two magic bullet look's questions

J

joker454

Well-known member
I've just started using Premiere Pro CS5 and I have the Magic Bullet Looks trial, two quick questions on it.

1) The videos I've seen with it show it working in real time, but on my machine it's running very choppy. Are all the different looks supposed to play back in realtime, or just some of them? For example I tried the dream look and the performance is very bad, but then I watch a tutorial on youtube and that user is showing it running realtime. My machine is a core i7-2600k sandy bridge running at 4.4ghz, and my gpu is an nvidia gtx 470 1280mb which I thought would have been enough unless I have a setting wrong. During playback my cpu cores go up but no where near max, and my gpu use climbs to around 20%. Without looks I can playback my avchd videos realtime.

2) Is there any way to playback the video while trying different looks right in the looks editor, or do you have to go to the editor, pick a look, click ok to get rid of the editor, try the video, rinse and repeat?
 
That sounds like a pretty solid system. I use looks with cs5 and in premiere I usually click on video effects and scroll down to magic bullets. When you click on it, it will bring you to a seperate screen. You can get previews of the different looks there in photo format. And then you can apply it by clicking okay. Then you export your footage like normal and watch. It should come out decent. Are these the steps you've gone through?
 
Yeah similar to those steps. I opened the effects browser, found looks, and dragged it to my video clip to apply it. Then I select that video clip and in the 'effect controls' window I select 'Looks' and click edit, which brings up the looks window that lets me select all the predefined looks. I was hoping I could right in that window watch the video play, but it just shows a still picture of wherever you are in your video currently. I can work with that if needbe, but it would have been cool if I could have played back the video right then and there.

Regarding the speed, here's one of the many videos I've seen that shows it working in realtime:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8m5b6xxF2o

Hence why I'm confused as to why my gpu can't do that, unless the 470 doesn't have enough grunt to handle it. Still though...that video is with red 4k footage and I'm only using avchd footage, so the 470 should be ok. Here's one more video showing realtime looks:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPCI2tqK9IY&feature=channel

...near 1:24. I tried the same 'Neo' look on my footage and while is plays smoother than the "Dream" look, it's still a bit choppy. Gpu is at around ~48% use with the Neo look. Maybe I just need a gtx 580 instead?
 
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As far as I've seen so far it just show a still as a sample and then you need to apply to see the video. I haven't seen the videos played in the display screen and I don't think they do.
 
On video 1 there is no MB involved, just normal color correction, which is a realtime Mercury "effect".

Video 2 is not Premiere but After Effects and the guy says it doesn't play in realtime, but like 15 frames per second.

Usualy it depends on how much and which effect modules you use in MB. Some are almost realtime, some need too much crunching.

But actually MB is not a Mercury supported plug in.

Frank
 
Postmaster said:
On video 1 there is no MB involved, just normal color correction, which is a realtime Mercury "effect".

Video 2 is not Premiere but After Effects and the guy says it doesn't play in realtime, but like 15 frames per second.

Usualy it depends on how much and which effect modules you use in MB. Some are almost realtime, some need too much crunching.

But actually MB is not a Mercury supported plug in.

Frank
Click to expand...

Oh...didn't realize that. I assumed it was using the video card as the gpu load goes up to ~50% on some of the 'looks' filters whereas my cpu cores always stay fairly low. Hmm, I wonder then why it makes so little use of my cpu's if it doesn't support the gpu at all, very strange. Ok, then Magic Bullet Looks won't work, I'll try the default color tools since those support gpu. Is there a respository of effect filters someplace for Premiere Pro CS5 that anyone can use? For example, I also use Vegas Pro 10 and I installed this lady's presets:

http://vimeo.com/3323463

...and they appear as filters in my effects menu that I can easily add. Is there an equivalent website for Premiere Pro where one can go and download filter presets? Vegas Pro 10 actually uses all my cpu cores, they all get pegged at 100% when applying those effects but it's still not a good enough frame rate to be useable for work. So I'm hoping I can get a realtime solution with Premiere Pro. Looks like I have to stick with it's default tools since only those support gpu, but I'm not a color expert so I'm not sure how to make these types of filters myself. That's why I was hoping Magic Bullet Looks would have worked since they do the work to make nice presets, but it's too slow to be useable :(
 
Looks is not accelerated by Adobe's Mercury Playback Engine, but it still runs primarily on the GPU.

You can't get a video preview in Looks Builder, only a still shot. To see each look in motion, you will have to close Looks Builder.
 
I have the same issue with my system (dual quad core xeon/24gb RAM/GTX 470) so it's not your system.

Be careful when viewing videos, as many of them show AE, not premiere pro. AE's RAM preview is much faster than just hitting the space bar in PP.
 
Ok makes sense, thanks for the help. I guess I fell for the 'mercury playback engine' hype in that I stupidly thought it applied to Premiere Pro CS5, when in reality it applies only to a small subset of effects. My mistake, I should have researched it more :( Anyways I found a workaround. I quickly get a general look from Magic Bullet Looks trial and then screen shot it. Then I ditch looks and quickly match the effect using standard gpu accelerated effects of Premier Pro CS5. Once I have that approximation, then I spend a lot of time tweaking it to look exactly as I want for a given video that I'm working with. Sounds clunky but for me it works as I do not have the ability to get the look I want when my video is playing back at 4fps, this way I can watch my video full resolution and full framerate so I can get a feel if I truly like the look or need to keep tweaking it. Fortunately many of the important effects on PP5 are indeed gpu accelerated so this method will work for me, and save me a few hundred bucks in the process by not needing to buy Looks. When they add gpu support in Looks I will definitely buy it though as it is a badass program, but unfortunately for me it's unuseable for real work without gpu support. I'm still really happy with Premiere Pro though since if I did this type of color work on Vegas my machine would crawl, so PP5 was a great buy.

I still wish there was a repository of color effect presets someplace on the internet as can be found for Vegas, but I guess maybe PP5 users tend to be more pro and hence don't share that sort of thing :(
 
Looks not only 'has' GPU support, but it runs on OpenGL, so it has 'only' GPU support.

You'll notice when exporting out two clips, one with Looks and one without, that your CPU usage drops to almost nil when export hits the Looks clip. That's because Looks (and Colorista) are processed on the GPU, not the CPU. Always have been.
 
I meant during editing, not export. During editing is where I really need gpu support. During export gpu support is nice but no where near as critical, at least not for what I do.
 
Looks and Colorista are always processed on the GPU, whether for real time playback or export. Has always been that way. Your only chance of getting it to perform faster is a better GPU. However, the 470 is a pretty damn good card. You're not likely to find anything that offers a huge improvement over that. Small improvements, maybe. But not huge.

If you need to see Looks in motion, and your GPU just can't handle it, render.
 
Hmm, you sure? I ask because my gpu meter doesn't go up a lot during playback in PP5 with Looks. For example if I play a normal video in PP5 my gpu use goes to around ~12%. Then if I add say the "telecine net warm" effect from Looks to that video and play again in the editor, gpu use only goes to ~21%. So looks is only adding ~9% load to the gpu. Given that video work is heavily parallel, doesn't that seem really low to you? More imporantly is my cpu use though. When I play that normal video all my cpu cores are < 20% load. But when I enable the "telecine net warm" effect from Looks and play, then my cpu cores jump between 40% and 70% use. To me both of those conditions indicate that Looks is not entirely being process on gpu. Every one of it's effects has multiple steps it needs to create the desired look, and my guess is that some of those steps have been ported to work on gpu while others still work exclusively on cpu. That would explain why with the "telecine net warm" effect my gpu use only goes up ~9%, whereas my cpu use goes up ~20% to ~50%.

Does that make sense? Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but everything I'm seeing on my machine implies that Looks is heavily using my cpu cores during playback, whereas it's leaving my gpu mostly idle. The only case I've seen so far from looks that taxes my gpu more is the "neo" effect. Gpu use goes up to ~49%, but again even with that effect use of my cpu cores still goes up a bit. So whereas 'telecine net warm' gives me ~4fps, 'neo' give me ~15fps. My guess is that perhaps more of the individual steps of the 'neo' effect run on gpu hence why the gpu use goes up much more, and hence why it gets a semi decent playback fps.
 
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My CPU remains low and so does my GPU (GTX 470 also)...I gave up trying to figure it out and just add Looks as the very last thing before rendering.

Maybe it's a bug in Looks; I don't know. I can't even SCRUB the clip with Looks applied to it.
 
I have the same exact problem. I just nest my final edit then I open another sequence and apply looks in that sequence. It's still choppy but not as much as it was before.
 
I suspect the entire Red Giant MB Suite has some issues with CS5. Looks runs like crap...unless I apply a very basic effect, I can't even SCRUB the clip without rendering because it freezes.

Also, I try using the Denoiser in AE and it just crashes AE. I sent them an email and they said they "we have tested this and have been able to duplicate it...however, no ETA on a fix at this time"....WTF?
 
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