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

Someone who worked on the Premiere beta team told me this:

"Instead of CC2015, give 2014 a try. Everything I have read so far is that 2015 was a rush job by Adobe and not fully optimized yet and some multiprocessing stuff hasn't been re-implemented. It was more or less a ground-up rewrite that was rushed to get out before it was 100%. Or at least that is what I have inferred from my research."


​SO it appears that CC 2014 is less bug-ridden than 2015 and has more multiprocessor support. Ironic.
 
Numerous problems with MXF wrapped files in Premiere Pro:




[h=6]Re: XAVC UltraHD files playback problem[/h]
member_46x12.BWnew2.png
plus.one_12x12.BW.png
​

There have been other reports of poor playback of xavc/mxf files on this forum. But if it's a "known bug", Adobe has yet to acknowledge it.

Something similar occurs with plain AVC files: performance is sluggish on PPro, but highly responsive in other NLEs on the same machine. This situation has been going on for years now, through multiple PPro updates.

In other words, don't hold your breath, expecting a fix.



https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1583049
 
Last edited:
Well, i am having piss poor performance in PPro with XAVC-I at least.

4x RAID 5 disks with 800mb/s so its not the disks.

The performance is so bad, i might actually have to sell the FS7 in order to get a camera with a workable codec. How is this even possible when we are talking about two large manufacturers of professional film equipment and software?
 
I can't say what it is, but you're doing something wrong. I work with 4K and HD XAVC-I effortlessly with Premiere CC on a MacBook Pro using regular (non-raid) Thunderbolt and USB3.0 drives. Smooth as butter. The problem is someplace on your end.
 
To be honest martin, the fact that people with far far far lesser drives (and I'm going assume system?) are having it work with zero issues says there is more than likely a setup issue or a conflict.
 
Martin.G said:
Well, i am having piss poor performance in PPro with XAVC-I at least.

4x RAID 5 disks with 800mb/s so its not the disks.

The performance is so bad, i might actually have to sell the FS7 in order to get a camera with a workable codec. How is this even possible when we are talking about two large manufacturers of professional film equipment and software?
Click to expand...

I have a late 2013 iMac, nothing special - 24 gigs of RAM, the next option above stock Nvidia card and a stock G-Raid. When I first got, took it out of the box, installed Premiere and it's cuts 4K XAVC-I perfect. Runs smooth and problem free. It has to be your computer as mine is once again, nothing special.

Maybe Apple just fine tunes it specifically for graphic / video type work and PCs you probably have to customize it a bit more to get it working right.
 
Last edited:
I'm noticing a pattern here: all the folks with problems are running Premiere and Windows. All the folks that are reporting no issues are using Macbook pros. Could it be that the apps for editing are written that much better on the Mac side?

I myself am stumbling along with 23.98 footage. I find it impossible to play 59.94 footage. Oddly, I can scrub it smoothly in Premiere, but not in DaVinci Resolve. Neither Resolve nor Premiere can play the 60P 4K footage. DaVinci has no issues with handling 2-3 cameras of 4K 23.98FPS footage. Premiere can barely handle a single stream of 23.98P 4K. It also has problems with 1080P footage in this CODEC/wrapper. Ironically, I can overlay four 4K video streams and scale them to 25% using the presets and have them panning across the screen and play a 5th 4K stream underneath it without any worse frame dropping than with a single 4K stream. Common logic suggests that if one stream is dropping frames, the five streams ought to be impossible. But there it is.

I've been in a constant tech support dialog with Supermicro and nVidia and both have concluded that the software is to blame for my performance issues. Pudget Systems sells workstations like the one I built, for $30K, and they claim they are suitable for 4K editing and production work. Dual Xeons and a ton of RAM burn through complex 3D simulations and animation rendering like the proverbial hot knife through butter, but video editing seems to work best on overclocked gaming machines.

On the other hand, a buddy of mine relayed a conversation he had with a production person who works in Hollywood, to the tune that it takes six figures worth of hardware to edit 4K. I tend to give some weight to the opinion of a production person who's worked in Hollywood for many years on major films, but if others are editing smoothly on Macbook Pros, well.. then we need to find out each person's definition of 'smoothly'. For me, smoothly means that when I press 'play' in Premiere, playback commences immediately and the dropped frame indicator remains green. I get that with XDCam EX footage. With anything in the XAVC wrapper, be it 1080/24 or 4K /24, when I press 'play', the CTI moves and audio commences immediately, but five seconds pass and then the video displays another still frame, then another, and then finally, video playback commence. 96-154 frames reported dropped when I hover the mouse over the yellow dot. And it doesn't matter if it's a single stream with no effects, or 5 layers of 4K with sharpening and color correction. Both play the same... stutter, then smooth out.

That's not saying that it's impossible to edit 4K. It's just annoying. But I can still shuttle and scrub through footage. Will this make me sell my FS7? Probably not. I still love the images I get from this camera. But will I be shooting 4K at concerts next year? Probably not. I'll probably be shooting MPEG422 to maintain the editing flow in multiple camera shoots. Even if I had multiple FS7's. Just the data density alone would compel use of the lower bitrate CODEC. To heck with worrying about framing in post. I'll hire people to point and zoom, rather than do it in post, like an associate of mine likes to. He shoots corporate panel discussions with seven locked down cameras and then crops pans and reframes each shot in post.

As for 4K, it probably is best for feature film making, not something where you have multiple camera angles to run concurrently. Render out proxies if you need to see them in realtime.
 
50% of me made it thru this thread. 25% of me thinks that 90% of the people responding 75% of the time that an iMac would do it on the cheap. I'm going to stick with my hackintosh i7 32g GTX780 CS6, Zbrush64 4RU7, FCPX, LG 4k 10 bit Monitor, which I only use 20% of the time. Other than that, I'm 100% satisfied it plays XAVC as well as 16 bit Raw from the F5 Raw Recorder.
 
basspig said:
but if others are editing smoothly on Macbook Pros, well.. then we need to find out each person's definition of 'smoothly'. F
Click to expand...

Nirv said:
I'm editing 4k XAVC-I like it's DV. It couldn't be easier.
Click to expand...

When I said it's like editing DV, I mean it's like editing DV. As smooth as butter.

It rather looks like there's a business opportunity in Basspig's Locale for someone with a 5 year old Mac to provide 4K concerts that he can't.


Martin.G said:
Mac tax :grin: I love that, its spot on!

/Homebuild-enthusiast
Click to expand...

It's a tax is it? Who's laughing now?

Edit.

Before this becomes a Mac vs PC thread I know plenty of people using PCs and Prem without any issue at all.
 
Last edited:
Well there is nothing like the frustration of knowing you're on the hook for payments on a system that you can't use efficiently, that makes you want to put your fist through the monitor every time you boot it up, and you've just found out the RMA period has expired so you're stuck with it.
And now it's messing with me, daring me to smash it with a sledgehammer. It started booting up in 640x480 resolution again, moving my desktop to the 4K monitor (which is running at VGA resolution) and preventing my Wacom tablet from accessing the primary display area. And the folks at EVGA can't figure out how to fix this.
Sometimes a Core2Quad running Win 7 is the best thing out there for editing. Like my '59 VW Beetle, it's reliable and gets me there. I would have kept using it for another 8 years, except that now I need the equivalent of a bullet train to handle this 4K content.

Lesson: when you are wowed by a new camera format, make sure the back end hardware and software exist. Or consider a platform change.
Really, I don't like either one of them. My best years of computing were on a SPARCStation 4 with OpenWindows 4.11. Maybe there's a good market for a bunch of smart Russian programmers to write an Assember coded NLE that will edit 4K on a '386/33. I was able to do amazing stuff on a '286-8 in 1986 with TrueVision Image Processing Software and a TARGA32 graphics card. Seems we've gone backwards with bloatware-infested OS's that eat processor cycles and do relatively little actual work.
 
Nirv said:
It's a tax is it? Who's laughing now?

Before this becomes a Mac vs PC thread I know plenty of people using PCs and Prem without any issue at all.
Click to expand...

Yeah i can edit ProRes like butter. 4K 100fps not a problem.

Its something with the XAVC, and i dont want XAVC bad enough that i would buy a Mac for it. Its just that Sony forces it through their camera. Maybe they should force some other codec that actually work and people dont have problems with it :-(
 
I have posted my PC specs several times. For the most part I am running off a consumer USB3 raid and am having zero problems.

I also have a macbook pro which has nowhere near the grunt of my PC and that runs XVAC-I equally well.

Either there is a conflict, or people haven't added their GPU to the CUDA list text file or something weird is going on. I wonder if there's a bizarre codec pack trying to be used (from VLC or similar?) instead of the proper codecs...
 
basspig said:
Well there is nothing like the frustration of knowing you're on the hook for payments on a system that you can't use efficiently, that makes you want to put your fist through the monitor every time you boot it up, and you've just found out the RMA period has expired so you're stuck with it.
And now it's messing with me, daring me to smash it with a sledgehammer. It started booting up in 640x480 resolution again, moving my desktop to the 4K monitor (which is running at VGA resolution) and preventing my Wacom tablet from accessing the primary display area. And the folks at EVGA can't figure out how to fix this.
Sometimes a Core2Quad running Win 7 is the best thing out there for editing. Like my '59 VW Beetle, it's reliable and gets me there. I would have kept using it for another 8 years, except that now I need the equivalent of a bullet train to handle this 4K content.

Lesson: when you are wowed by a new camera format, make sure the back end hardware and software exist. Or consider a platform change.
Really, I don't like either one of them. My best years of computing were on a SPARCStation 4 with OpenWindows 4.11. Maybe there's a good market for a bunch of smart Russian programmers to write an Assember coded NLE that will edit 4K on a '386/33. I was able to do amazing stuff on a '286-8 in 1986 with TrueVision Image Processing Software and a TARGA32 graphics card. Seems we've gone backwards with bloatware-infested OS's that eat processor cycles and do relatively little actual work.
Click to expand...


You don't like your computer. You don't like your editing software. Why not just use lightworks on Linux and be done with it?
 
Ben Scott said:
Either there is a conflict, or people haven't added their GPU to the CUDA list text file or something weird is going on. I wonder if there's a bizarre codec pack trying to be used (from VLC or similar?) instead of the proper codecs...
Click to expand...

That does not sound too far off.

VLC also has choppy playback when playing XAVC. Problems seem similar.

Would you know how to identify and remove VLC codecs?
 
Have you tried completely removing all extraneous codecs and players and then testing premiere, before slowly re-adding stuff?
 
Im not an editor .. but following this thread .. and being software neutral .. the answer seems very obvious.. with all these camera,s plus F5/55 knocking out XAVC.. and everyone merrily editing away.. except for bass pig.Martin and a few others.. logic would conclude that there is nothing wrong with the codec XAVC.. and a lot wrong with the "setup" of those having trouble.. I rest my case ..
Basspig.. I feel frustrated even reading your posts.. actually trying to make a living with that thing must be driving you mad.. here is my sage advice for free.. unplug it all slowly.. take to dumpster.. put a cap in it if you feel the need.. eat the loan.. and start all over again with some advice from Ben..

The End
 
"Some conflict" has been my theory for the past month. Everyone I've talked to said dual Xeons should be able to handle several streams of 4K. Actually it does, if it's prores (actually UHD Prores from my Shogun recorder).

Re: VLC... once I figured out how to set it to use more than one thread, it plays XAVC 4K 23.98 smoothly. It can also play XAVC-L UHD, both 23.98 and 59.94 footage smoothly. However, it cannot manage XAVC-I 4K 59.94. Playback gets very choppy.

I installed nVidia's latest driver that came out yesterday and noted some slight improvements. But not consistent. I can play through the 18-minute car show timeline with as few as 7 dropped frames, but most of the time I average 36-54 dropped frames. Start up at the beginning of the timeline is very poor. However, if the CTI is sitting somewhere in the middle, I find it will start play and not drop any frames. This has me scratching the old head. What's different in the middle of a timeline vs. the beginning?

On the other hand, AfterEffects smashes through work like it's nothing on the dual Xeons. When I hit that "Ins" key to multiprocessor render the timeline, it's done in 3-4 seconds rather than the 30+ seconds my old machine took.

So performance is spotty. Some programs like Maya and AE run well, but some like Premiere, run poorly.
 
basspig said:
"Some conflict" has been my theory for the past month. Everyone I've talked to said dual Xeons should be able to handle several streams of 4K. Actually it does, if it's prores (actually UHD Prores from my Shogun recorder).
Click to expand...

I have the exact same problem as you basspig, and i have a vastly different setup so i think its software related somewhere. My next step is to do a clean install of Windows, with only Premiere Pro, to see if its PPro thats the problem or not.

My workstation is clutter free. I only edit on that machine. My other machine is my personal computer, where all my clutter and mess goes, so to avoid problems like this.

I am on a:

i7 3930K stock speeds
64gb ram at stock speeds
ATI R9 290x at stock speeds
PCI-E RAID card with 4x 4TB drives in RAID 5 giving enough data rate to cut online
USB sound card with monitors

I dont have dual cpus, i dont have nvidia, and i have the harddrives to mitigate any issues here. Odyssey 7Q prores 4K plays back silky smooth. XAVC does not.
 
Hi Martin,

Agreed, Adobe has screwed up royally with CC2015, but...

ATI AMD GPU (no CUDA for the Adobe Engine to work with), 4TB drives (likely to be Greens or Reds) so likely labouring I/O and/or variable disk speeds. And you do not say whether you're operating on CC2014 or CC2015. Once again, we appear to be getting half the picture.

I have been using Adobe since CS4 and have NOT had any issues in the past as is now being described, nor have I and some others here also. Yes, you will have a problem with XAVC with that setup, and like some others here you're only confusing things by giving comparison to Pro Res. XAVC is not ProRes. Yes, XAVC (like AVCHD before) will "stress test" your rig.

If you want to use Adobe CC2014 (see below) and the Sony XAVC codec then:

1. Replace the AMD GPU with Nvidia, GTX980 (or something better than a GTX680) and get CUDA into play. Not entriely sure the i7 will be happy with AMD sat on the PCI slots either - just a thought.
2. Run your HDD using Blacks SATA3 (even better, use SSDs). RAID 5? Hmm, with ONLY 4 drives, a lot of I/O activity going on there across drives. Might be better off using 4 x RAID 0. Interested to see your large block file size throughput on that. Did you stripe to 128Kb on installation? We also don't know whether you're clogging your PCIe lanes as some information is not forth-coming.

List your setup here (including your Mobo) https://forums.adobe.com/community/premiere/hardware_forum and you will receive similar advice

If you have subscribed to Adobe CC do NOT use CC2015 for the time being (roll back to CC2014 as I have) as Adobe are intergrating Lumetri Color and Lumetri Scopes (which I hate) into PremPro and it's causing (or has caused) lots of grief. I use De Vinci Resolve for my grading and my XAVC workflow is fine in a 10Bit high sample rate 4:2:2 workflow.

This thread was started telling us there is a problem with XAVC. Then this thread started to tell us there is a problem with Adobe. It appears that this thread does not know what it's telling us as one after another other issues have been introduced which have completey mudded the waters.

Sorry to hear of your issues, but it's not that hard surely?

Edit:

You know the i7 3930 only supports PCI version 2 bussing? If you're contemplating 4K XAVC then you should adopt PCI version 3 bussing. You are going to choke your PCI lanes otherwise and using a RAID controller in with this it's not going to handle all too well.

Claire :)
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top