NeoHD 4K V5 Performance

[Tom Santopolo]

I just installed version 5 and ran some tests in CS5. I converted AVCHD to Cineform AVI and put a few layers on a Cineform preset time-line. A single layer plays fine, but when I place 2 or more tracks, everything runs in slow motion. I set the resolution to full,1/2 & 1/4 all with the same results. Am I doing something wrong? I can run 8 layers realtime AVCHD with CS5's preset! I have an i7 processor, external raid, GTX-285 card and 12gigs of ram.

[David Newman]

Consider you disk speed. I just ran 3-levels for full-res. on a consumer i7 with an ATI card (no Mercury acceleration.) Two sata drives in RAID 0. If disk speed is not the issue, contact support.

[Jay Bloomfield]

Originally Posted by Tom Santopolo

... I can run 8 layers realtime AVCHD with CS5's preset! I have an i7 processor, external raid, GTX-285 card and 12gigs of ram.

Have you checked the true read speed of your external RAID unit with a disk utility? A good, free utility is:

Disk Benchmark | ATTO Technology, Inc.

Cineform files are less compressed than AVCHD:

Cineform Tech Blog Blog Archive Understanding CineForm Quality Settings

Hence, when you create a timeline with a lot of tracks of CFHD, your disk subsystem has to be top notch. For example, the Cineform encoder "High" setting creates files with a data rate of 16 MB/sec (~10X the data rate of AVCHD). Put 8 tracks of CFHD on the timeline and that's 128 MB/sec, which is generally above the read limit for most single mechanical disk drives.

You have to think of all this as a barrel filled with water. Each stave of the barrel, represents a computer component (GPU, CPU, RAM, disks, etc.) and is a different height, depending on component performance. The water will only fill the barrel to the shortest stave, so to speak. It's sounds like a very simple concept, but you'd be surprised how many people have posted on the Adobe Premiere forum, complaining about performance in CS5, without realizing that you have to balance all the components to get the best performance out of the MPE. I'm sure that you understand this, given the design of your system. But the external RAID unit may be the bottleneck and it's worth investigating this further.

[Brant Gajda]

^^

He did say that if he uses a regular CS5 preset it appears to work just fine with multiple video layers, but not with the Cineform presets.

[Tom Santopolo]

I am getting about 170 MB/sec - 220MB/sec on the raid. I run the AVCHD files and Cineform files from the same raid. I had uninstalled and reinstalled cineform V5. I can run 1 track looks great. I put a second track on, re-size it like (to give me a picture in picture) and it looks like the video slows down, but the audio stays the same. I have tried 2 - 5 tracks and it looks the same. It plays fine but it looks like it's 15fps video. Doesn't matter if I use full, 1/2 or 1/4 resolution settings - it looks identical.

[Jay Bloomfield]

Originally Posted by Brant Gajda

^^

He did say that if he uses a regular CS5 preset it appears to work just fine with multiple video layers, but not with the Cineform presets.

It's possible there is something bizarre with the Cineform presets, but they don't do anything more than you can do by typing in all the variables (resolution, etc.) in the generic Desktop preset directly. AVCHD is so heavily compressed, that disk read performance is hardly ever an issue, only CPU speed. If AVCHD runs okay, but less compressed files run slowly, the first thing that you suspect is disk read speed.

Since Tom S.'s response has eliminated the only remaining hardware unknown (at least to us online: disk system read speed), the only option left is a support ticket.

[Tim Bucklin]

We're continuing to improve performance in the CineForm play engine, but there may be some limitations we haven't run into.

That said, let's eliminate the disk from being a possibility by trying the following:

Create a new sequence with a CineForm preset as the starter, but before clicking "OK", go into the "General" tab and change the Editing Mode from "CineForm RT" to "Desktop".

Copy that same sequence content -- with the CineForm files, not the AVCHD files -- into this new sequence and let us know how the sequence plays. If it's nice and smooth, there's probably some more optimization to be done on our end for these types of sequences. If it's still chugging along and you don't see a lot of CPU usage, then it's a problem with the disk accessing the data.

[Tom Santopolo]

Tim,
I did what you said - changing the editing Mode from "CineForm RT" to "Desktop" allowed me to run 3 layers nicely and the forth layer does slow it down. My CPU usage is 75-90% in desktop mode on all 8 cores equally (the I7-920 chip). The exact same layers (files) run in slower motion in RT mode, and the CPU usage is much less - doesn't seem to use all the cores at once, and it seems to change from core to core. Another-words, CPU 1,3,5 will be fluctuating between 30-60%, then 2 and 5 will do it and the others will be minimum, then core 8 will jump up to 60%, etc... I did test my raid with the Blackmagic disk utility and get 199 MB/sec write and 177 MB/sec read. Hope this helps. I really appreciate your help. You guys are great.
Tom

[Brant Gajda]

While somewhat related to performance, when choosing a preview mode, is there any noticeable difference between using 1080p 24 vs 720p 24 at 1/2 resolution for previews? I swapped between the 2 and didn't really notice any difference between them. I figured I'd see a better performance using 720p 24 previews.

[Simon Zimmer]

Hello,

I just tried the ATTO Disk Benchmark on my raid 0. What are considered good results? I attached mine to this message. I have never done this before so I don't quite understand the results.

I just want to verify that my system is running well.

I am using PPCS5, 12 GB of ram, x980 CPU and Sata drives at 7200 rpm. I have 3 drives at RAID 0.

Thanks,

Simon

[Jay Bloomfield]

The Cineform encoder "High" setting creates files with a data rate of 16 MB/sec. Your results are excellent for a 3 disk RAID0 array (~250 MB/sec write speed and ~300 MB/sec read speed, as you can ignore the small block size transfers).

[Simon Zimmer]

Hi Jay,

Good to hear. I was not worried but was not sure how to interpret it.

Thanks again,

Simon