FS7: XAVC-I Brings Even the Mighty i7-4770 to its Knees

bengiles said:
All you "smooth as butter" boys and girls:

FCP X or Prem Pro or <insert name of NLE>?

Ta.
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FCPX and Resolve UHD flavour of 4K at 25 fps without resorting to Better Performance setting. On Macbook Pro 2015 and Mac Pro 2010 with GTX 680.

When I was researching the camera I downloaded several 4K clips that did not playback well on the 2010 Mac Pro but material straight out of the my camera edits fine so I can only assume the downloaded files had been recompressed to a codec flavour not quite so agreeable.

The Macbook Pro certainly gives the impression it has enough headroom to laugh in the face of 8K too.
 
We have a dedicated editing machine at our shop, but the machine on my desktop is a 27" iMac with:
3.4 GHz Intel Core i7
16GB of RAM
AMD Radeon 6970m 1GB

In addition, I have an Gigabit ethernet connection to a server with all of my media. If I open a project in Premiere CC 2015, load two clips of UHD XAVC-I from the server, and stack them in the timeline (with the top clip at 50% opacity), I can playback without problems. I do have the playback setting at 1/2. When I add a third clip (once again with 50% opacity), it begins to jump a little, but not much.

On a more powerful machine, you shouldn't have any problems.
 
i pretty much can't get my 2014 2.8 i7 MBP to choke in FCPX....i have tried....it plays back 10 layers of 4k 60fps (alldifferent opacity with effects applied)....this is on the better performance setting which looks pretty perfect to me in playback....premiere (latest version) was pretty bumpy for me, resolve 12 beta does not seem to play XAVC-I files but maybe that is because i am also running the el capitan beta?
either way: XAVC-I and fcpx are a dream....
 
Paul schefz said:
i pretty much can't get my 2014 2.8 i7 MBP to choke in FCPX....i have tried....it plays back 10 layers of 4k 60fps (alldifferent opacity with effects applied)....this is on the better performance setting which looks pretty perfect to me in playback....premiere (latest version) was pretty bumpy for me, resolve 12 beta does not seem to play XAVC-I files but maybe that is because i am also running the el capitan beta?
either way: XAVC-I and fcpx are a dream....
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Now this I don't believe. Even if each clip were hosted on a separate SSD drive, no laptop computer is going to have the horsepower to play ten streams of 4K.
 
basspig said:
I'm following the CC fiasco on Adobe forums, and I've cited it as another reason why I myself don't move off of CS6. But my friend already has a subscription for CC and he's got 2015 in there with the July 27 update. If it were me, I'd be on CS6, as he has no need to edit XAVC at the moment.
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Then Mark, I have no idea why you have started this thread other than to tell us you have a friend come around for training on Adobe CC 2015 (when all you are experienced in is CS6 - apparently).

It just appears this thread is yet another to tell us about your findings - in this case the title of the thread "XAVC-I Even Brings The Mighty i7 4770 To Its Knees" - so there must be something wrong with XAVC. How about there is something wrong with your PC build perhaps?

I find the GTX680 perfectly adequate for UHD Prores on my quad core from 2007... But we're seeing XAVC 4K nailing the CPU usage to 100% for two streams... UHD is not 4K and Pro Res is not XAVC - so please can we compare like for like before judgement is passed on a codec judged in addition against another variable: your "build". Forgive me if I appear to call you out on this.

A number of people here, including myself, have told you the XAVC is a very manageable codec on current edit systems. You also know about the CC 2015 issues. And I would also like to add, just because you are using SSDs does not mean you do not have a bottleneck in I/O. But then I like to keep it simple.

:)

Claire
 
I started this thread to discuss the matter in the title. XAVC does present a serious challenge to hardware.
Someone I communicate offline with in the LA area told me that it takes six figures in hardware investment to edit the stuff. I'm beginning to believe he's right about that.

I pointed out the Prores example because it proves that the GPU is not the bottleneck. Prores plays fine on a GTX680 with low GPU utilization. XAVC bottlenecks at the i7 CPU as the utilization is high.

I'm having a completely different problem on dual Xeons: I can't get beyond 3-5% CPU and 1% GPU on the Titan X, yet playback is very poor in Prores. I have some tweaking to do to make Premiere wake up the CPUs, which seem not to come out of idle state (clocks stay at 1200MHz most of the time, instead of turboing up to full speed). I think I can solve this in power management tweaks and the registry to force prevent core parking. The machine crushes BiFrost simulations and Mentalray renders at staggering speeds, and utilizes over 90% across all cores, but not Premiere and not VLC Media player. Seems like these apps can't find the gas pedal on my new Ferrari.
 
Anyone who buys a massively multicore server grade CPU and expects Workstation performance generally gets a surprise when they discover most tasks are still single threaded. The single threaded performance will be very poor and this will kill all the interactive tasks but hey it's not like I didn't mention it in another thread.

That 18 core Xeon is clocked little over 2 GHz and its turbo mode is pathetic which means everything is compromised especially that Titan. That CPU for most realtime interactive tasks is a robin reliant not a Ferrari.

Please do not take this as a platform war, I'm happy to use either when needed but Apple have nailed FCPX. the flash drive in my MBP is 2x as fast as the nMP and as yet I haven't found its limit in normal work.

 
basspig said:
Now this I don't believe. Even if each clip were hosted on a separate SSD drive, no laptop computer is going to have the horsepower to play ten streams of 4K.
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The clips are either on my internal drive or on a TB2 LaCie rack raid.....I believe the internal drive is actually faster....when I said 10 I really meant that this was when I stopped adding clips because I just could not slow it down.....
there are a couple of optical effects that manage to slow things down but the clips straight from the camera...it's insane....

it all comes down to how things are managed and how apps are written.....I can cut 4K clips from my FS7 but simple flash videos bog the whole machine down....every adobe app I have seems to be at least twice as hard on my machines as other apps doing the same thing.....easiest example is acrobat vs preview....its just a joke....


i of of course have to add that transcoding the files is nowhere near real time...
 
Liam Hall said:
This thread is too funny. Pay the Mac tax. Buy some Thunderbolt2 drives. Move on.
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I honestly think that the iMacs are an incredible value for what they offer....they aren't for everyone and everything but if they fit into your workflow, they are hard to beat....

and yes....storage/speed discussions are pretty much over....TB2 raid5 and done....
 
The impetus to go with dual Xeons came from Puget Systems' tests comparing a low end Xeon to the high end of the i7 line. i7 5960X is compared against Xeon E5-1660 v3. The 1660 is an entry level CPU on the Xeon lineup.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Intel-CPUs-Xeon-E5-vs-Core-i7-634/


And you wan to hear something really ironic?

I suspected it was a CPU core parking issue (Windows energy saving crap), and thought.. "hmm, what if I disable most of the cores and just use four?" So I was able to do that in BIOS, under CPU options. I reduced the number of available cores to four and rebooted.

Well, I'll be darned.. before I disabled 75% of the system's cores, Playing ten seconds of video dropped 87 frames.
After disabling most of the cores and just leaving 4 operational from BIOS, I saw smooth playback for the first time ever. It stuttered briefly at the beginning (10 frames dropped) and played smoothly for the entire ten minute sequence consisting of 2 dozen clips. At the end, 46 frame total, were dropped. CPU utilization went from 3% with all cores running, to 40% with 4 cores running. Very similar to my friend's i7-4770 based system with 32GB RAM.

So now I know it's not a matter of insufficient processor clock speed. In fact, according to Intel, some instructions execute at 16 instructions per clock on the v3 Xeons.

I am aware, from watching test data from a dual 18-core Xeon-based system, that Premiere is limited to 36 threads, and that hyperthreading must be disabled to use that many cores. I am well under that limit with only 32 thread execution.

I think the real issue is in the bowels of Windows.. CPU core parking, SpeedStep and other energy-saving junk that I must disable in order to fix this. I know that my old Core2Quad wouldn't play UHD video until I disabled core parking and speedstep in the Windows registry. I obtained much of that information from a lengthy discussion thread on machine optimization for gaming. There is much under the hood that can be optimized in Windows 7. I saw a 50% improvement in frame rate on the Core2Quad (build in 2007) just by tweaking the OS. But disabling most of my cores has made me realize that the Xeon is plenty fast. It's a resources assignment issue. The OS thinks it's idle when Premiere is playing, and the CPU clock goes to standby speeds (1200MHz). If I can disable that stuff, it may change everything.
 
basspig said:
The impetus to go with dual Xeons came from Puget Systems' tests comparing a low end Xeon to the high end of the i7 line. i7 5960X is compared against Xeon E5-1660 v3. The 1660 is an entry level CPU on the Xeon lineup.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Intel-CPUs-Xeon-E5-vs-Core-i7-634/


And you wan to hear something really ironic?

I suspected it was a CPU core parking issue (Windows energy saving crap), and thought.. "hmm, what if I disable most of the cores and just use four?" So I was able to do that in BIOS, under CPU options. I reduced the number of available cores to four and rebooted.

Well, I'll be darned.. before I disabled 75% of the system's cores, Playing ten seconds of video dropped 87 frames.
After disabling most of the cores and just leaving 4 operational from BIOS, I saw smooth playback for the first time ever. It stuttered briefly at the beginning (10 frames dropped) and played smoothly for the entire ten minute sequence consisting of 2 dozen clips. At the end, 46 frame total, were dropped. CPU utilization went from 3% with all cores running, to 40% with 4 cores running. Very similar to my friend's i7-4770 based system with 32GB RAM.

So now I know it's not a matter of insufficient processor clock speed. In fact, according to Intel, some instructions execute at 16 instructions per clock on the v3 Xeons.

I am aware, from watching test data from a dual 18-core Xeon-based system, that Premiere is limited to 36 threads, and that hyperthreading must be disabled to use that many cores. I am well under that limit with only 32 thread execution.

I think the real issue is in the bowels of Windows.. CPU core parking, SpeedStep and other energy-saving junk that I must disable in order to fix this. I know that my old Core2Quad wouldn't play UHD video until I disabled core parking and speedstep in the Windows registry. I obtained much of that information from a lengthy discussion thread on machine optimization for gaming. There is much under the hood that can be optimized in Windows 7. I saw a 50% improvement in frame rate on the Core2Quad (build in 2007) just by tweaking the OS. But disabling most of my cores has made me realize that the Xeon is plenty fast. It's a resources assignment issue. The OS thinks it's idle when Premiere is playing, and the CPU clock goes to standby speeds (1200MHz). If I can disable that stuff, it may change everything.
Click to expand...

I get it now: it is not about the computer helping you, it's about you helping the computer.
 
broughtonfilm said:
I get it now: it is not about the computer helping you, it's about you helping the computer.
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slow_clap_citizen_kane.gif
 
Nirv said:
@Basspig Have you turned it off and on again?
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Several times.


XAVC is proving to be a real issue. Either the decoding is really duff, or it's just bad all around.


I'm testing now with four 4K Prores streams and they are playing as effortlessly as standard def DV footage. Four streams playing, 7% CPU use, and no dropped frames. If I attempt to play 4 streams of XAVC 4K, the system can't do it.. CPU hovers in the high 90% range and it plays a series of freeze frames. BUT... here is the kicker: if I SCRUB the timeline with the mouse at a steady pace, I can see smooth playback of all four video sources in the multicam monitor and on the 4K program monitor. It's when I hit the play button that it freezes and jumps and freezes repeatedly, giving me about 1 still frame per second. Scrubbing the timeline, I get a smooth motion picture on all four source monitors. I don't get it.

Memory usage with XAVC-I streams was surpassing 82GB. With Prores streams, it's steady at 16.1GB.

For now, it looks like Prores HQ is the way to go, despite the larger file sizes.
 
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