxy file.



Yeah the internal drive has been one of the issues. All things considered I've ordered a suitable 2009 model mac pro for a reasonable price, taking into consideration it's a computer to marry with the FS5 and future proof me for the next 5+ years. I would have preferred to keep the imac, but for me managing a proxy workflow wasn't appealing in the slightest.
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i have a 2009 Mac Pro 8 core, 2.93ghz / 32gb ram / GTX Titan X 12gb flashed from macvidcards. i recently was playing with 4k footage and having stuttering problems and it obviously led to lack of HD performance as the culprit being still on single 7200rpm drives which was no problem with 1080 but not getting it done with 4k. I'm not exclusively in 4k yet but here and there using some 4k in a 1080 timeline like your wanting to do. i bought a couple of SSD (OWC & Samsung EVO 850) and even without a RAID it was night and day difference via USB 3.0. need to get SATAIII going for even better performance though.

i also use several other cMP's (12 core and decked out) and find their performance very good as long as you have a chunky GPU. I've had bdundles of flashed GPU's, GTX 680 4gb / GTX 780 3gb and now the Titan to really handle Resolve 12 and ill tell you with 12gb vram its seriously powerful but not cheap.

its interresting all the pro & cons of FXPX. i downloaded it the day it came out and of course was not happy like most others. later i gave it a play again but can't get past some of its core structure but now...lol i just downloaded it again to have a look for the hell of it. I've been in PP happily and with the right GPU it is AMAZING!. still i can see FCPX workable if "one" is able to let go of some of their legacy memories. i highly doubt i will but am not surprised when i hear people that are very happy with it.

good luck!
david
 
I have two friends both with mac pros. One with a 2.66 12 core with a gtx780 6gb and one with a 3.46 12 core with an ATI radeon 5770 1gb. Using the same premiere sequence the 2.66 with 6gb vram played it without problems, but the beefier spec cpu rig with the 1gb card did struggle a little. Which confirms it's more about the graphics card than the cpu.

I've opted for a 3.33 12 core with a flashed cuda gta980 4gb. Im confident im set with a rig for the same life as the FS5, which has been the point from the start.
 
mattjeh said:
Yeah the internal drive has been one of the issues. All things considered I've ordered a suitable 2009 model mac pro for a reasonable price, taking into consideration it's a computer to marry with the FS5 and future proof me for the next 5+ years. I would have preferred to keep the imac, but for me managing a proxy workflow wasn't appealing in the slightest.
Click to expand...
This is the same thing I did, although it was easy for me as I already owned a 2009 single quad core (2.66ghz) Mac Pro.
I upgraded the CPU to a six core 3.46ghz ($230) and the GPU to a GTX 980 Ti (6GB). It runs Resolve 12 like it's
nothing now. I still need to get some SSD's but I find that it can pretty much handle anything right now.
I highly recommend joining this facebook group if you need advice on upgrading your old MacPro for use with
FCP X, Resolve, or Adobe. Most of the people in the group are video professionals.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/Mac.Pro.Upgrade/
 
alohype said:
What parameters? Could you share your knowledge?
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See this post: http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthrea...-Knees&p=1986586044&viewfull=1#post1986586044

I found a tuning that works. I changed two settings in the Debug Console, reachable by Control F12:

PlayerMain.MaxOutstandingPendingAheadOfPlayback = 30 ---change to 2
PlayerMain.MaxQueuedFrames = 300 --change to 2

Another thing to experiment with is MXFmaxFramestoScanForCaptions. Default is 5. Change to 1. Reduces startup delay/dropped frames at start.

For the first time, I'm getting through a 4K XAVC playback without dropping frames, and the startup was nearly instant.
It seems that the default pending/queued frames values are too high out of the box. Perhaps these were for spinning hard drives, but no good if your drives are SSDs.

I fiddled with these numbers a lot, mostly increasing them, thinking more was better. But tonight I got creative and tried setting to very low values and found I got faster startup and fewer dropped frames.

Another thing that can affect startup is DisableSpeculativePrefetching = false ---change to true and see if that also helps.

Normally, I see 150~ frames dropped in 18 minutes play and 150 frames dropped at start of play. I just finished an 18 minute program playout with zero dropped frames. Has Adjustment Layer with sharpening and some color correction, too.
 
Good points about the GPU. I am an Edius user and the GPU is not as important as with Premiere. Amend my post to read - spend your money on CPU & GPU before drives.
 
alohype said:
Very nice finds basspig :) Where I could find a whole list of available parameters?
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They're all there in the debug console. It may be necessary to open the menu at upper right on this window to get the right console view with editable list of parameters. Many are Boolean, others take numeric entries.
 
nyvz said:
Drive limited for 12.5MBps footage? I have a tough time believing any hard drive would ever be a bottleneck for playing back highly compressed 12.5MBps footage.
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You think using a system drive for editing multicam clips is not being drive limited? I can't remember ever thinking editing off a system drive was an acceptable course of action.
 
mattjeh said:
I would have preferred to keep the imac, but for me managing a proxy workflow wasn't appealing in the slightest.
Click to expand...

If you could warm towards FCPX there's absolutely managing of a proxy workflow other than flicking a switch and FCPX takes care of the rest behind the scenes.

I think you've made a great choice with the FS5 as when Sony release the RAW out it could be a better camera than the stock FS7 for a lot of people.
 
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