performance advise CS5.5 R3D Files

[Sebastian Cepeda]

Hi everyone,

Im having some troubles with my CS5.5 and R3D files that my Mac wont realy play them. Its stuttering the whole time.
Here my setup and way of work:
Mac Pro 6-Core Intel Xeon (2x2.93GHz)
12 GB Ram
ATI Radeon HD 5770
NVIDIA Quadro 4000
2x G-Speed es (http://www.g-technology.com/products/g-speed-es.cfm) via SAS

Just to say, everything works flawlessly on DaVinci Resolve at 2K without stuttering or anything at around 10nodes. No Blur node...
With CS5.5 im having a lot of troubles, first I started with a 4K sequence and then I though of going to FullHD R3D (like Output) but it still has some troubles with playback.
I have to say I edit a lot of musicvideos and I work with around 10 video layers, eventhough many of them arent visible. I work with 1/4 resolution on playback

Is there anything I can do/change to make it work better? What about more RAM or even an SSD for the software? would that help?
I would love to get me a RED Rocket but my actual budget wont allow me that for now...

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

thanks in advance!!

[Paul Russell]

Without a Red Rocket you're going to have to transcode or work with proxies. Even with a Red Rocket you would suffer with that many layers

[Sebastian Cepeda]

So I do need to work with 2-3 layers max? That really sucks cose I want to have many performances that I can back and forth without having to resync and search for everything.
I guess I will do different sequences and on the "final cut sequence" just stay at around 2-3 layers...hope that helps.

So RAM and SSD wouldnt help at all eh?

[Andy White]

If you want to work with 10 layers stacked, why not just make SD proxies and re-link when you're happy with the edit (ie off-line and on-line).

Before you went R3D, what process and resolution where you using? 10 stacked layers of 4K is a lot of data on a timeline.

You say all is flawless on Resolve in 2K - is that with the same stacked timeline?

[Paul Russell]

@Sebastian: Not much. It's all about disc throughput. And Premiere is really inefficient and doesn't use multi-processing environments very well.

[Lliam Worthington]

I recently reconfigured my system to greatly increase my render times and performance.

First though, yes more RAM will help in my experience, max it out, as this the cheapest way to get better performance for $ value.
You may only be accessing a part of your machines power, but 12Gb of RAM is not a lot for a 4K workflow.
Second is to go in and configure your multicore settings and experiment with what is giving you the best results.

Read through this thread and experiment with different settings.

http://blogs.adobe.com/toddkopriva/2...-feedback.html

Also you can look at going into preferences and increasing your disk cache size, it may even be full if it's set low, and I would recommend cleaning your database and cache. (Just hit said button)
Moving your caches to different drives can help with performance too.

I'm not an expert by any means, but have travelled this road and it has made a considerable performance difference.

Best Wishes

Lliam

[Sebastian Cepeda]

@Andy: I used to work with HD formats of all kinds and even RED ONE MX at 36mb/s. now im working with 6:1 codec, yeah I thought of going Offline/online but couldnt wait 24hours to transcode to start editing thats why i went straight online...
Now I deleted a couple of layers and its playing way better, guess will need to start cutting down layers to work more efficent.
With davinci I had max 2 layers. thats of course a huge difference.

@Paul: thanks again for your help.

[Joseph Coleman]

When you create a new project do you have Mercury playback set to hardware? On my pc with one hexcore i7 and a gtx 580 I get real time at 1/2 res for most stuff, once I start adding a lot of layers and effects I go down to 1/4 and It will play anything i throw at it without ram previewing. I'd say if your really using 10 layers of video stacked on top of each other you may just have to be more clean in your editing. I doubt you have 10 video streams playing at once unless your doing some PIP stuff, even then I would do that in AE. But if thats the case then just knock it down to 1/8 in those cases. I get realtime on a macbook pro with 1/8th, your computer should have no problem with that.

[Sebastian Cepeda]

Hi Joseph,

The problem is somehow I cant go down to 1/8 that option is gray, maybe cose im using a FULLHD R3D sequence? I have many layers cose I take different performances from the artist, sync them and then I can go through the song picking the best part of him singing and "story". Otherwise I have to be looking for exactly the same part I need and sync it and add it to the sequence. On my timeline I have for example: CUs, MS, Wideshot, and then I can cut between them to be a bit faster, normaly without any problems.
GPU Hardware is active...

[Brad Allen]

This might be a frustrating test for you to try Sebastian but why don't you try copying all footage into a 720p timeline and then "scale to frame size" on all of it. (Select it all > Right Click > Scale to Frame Size).

This will force Premiere to preview it at a lower resolution (and you should still have some of your playback resolution options available too).

Once your edit is complete, you could then copy it back into your 4KHD sequence. Unless by "FULLHD" you mean you are already working in a 1080p sequence - in which case this suggestion may not help out all that much.