Transcoding t3i footage in Premiere Pro CS5?
 

Hey, just wondering if you guys transcode your footage from your t3i/other canon dslrs or not, and why. I haven't been, but I saw someone talking about it and it seemed to improve performance in premiere a lot. Also: if you do, how do you go about it?

Thanks,
Evan

Re: Transcoding t3i footage in Premiere Pro CS5?
 

transcode footage? premier is suppose to be able to read dslr footage natively and no transcoding are needed.

Re: Transcoding t3i footage in Premiere Pro CS5?
 

Premiere CS5 to CS6 can easily deal with native H.264 from the T3i - there was a time when transcoding might have helped but not with modern computers and the mercury playback engine.

Re: Transcoding t3i footage in Premiere Pro CS5?
 

Unfortunately we don't all have fast computers with mercury capable cards. :(

Re: Transcoding t3i footage in Premiere Pro CS5?
 

This.
I have a 2010 13 inch Macbook Pro, with 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3, and NVIDIA GeForce 320M 256 MB. I have trouble with smooth playback and stuff sometimes, and I didn't know if this would help. I also still don't entirely understand the mercury playback engine hah.

Re: Transcoding t3i footage in Premiere Pro CS5?
 

I think many user mistake mercury playback engine to accelerate anything, it doesn't. Playback on your timeline is still cpu dependable, something which you see the most when fast scrolling the timeline. I have been a former premiere user (using edius now) and have played with the cs6 trial with mercury engine enabled. I have a i7 950 with 12gb memory, so no cutting edge but also no slouch.

The playback on my time line was smoother on edius 6 when I scrolled the timeline fast. Exporting was faster in edius 6 as well when going from dslr 1080p mov to a mpeg2 1080p file, only when outputting to a h264 file you see the mercury engine kick in and make a difference but hey, edius can utilize the build in gpu on the latest cpu's (making $$ high end videocards unnecessary) and making mp4 outputs trailblazing fast as well.

Don't get me wrong, premiere is great but its a system hog, you need a cutting edge pc (and very expensive one with all the right hardware, LOTS of ram, dedicated videocard, raid and whatnot) to get the most from it and then it can be really fast. Edius is still 32bits and feels more responsive to me then premiere cs6 does on my pc and it does that without any hardware acceleration help. Just getting started, I imported 33 gb of dslr footage, in edius i was editing after 20 seconds, in premiere I had to wait 10 minutes. Ok, its buidling waveforms and doing other stuff, but when I need to do something quick, right now and deal with audio later, premiere is a painfully slow starter.

Also multicam does not benefit from mercury, I was able to handle more camera's in premiere because it seemed to lower the preview to get realtime performance but then it started to do very weird stuff, sometimes not moving at all, jumping ahaed and back, so if you want to do decent multi-cam, again premiere is no better then edius 6, maybe on a super optimized starship computer but for most user with a bit more basic setups, its not that great performer..

Re: Transcoding t3i footage in Premiere Pro CS5?
 

According to the guys at Adobe, CS6 uses the GPU for playback...at least that's what they told me at the launch!

I've heard great things about the new Edius, too.

Re: Transcoding t3i footage in Premiere Pro CS5?
 

When you look at the ppbm5 test results all top performers have been heavily overclocked and use minimum 24gb of memory and raid, sure all those users might confirm what Adobe is advertising. Maybe the playback acceleration is for getting a good preview? On my more down to earth system Edius at least is more responsive then Premiere, even with mercury enabled. I"m sure for comparable results (if you install edius on a system with the right board and cpu with build in gpu) in both realtime playback and output speed you can build a system for Edius at half the price for a comparable Premiere system. That being said, Edius has several area's where it needs some catching up to do, like the way it handles audio, but it's a very solid and stable performer that also has very good collorcorrection tools build in.

Re: Transcoding t3i footage in Premiere Pro CS5?
 

To clarify how the Mercury engine works, Adobe Premiere Pro sometimes renders in real time using the CPU, sometimes renders in real time using the GPU, and sometimes pre-renders, to allow you to manipulate your video. If you have a weak GPU or no GPU, it won't be used for this purpose.

Richard

Re: Transcoding t3i footage in Premiere Pro CS5?
 

I understood Premeire now uses all cuda cores so you would think more is always faster yet to me it's still unclear what exactly gives premiere a performance boost, f.i. in the ppbm5 test there is a I7 950 system with a gtx460 card in the top 10 of best performers, so it seems the card alone is not what makes Premiere fly?

Re: Transcoding t3i footage in Premiere Pro CS5?
 

Noa,

You have to be careful in interpreting the results. At the top of the page there is a warning:

Due to differences in caching between CS5 and CS5.5, it can be a good idea to select only the version you want to investigate.

The changes in caching have caused results for the MPEG2-DVD test to be almost three times slower with CS5.5 than with CS5.

Cristobal's results on rank #10 and #8 are illustrative of this effect.

Re: Transcoding t3i footage in Premiere Pro CS5?
 

So back to the question. Do we lesser mortals transcode or not?

Re: Transcoding t3i footage in Premiere Pro CS5?
 

Does cs6 perform the same as cs5.5?
What do the changes in caching mean, is it something adobe can correct with a update?

Re: Transcoding t3i footage in Premiere Pro CS5?
 

I've got a three-year-old computer (i7 860, 2.8GHz, 8GB RAM, no RAID) with a pretty ordinary Radeon HD4800 graphics card, and CS6 runs pretty smoothly with footage from my 600d without transcoding. Mind you, I've not tried anything more complex than 20 minutes or so of foorage from the 600d.

I notice little difference when I transcode to Cineform. I also find that CS6 is a bit faster overall than CS5. I do use Cineform for lossless exports, and somtimes to get better color rendition from my Sony cam, especially with the reds.

Renders are a bit slow sometimes when I've got lots of effects on a clip, but transcoding doesn't help that at all.

If you're not transcoding and everything seems fine... well, it probably is!

Re: Transcoding t3i footage in Premiere Pro CS5?
 

CS6 performs slightly better than CS5.5, but there is a weird thing going on when you compare direct export versus using the AME queue. AME queue is around 20% slower than direct export with MPEG2-DVD, but 30% faster than direct export with H.264. However DV AVI is around 3 times slower with the queue versus direct export. Sizable differences and I have not yet received a clear explanation from Adobe as to the cause of this.

The changes in caching between CS5 and CS5.5 have shown that our MPEG2-DVD test was the culprit, because it contained three identical nested sequences after each other, something that will never happen in real life, but that we did to keep the download size small. CS5 could cache the transcoding results from the first instance and was clever enough to use those results for the second and third instance. That no longer happens in CS5.5 and CS6 and that is why the same test takes about three times as long in comparison to CS5.

It is a problem in the test and not something to worry about in practical life and that is why we have overhauled and modified the tests to avoid these kind of issues in the CS6 version of PPBM6, which is not yet ready BTW.

@ Mike:

The faster the CPU in the system, the less need or even benefit you will have from trans-coding. If you have a dated Q6600 CPU @ stock speed, you will probably benefit from trans-coding, but if you have a fast CPU, like the i7-2600 or i7-3930, trans-coding to an intermediate format will not be beneficial at all, it will only slow you down. Your i7-860 will probably not gain anything from trans-coding either. It is a balance between bigger file size and the inherent memory and disk requirements on the one hand and the CPU load on the other. In your specific case the bigger files will likely offset a lower CPU load due to the limited memory in your system.

Re: Transcoding t3i footage in Premiere Pro CS5?
 

Thx Harm for the explanation

Cineform doesn't seem to be that optimised for use in Premiere, the intermediate codec in Edius f.i. gives a major speed improvement, both in Editing and exporting. But like cineform intermediate files size can be a lot bigger, average of 3x which lets you run into disc space problems quickly.

Re: Transcoding t3i footage in Premiere Pro CS5?
 

Noa,

I'm not sure about this, but the 32 bit nature of Edius may be beneficial for Cineform trans-coding, PR OTOH is 64 bit and that may lower the benefit of trans-coding, because the CPU heavy decoding of difficult codecs like AVCHD are handled more efficiently. On modern fast CPU's like the i7-2600+ or i7-3930+ the time to trans-code and the disk space consequences make it unlikely to be a real benefit to use Cineform any longer. However on lesser systems or on many laptops, it may still be beneficial to trans-code, with the caveat that on many notebooks you can easily run into disk and memory problems.

Re: Transcoding t3i footage in Premiere Pro CS5?
 

28mb avchd and 45mbs dslr mov files run smoother in edius 6 then a trial of premiere cs6 on my pc, That is when scrolling the timeline, there I don't see any benefit of working with a 64 bit system.

Re: Transcoding t3i footage in Premiere Pro CS5?
 

Scrolling a timeline is very much disk I/O dependent.

Re: Transcoding t3i footage in Premiere Pro CS5?
 

Where do you see then the advantage of decoding avchd footage with 64bits NLE's? Does that show during playback?

About fast scrolling the time line, with 80 to 100 mbs edius HQ avi footage that is butter smooth on my system and 28 mbs I get footage that jumps which is a bit worse in Premiere, I would expect theh 80 to 100 mbs sec footage to need fast disks but not 28mbs avchd, only big difference is that avchd has a much tougher compression for the cpu to handle to give a realtime smooth preview, is the cpu then not the limiting factor when fast scrolling the timeline?

Re: Transcoding t3i footage in Premiere Pro CS5?
 

The CPU and RAM is used no matter what you do - even if you move the mouse an inch.

It is very likely video scrubs in CS6 are stored in HDD buffers (how else will uncompressed footage play back?) - but they have to be processed the first time for playback. This - as claimed by Adobe in answer to a specific question - is more GPU dependent in CS6. Earlier versions, and other software, utilize the CPU for it. According to them, 64-bit is only tangibly useful if the mercury engine is enabled, and this directly affects AE, not Premiere Pro.

If the GPU is not found, the mercury playback engine is not used in its hardware mode. However, CS6 supports OpenCL (but not completely) and thereby a few ATI cards. Could this be the reason you are not seeing a playback improvement in your trial version? Was the software mode turned on?

Unfortunately it has become too complicated to compare software without supporting hardware. It's tough as it is to build a system that utilizes all of the CS6's programs efficiently within the production premium suite. Adding third-party software to a workflow makes it almost impossible.

Re: Transcoding t3i footage in Premiere Pro CS5?
 

Premiere generates thumbnails for video tracks on the fly. For each clip it has to read it and generate the thumbnail. It only reads those clips which are in the current view, so scrolling the timeline will result in slower response when it needs to generate many thumbnails on a big zoom out, and big change, especially when you are dealing with AVCHD codec. The program is pretty good at not getting in your way (ie. the thumbnail generation has lower priority than playback, etc.), but the performance hit can be seen, especially on older machines.

Of course, you can skip it by minimizing the track or choosing not to display the thumbnails in the track option. And if you use uncompressed, or any codec that is not CPU-intensive, the UI and scrolling is pretty snappy. Thus comparing Edius' codec to AVCHD on the basis of bandwidth is totally irrelevant.

Re: Transcoding t3i footage in Premiere Pro CS5?
 

Harm said scrolling the time line was disk I/O dependent, that's why I refered to canopus own codec as I would expect a high bitrate format to benefit from a raid set up and a heavily compressed format to benefit from a fast cpu. I at least had a gtx460 card that was enabled for mercury playback by using that "hack" so I was not in software mode and on my system at least I saw no benefit in that compared to a 32bit NLE, neither in playback or faster scrolling the timeline.

Also about generating thumbnails etc, I had to wait about 10 minutes before all that background stuff was done and I could do any serious editing, so when I was testing there was, as far as I could tell, no background tasks running.

On a bit older systems premiere runs ok but you shouldn't expect any miracles during editing, you only will benefit most from faster exporting.

Re: Transcoding t3i footage in Premiere Pro CS5?
 

A good way to see how many background processes are actually running and consuming CPU cycles and using memory, is to start Task Manager and click on Show Processes for All Users, or use Process Explorer. I prefer Process Explorer, because of the additional functionality, but that is just me.

Normally on a properly tuned system you will have around 40 - 50 processes active, more means that you will have to kill superfluous processes. Often there are unneeded processes like mDNSResponder, all kinds of Apple stuff if you have QuiRcktime installed, Java updater, and the like.

When scrubbing, consider what happens. The clip or clips have to be read from disk. If it is a single clip, that is pretty fast, but if it is about many clips for all your tracks, possibly located at different locations on your hard disk, short clips that change rapidly, all those clips need to be read from disk and that is where the bottleneck often is, due to the half duplex nature of SATA drives. Once read, the CPU decodes the long GOP format to an internally used intermediate intra-frame format so all frames can be rapidly displayed. This decoding ought to be more efficient on 64-bit systems than on 32-bit systems, but of course the algorithm used is the overriding factor. Most modern day CPU's are quite capable of handling that task while the disk fetches the clips which can be time-consuming because of relatively long access times when the disk is fragmented or the clips are physically located on different locations on the disk. This problem gets worse when the fill rate on a disk goes up. On memory starved systems, this can lead to further deterioration in performance because of the use of the page-file. You have to store the decoded results somewhere, right?

On testing the new PPBM6 timeline, using 6 tracks plus an overlay track and with a mix of DV, HDV, AVCHD, XDCAM-EX, XDCAM-HD, Canon MXF 422 and Red 4K material both in NTSC and PAL, I have seen that sustained transfer rates were in excess of 300 MB/s for playback. Usually scrubbing moves along faster than playback, so the requirements for a high transfer rate increase.

Hope this explains it a bit.

Re: Transcoding t3i footage in Premiere Pro CS5?
 

I don't transcode and don't have any problems. Using the 8 core Mac Pro, basic system.