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

Mark.. better alert Sony ASAP.. XAVC is total dog of a codec and they should re engineer it and re call all their camera,s..
 
Here's the thing: a single stream is okay. Hit play, drops about 9-10 frames and then no more dropped after that. It's as if something has to spool up.

Multicam editor however, is poor. Hit play, and it's a freeze-play-freeze-play at about one frame a second. BUT.. if I scrub the timeline with the mouse, playback is fluid and smooth in all camera source windows and on the 4K monitor with resolution set to Full. Setting resolution to 1/8 does not improve the playback in the slightest perceivable way. Scub is smooth, but hitting play doesn't work. Puzzling.
An already multicam edited timeline, in program monitor mode plays smoothly after an initial stutter at startup, but there's no way to do a multicam cut edit in realtime so far, due to the playback problem, although manual scrubbing works fine. I could scrub to the point where I want to make the cut to a different camera and do it that way, only thing is, no audio when I'm scrubbing.

Prores 422 is another story altogether. That plays like it's SD DV footage. I can even play it at 8X speed, four camera views and 4K display all outputting razor sharp images. My test footage is that 4th July walkabout handheld video, with lots of panning around, figuring it would put the most stress on the system. 0 frames dropped and only 5-7% CPU utilization at normal realtime playback. At 8X, it's around 55% CPU usage.

I'm sure the hardware is performing, but the software decoding of XAVC-I seems to be lacking.
 
basspig said:
Look at the 7th post. They are talking 150 grand for a 4k editing box.

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/277/31249
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It isn't just hardware you get when you buy a turnkey system you're paying for same day support if not within the hour support, the people buying these systems can be charging around £1k/hr for the equipment and talent for attended sessions which has serous financial implications when things go tits up. They will not be skipping frames... I'm not sure what the current Hr rate is for grading in Soho as no one seems to put their rate card up any more but the cost used to be even more eye watering.

The colourists are the premiere league footballers of VFX production the best commanding insane salaries because the advertisers know the pixie dust they sprinkle over the image works.
 
Would it be a good time to say I've not heard anyone refer to the i7 4770 as 'mighty' when it comes to a professional editing environment before?

That said, I've repeatedly listed my self-built PC's spec and it runs everything 4k super smoothly (Red, Pro Res, XVAC etc) and cost under £1,000.

The main components:

i7 5820k
Geforce 980 GTX
32 GB Ram
512Gb SSD
Fractal Design R4 case
Asus UHD 27" monitor connected via displayport

Then different lowish end raid drives for different projects.
 
Ben Scott said:
Would it be a good time to say I've not heard anyone refer to the i7 4770 as 'mighty' when it comes to a professional editing environment before?

That said, I've repeatedly listed my self-built PC's spec and it runs everything 4k super smoothly (Red, Pro Res, XVAC etc) and cost under £1,000.

The main components:

i7 5820k
Geforce 980 GTX
32 GB Ram
512Gb SSD
Fractal Design R4 case
Asus UHD 27" monitor connected via displayport

Then different lowish end raid drives for different projects.
Click to expand...

What motherboard is your PC based on?
 
Ben Scott said:
Would it be a good time to say I've not heard anyone refer to the i7 4770 as 'mighty' when it comes to a professional editing environment before?
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:Drogar-BigGrin(DBG)

I am looking forward to seeing how my 3930K with 64gb ram and AMD R9 290x will handle the XAVC.

Prores has been like butter.

Anyone have good XAVC files on Dropbox they could share so i can test?
 
I'm fairly certain this is some hardware or software conflict. Start of playback drops 72-96 frames, then after the initial 4 second hang, playback of video begins and doesn't drop any additional frames for the remaining 18 minutes.
If I press "L" four times, it plays back at 8X normal speed. CPU use is 22% and playback appears smooth. It's just that initial startup that's a problem.
 
Ben Scott said:
Sounds like your drives are the issue.
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XAVC is not that drive intensive. If it's the drives, then how is it possible that I can play uncompressed 4K that I rendered from Maya 2015 as an uncompressed AVI file, but XAVC stutters? I have very fast SSD drives on 6GB/s SATA ports. This is a server grade motherboard with extra PCI lanes, more than double that found on X99 motherboards.

The stutter problem is inconsistent. That is, if I let it sit for a minute and then start play, the CTI moves and sound plays, but the video is frozen for 3-4 seconds. If I stop and start again, it immediately starts up like it should. If I let it play, it plays the whole 18 minutes with no dropped frames. I can play it at 8X (press L four times) and it plays smooth.

I can also do multicamera Prores 422 at full resolution with the four views on the 2.5K display and the 4K output on the 4K monitor, running in native 4K resolution. I can play four streams of Prores 422 at 8X in multicamera, smoothly. So no, I doubt that my SSD array isn't fast enough.

The startup lag suggests a process that's going to sleep and is slow to wake up. Once waked up, startup of play is responsive. I can stop and start the playback of XAVC and it's perfectly responsive. But go on a coffee break while it's paused and come back, start play and it stumbles for the first 3 seconds. Baffling.
 
well everything you are describing is exactly what happens when you have a drive issue or a drive with insufficient sustained throughput. I had it for ages until I started cutting on fast G Raids instead of what I had before.

I assume you have turned all power saving settings off at a drive and system level, and that they aren't your system drive or scratch disk drive?
 
Ben Scott said:
well everything you are describing is exactly what happens when you have a drive issue or a drive with insufficient sustained throughput. I had it for ages until I started cutting on fast G Raids instead of what I had before

I assume you have turned all power saving settings off at a drive and system level, and that they aren't your system drive or scratch disk drive?
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Did you read the part where i said the drives have no problem with UNCOMPRESSED 4k?

I've turned off much of the power saving stuff at the BIOS level, but I can't seem to solve the processor clock idling issue. When I start playback, CPU usage shoots to 100% for 3 seconds then drops to 18% as soon as the video unfreezes. At the same time, I'm watching CPU-Z report the clock speeds. It's at 1200MHz for 2-3 seconds and jumps to 2600MHz as soon as the video unfreezes. No, it's not a disc problem. Some process is hanging up the CPU at that instant.

I have a hunch.. going to run Prime95 in the background and try this test again..
 
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Anyone else format their video drives as GPT partitions instead of MBR? I'm thinking that this is the one thing I did differently on this build. Wondering if I should reformat the drives as MPR.. Even low bitrate 1080P XAVC is dropping frames. If it's a drive issue, it must be a compatibility problem between the motherboard and the drive itself.
 
Try changing the memory allocation to premiere. If you have it using up most of the RAM decrease the amount. I know there is a nasty memory leak in the version of Adobe Media Emcoder that is psrt of CS6. That may slso be inherent in PPro CS6.

That stuff about the MBR doesn't matter at all. Block allocation size has the most effect on video throughput. But as you said XAVC isn't that media intensive.

Edit:

read 1st post and see this is for a current version of Premiere. I would still try changing the memory allocating a few times to see where the sweet spot is before reformatting drives.
 
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I had that thought too.. I reserved 96GB for other applications, leaving 32GB for Premiere. It uses less RAM now, but I see no improvement in performance, especially startup lag. Should I reduce it more? My old machines only had 8GB and Premiere ran fine on them for 1080 work. What's really strange is this new system drops more frames on 1080 HD XAVC than on 4K XAVC.

CS6 behaves strangely on this new system too.. every time I start play, the dropped frames indicator turns yellow. When I hover the mouse, it says some absurd number like 1989 frames dropped--and the video is playing smoothly and I'd just started two seconds ago, so even if it dropped 100% of the frames, that number could be only 48 frames!

On another IT forum for servers, it was suggested that the motherboard BIOS is at fault and that a BIOS update may fix the problem.

So many variables.. the RAM is the only thing that was on the motherboard vendor's approved and tested list. Video card is not mentioned, nor are the SSD drives. That doesn't mean they're incompatible, but it just means that Supermicro hasn't tested them with this board. But there could be subtle issues with some low level system communication that have to be discovered and resolved.
 
basspig said:
I had that thought too.. I reserved 96GB for other applications, leaving 32GB for Premiere. It uses less RAM now, but I see no improvement in performance, especially startup lag. Should I reduce it more? My old machines only had 8GB and Premiere ran fine on them for 1080 work. What's really strange is this new system drops more frames on 1080 HD XAVC than on 4K XAVC.

CS6 behaves strangely on this new system too.. every time I start play, the dropped frames indicator turns yellow. When I hover the mouse, it says some absurd number like 1989 frames dropped--and the video is playing smoothly and I'd just started two seconds ago, so even if it dropped 100% of the frames, that number could be only 48 frames!

On another IT forum for servers, it was suggested that the motherboard BIOS is at fault and that a BIOS update may fix the problem.

So many variables.. the RAM is the only thing that was on the motherboard vendor's approved and tested list. Video card is not mentioned, nor are the SSD drives. That doesn't mean they're incompatible, but it just means that Supermicro hasn't tested them with this board. But there could be subtle issues with some low level system communication that have to be discovered and resolved.
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Mark,

Against my better judgement I am responding to this because something in your post is not consistant - something is not quite right in what you're telling us. But I truly want to help you...

First you tell us about a friend's system you built:
This system has 32GB RAM, an i7-4770 CPU at 4GHz and a GTX680 GPU, plus all drives are SSD's.

And that systen won't play 4K XAVC etc. Now you're talking about 192GB* of System RAM.
I certainly don't know what this thread has to do with the FS7 as it's progressed, and likely a Moderator will move this to the Prem Pro Software section.

The Intel i7-4770 Quad Core will not run 192Gb* RAM (it is far from "Mighty"). In fact that chip with the 1150 footprint/socket will only multi-thread (8Mb Caching) with 32Gb tops - a well passed-it Northbridge configuration. So I have no idea why you think this is "top drawer" or "mighty".

I suggest you get to read Haarm Millard's papers and posts about the hardware setups for Prem Pro - Google him. You clearly are making a simple issue complicated (as ever).

If you truly want people to help you (rather than to espouse technical gobble-d'gook of the irrelevance) post your system specs - include the make of the MoBo and the RAM. Also your storage arrangement and how this is configured over your requirements: OS, Scratch and Project Cache and RAID arrangement.

One thing you have to know about Adobe Prem Pro is its heavy reliance upon Caching and the Adobe Cache File system when utilising playback - I'm not talking about System File Cache - separate thing.

Be simple, and do not complicate this if you want people here to genuinely help you.

Claire

*Correction: Of course it should read 128Gb RAM not 192Gb.
 
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Anothter thought and forgive me if you have mentioned this previously... The PCI slots that are occupied on the machine. If you have slow cards in the 16 lane slots it will bog down the 16 lane PCI cards like the video card. Do you have another 1 lane or 4 lane, etc type cards in the 16 lane PCI slots? and do you have the video card in slot #1, the closest to the CPU? If you are unclear as to the speed of your slots, simply have the GPU in slot one an no other PCI cards and try things out.

EDIT:

Adding to Claire's above post which I just read. I would also suggest to those setting up Premiere Pro machines to read the DaVinci Resolve Windows Configuration Guide when specifying machine parts as many will likely be using resolve and the requirements to a degree will be similar as they both require CUDA or OpenGL to process the video that is streaming and being processing through the GPU(s). Slot placement of the GPU does differ between Premiere and Resolve, as well Sony's Catalyst Browse (this is a Sony based thread) utilizes the CUDA/OpenGL as well. As an illustration, I am using a Asus P9x79 motherboard, a four year old design and it is still performing well with Premiere Pro, Resolve and Catalyst Browse. I also have a BM display card, a FW card, 4 MIDI controllers and 2 audio interfaces to potentially muck things up and it still operates like a champ with all the apps I use including Premiere, Resolve and several DAWs. And yes on Windows.
 
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