Transcoding Speed

[Ben Jackson]

Hi guys

Just a question and some help if possible.

When I was first using my Epic, I did some test shots, did a video at Runyon Canyon, and an audition video for someone. Whatever. I took the stuff, set to transcode in Redcine-X, just left it all at default. for the 3 minute audition video, took a couple of hours to transcode on my May 2010 Macbook pro 17" i7, with 1067 speed ram

I'm now back in Melbourne, and shot about 500gb of data for a music video. 88 clips. Is it just my perception or is transcoding taking longer?

A 3 minute clip (at 48fps) is taking about 6 hours, so at this rate, if each clip was about that long, I'd be looking at 22 days...

This is now on my 2006 Mac Pro with slower memory 667... but I've tried the same stuff back on my Macbook pro and it's about the same time (mac pro is a 4 core system)

Man i regret returning that Red rocket!

But is this normal? How long does it take for people without a red rocket on a more modern mac pro or macbook pro? Can you get much faster speeds? If I go out and buy the current mac pro, what would I be getting?

The only difference is that in Redcine-x i've done some basic color grading of exposure, saturation etc... is that going to make it take longer? seems unlikely as there's always meta data with each clip for the look anyway...

both of my computers are too slow it seems to run Premiere (have tried) to edit without transcoding... so that option seems to be out. Should I get a better machine? Or is there any tips for making it faster? Are these normal speeds?

[Domenic Barbero]

are you on full debayer or have you messed with sharpening or denoiser in RCX? those will def affect your speeds.

[Ben Jackson]

no haven't touched any of those settings, unless by accident...

[Ben Jackson]

should i not be on full debayer?

[Subhadip Sen]

Redcine-X Pro is poorly optimized and fails to utilize too many threads. Premiere Pro CS6 is very promising in this respect. Joseph S. has run some tests on his Xeon E5 system in the Hardware and Adobe forums where his rig finished a transcode from 5K to 1080 faster than real-time, faster than Rocket. In addition, it could play back full-res at 5K. All of this with no Rocket and with a crappy GPU. Adding a GTX 680 to the mix will speed things up even further, especially with such a heavy downscale.

In short, use faster software, faster computers. What took you 6 hours will take 6 minutes. Or 30 minutes for the latest Ivy Bridge laptops with GeForce 600M GPUs.

[Ben Jackson]

Wow that's impressive. It's good to know the latest processors etc are going to speed things up too, as being from 2006, i'm definitely ready for an upgrade to that. Just waiting on Ivy Bridge rather than the old westmere or whatever....
so, maybe i should load up premiere cs6 and see how that goes - that have a transcode does it? i couldn't get it to play the red files without dropping frames so i gave up on it

i noticed i had checked the 'film look' checkbox just playing around, but then set everything back to default, maybe it was still processing some noise settings like domenic said - got me checking anyway, thanks for that

[Ben Jackson]

got it down to less than 2 hours for a 4 minute clip ...
now going to load up cs6 see what that can do

[Domenic Barbero]

if you are shooting 4k or 5k you can move your debayer to 1/2 good and try that. I really only do full on 4k if i need to utilize a key or SFX shot. However, once i get cs6 i can stay RAW all the way through. Free of the FCP chains once and for all.

[Ben Jackson]

cool thanks for that. yeah premiere wasn't able to play the files for me on my system so I can't do that. going back to fcp 7

[Brad Allen]

Hi Ben,

I'm suprised to hear that you can't get R3D's working in premiere being that most people can edit R3D's on their laptops in Premiere these days. Are you changing your playback resolution to 1/4 or 1/8 to see how it goes?

Also I have found that Adobe Media Encoder does a much better job at multithreading - you may want to try and use that for your transcoding if need be. If you are creating proxies, leave "max render quality" off as this will dramatically speed up your export time. If they are your final files that you will be working on and taking into grading, make sure to leave "Max Render Quality" on.

One caveat though - AME doesn't support RedGamma3 or RedColor3 yet...