GH4 Cinema 24.00 HZ .mov stuttering in QT,VLC and FCP

[Manuel Fantoni]

MacbookPro
__________

Processor 2,4 GHz Intel Core i5

memory 4 GB 1067 MHz DD3

OSX 10.8.5


SDCARD
_______


Trascend R95-W60MB/s
San Disk 95 MB/s 1 class 10



Pansonic gh4 mov file shot in cienema mode 24.00Hz p 50mbs or 100 mbs

if i play them in VLC QT or FCP stuttering is terrible,in FCP almost impossible to work properly.

If i shoot in 25p or 50p situation is better but still some stuttering.

Question:is my computer too old for this camera?

If yes is there any workaround(read about transcoding the mov file,any advice about workflow in FCP or Premiere pro/after effects?)

Thanks for any help,i appreciate

[Gary Huff]

Don't play the file straight from the SD card. Copy it to a hard drive first.

[Manuel Fantoni]

Unfortunately same bad stuttering(very bad)playing it from an hard drive. :(

[Noa Put]

I think your processor might be too slow to give you realtime performance, my I7 3770 can handle one stream in realtime, can't you render to prores?

[Manuel Fantoni]

Thanks.
Thought was eilther a computer or a camera problem.

Any link for a workflow to convert my GH4 footage in apple prores?

thanks again

[William Hohauser]

50mbs H264 is too much for your computer to deal with. If VLC is stuttering then the video board in the laptop is being overwhelmed. Updating your system to 10.9 might help. Getting a total of 8Gbs of RAM might help also.

You don't specify which Final Cut you are using but FCP7 would definitely not like these files. If you have FCP7, you should have Compressor already installed which can transcode these files into ProRes.

In FCPX you can transcode the files into ProRes on import or even after import. FCPX will play these files natively but the computer needs to be robust enough.

[Gary Huff]

Originally Posted by William Hohauser

50mbs H264 is too much for your computer to deal with.

Actually, it's not. That's 6.25MB/s, which is really low for practically any connected storage. It's also a similar bitrate to the H.264 variant found in Canon DSLRs. I would be curious as to what other footage the OP has been able to playback on his machine without skipping.

His MacBook is from 2010, and has a NVIDIA 320m GPU. It's 4 years old now and I'm not surprised it has trouble playing back footage. The solution is to transcode the GH4 footage to ProRes. I would also possibly look at downgrading to Snow Leopard for that machine. I have worked with some older Macs that were updated to Mountain Lion and I just wasn't happy with the performance, and Snow Leopard was much better.

Is this FCP6/7 or FCPX? Seems like the latter, in which case AVCHD and H.264 material will never playback without rendering in that NLE, so you need to transcode before editing anyway.

[Manuel Fantoni]

It is FCP 7,actually footage from a canon 60d played decently.

So i do need to transcode to PRORES ,seems to be the only solution,

thanks for the help

[William Hohauser]

50Mbps and 100Mbps AVCHD files are non-standard h264 codecs which need hardware and software requirements that older computers don't have. The original universal AVCHD codec was 24Mbps and below and that is what everybody designed for. Getting the files off a drive isn't the problem here as the bandwidth is very low, it's the computer being unable to cope with the decoding of the compressed data. H264 is very processor dependent unlike ProRes or the old DV files. 50Mbps plays worse on my 2009 MacPro with an updated video board than my 2010 17" MacBook Pro. These files play fine on my new MacPro until filters start getting applied.

Also I have updated a couple of older 64bit iMacs to 10.9 and experienced quite noticeable improvements in speed. I don't use these computers for video anymore so I can't vouch for that.

[Gary Huff]

Originally Posted by William Hohauser

50Mbps and 100Mbps AVCHD files are non-standard h264 codecs which need hardware and software requirements that older computers don't have.

I would have to see tests on this. More bitrate equals less compression equals less CPU power needed to decode. That is the idea behind the All Intra 200Mbps modes. If playback performance is desired, All Intra modes are best for older hardware.

Unfortunately, All Intra is only available in 1080p. All Intra for 4K would be about 800Mbps ideally.

Even so, all H.264 material is hard to playback natively in FCP6/7 without rendering, so ProRes transcoding is an absolute must.

[William Hohauser]

h264 works with GOP encoding like the older MPEG2 codec. This means that the computer has to constantly refer to a base frame to integrate the fragmented, compressed data from the rest of the group. 50Mbps is less compressed but there is more data to integrate as you are trying to playback. Intra based codecs, while having more data per frame, are an easy decode for the computer as there is no calculation and frame reconstruction needed. It's all there in each frame.