CS 5.5 - Premier Pro - Bug Reports bug Reports from a RED user

[Brad Allen]

Also, while looking at your posts on the Adobe forum, I couldn't help but notice that you have something like 6 or more instances of Colorista applied to a clip. This is probably what is bringing you render times to its knees

+1

Sorry I didn't catch this earlier Johnny - I didn't notice that you had been doing this. This is certainly going to slow your render down and helps to explain why you're not seeing much difference between RedRocket and no RedRocket - the debayering is not your bottleneck - all those effects you have applied are.

[Paul Ellington]

Johnny:

As an engineer that works on the product, I can tell you for a fact that I've never heard of a bug around shadow/highlight. We're certainly not sitting on a known bug (that thread you referred back to is a user thread, and they're talking about auto levels changing with the footage dynamically & potentially creating a 'pumping' effect if there are lighting changes in a given shot, hence the suggestion to use temporal smoothing options when using auto levels). The tearing in your screenshots is something else altogether - i suspect that is a bug, and we need to repro it. I think you touched on what is probably the key issue, which is the consecutive clips each having the effect. Have you noticed whether it's specific to having GPU acceleration enabled, or are you seeing this in software mode as well?

On a related note, you've been complaining a lot about render performance, and touched on the Performance vs Memory thing. Unless you have a specific requirement for Memory mode, don't use it. What it does is reduce the amount of render threads running, which in turn lowers the amount of memory used to compute intermediate frames. This was more of concern back in CS4 & earlier, when the app was still a 32 bit process. At this point, I think it's pretty much an obsolete option and should be left to the default of Performance, unless you're running with 6 or less gigs of ram, which is just a bad/pointless idea these days.

Also, while looking at your posts on the Adobe forum, I couldn't help but notice that you have something like 6 or more instances of Colorista applied to a clip. This is probably what is bringing you render times to its knees - each layer has to be composited to a flat RGB (or possibly YUV if they do native YUV effects, although I suspect not), then the effect is applied, then the composited version is passed again to another plugin instance, recomposited again, times 6. Not optimal. I don't know how it generally performs on 4K material, but with six layers of their plugin on a given clip, you're probably breaking the bank right there.

OTOH, if you were using something like the native RGB curves / Three way color corrector / fast color corrector filters (heck, all three) - in CUDA, these are computationally combined on the GPU and happen immediately. I think you'll save yourself a ton of render time by doing whatever basic grades you can via GPU, and if necessary, try to sparingly use one or two levels of Colorista on the topmost layers.

HTH, Cheers

Can you tell me why I am having issues working with 5.5 R3D's from the jump? I set everything up but then it doesn't like I am importing the R3D files.

[Wil Renczes]

Can you tell me why I am having issues working with 5.5 R3D's from the jump? I set everything up but then it doesn't like I am importing the R3D files.

Not quite sure I understand the question - if you're saying that you can't get R3D files working correctly in CS 5.5, then I'd hazard a guess that you're probably using Epic/Scarlet footage and the built-in support in CS 5.5 doesn't cover Epic/Scarlet - you need to download & install the latest Labs release for this support:

http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/redepic_importer.html

OTOH, if you're running CS6, then I don't have enough information to suss out what is potentially the trouble here.

[Johnny Friday]

Johnny:

As an engineer that works on the product, I can tell you for a fact that I've never heard of a bug around shadow/highlight. We're certainly not sitting on a known bug (that thread you referred back to is a user thread, and they're talking about auto levels changing with the footage dynamically & potentially creating a 'pumping' effect if there are lighting changes in a given shot, hence the suggestion to use temporal smoothing options when using auto levels). The tearing in your screenshots is something else altogether - i suspect that is a bug, and we need to repro it. I think you touched on what is probably the key issue, which is the consecutive clips each having the effect. Have you noticed whether it's specific to having GPU acceleration enabled, or are you seeing this in software mode as well?

On a related note, you've been complaining a lot about render performance, and touched on the Performance vs Memory thing. Unless you have a specific requirement for Memory mode, don't use it. What it does is reduce the amount of render threads running, which in turn lowers the amount of memory used to compute intermediate frames. This was more of concern back in CS4 & earlier, when the app was still a 32 bit process. At this point, I think it's pretty much an obsolete option and should be left to the default of Performance, unless you're running with 6 or less gigs of ram, which is just a bad/pointless idea these days.

Also, while looking at your posts on the Adobe forum, I couldn't help but notice that you have something like 6 or more instances of Colorista applied to a clip. This is probably what is bringing you render times to its knees - each layer has to be composited to a flat RGB (or possibly YUV if they do native YUV effects, although I suspect not), then the effect is applied, then the composited version is passed again to another plugin instance, recomposited again, times 6. Not optimal. I don't know how it generally performs on 4K material, but with six layers of their plugin on a given clip, you're probably breaking the bank right there.

OTOH, if you were using something like the native RGB curves / Three way color corrector / fast color corrector filters (heck, all three) - in CUDA, these are computationally combined on the GPU and happen immediately. I think you'll save yourself a ton of render time by doing whatever basic grades you can via GPU, and if necessary, try to sparingly use one or two levels of Colorista on the topmost layers.

HTH, Cheers

Will, from the Adobe forums it seems quite evident that the shadow/highlight "issue" is a known "bug". I can now look it up with a simple search and in fact many moderators suggest not using it...but this is a moot point to discuss if it is or is not...since it obviously is causing problems for more than a few folks.....I'm not defending one side here...only revealing the actual problems i've had and spent days trying to overcome.

Render performance....I'll run some tests upon completion of my project....in a few days to determine if these are from adding such effects as Colorista etc....That said, i've seen enough to know i am seeing a problem even with a simple Tiff sequence. I look forward to trying out other options...but man of those just can't get me to where i need to go....

...appreciate your input and assistance...i will report back.

[Paul Schneider]

Ok we don't know about this bug. We will need more info and a bug report. Please let us know your hardware info and a screen video or sample exported clip would help

Thanks

Dave

I am having a similar (nearly exactly) the same bug when rendering with speed grade.

[Wil Renczes]

Will, from the Adobe forums it seems quite evident that the shadow/highlight "issue" is a known "bug". I can now look it up with a simple search and in fact many moderators suggest not using it...but this is a moot point to discuss if it is or is not...since it obviously is causing problems for more than a few folks.....I'm not defending one side here...only revealing the actual problems i've had and spent days trying to overcome..

I'm with you. I think HPMoon (or whatever that handle was) had the same issue, but the thread devolved pretty quickly into a flame war for whatever reason. My only interest is pinpointing the issue & getting it fixed.


One other thing that I thought I should mention while you're trying to sort out rendering times: if you're combining GPU & software effects, layer ordering matters. There is an efficiency aspect to making it work best, and that's to be sure that you apply any GPU accelerated PPro effects first (if possible), and layer software effects last. Why? As I was mentioning earlier, GPU effects can be processed in parallel, so they're more efficient when grouped together. Also, after doing the composite on the GPU, it has to be read back from the GPU memory to the host machine's memory, and that read back is not very efficient (as GPUs are mostly designed for output, so transferring data to the card is generally much faster than reading it back) - so, doing all the GPU effects at once and having it come back from the card only once will make rendering more efficient.

@Paul: that's interesting. Are you also using a rocket, btw? Speedgrade's compositing is a completely separate engine, so that leads me to think either a) it's a completely different issue that simply looks the same, or b) it is the same issue and must then be happening somewhere at the source conversion from raw to RGB. From Johnny's report, I was assuming that the 'tear' section of the video with the darker luminosity was equivalent to the clip without the shadow/highlight effect. Am I wrong here? Is it the source color settings that aren't being applied across the tear..?

Cheers