@Todd:

Thanks, Todd, for sharing this link.

I had read this article. But to me it didn't get clear on two facts:

• Only - and ONLY - the cards in the list will work
  
  (the article reads: "The official and up-to-date list of the cards that provide the CUDA processing features is here:" -- There is no note on the fact that Premiere Pro actively blocks CUDA cards not in the list, regardless of their hardware capabilities. -- "If you don’t have one of these CUDA cards ..." had been interpreted by me as: "So if you have one of these non-CUDA cards ...".)
  .
• An easy workaround is available to get Mercury use CUDA cards which are not in the list
  
  (If it's so easy, simple and harmless to activate a CUDA card that's not in the list, the workaround should have been mentioned in the article, accompanied with a note that Adobe makes no warranties on the result.)

KlausKi wrote:

 

 

my wish would be that these yellow and red bars in the timeline would turn green so that I don't just see a still in the Preview window as soon as I add two or three effects to a clip.

 

...

 

Currently, you have to actively trigger a pre-render, and after doing so, you have to   w a i t ...

Huh?  I usually add 2-3 effects on every clip, and with CUDA there's no need to pre-render.  Yellow bars might as well be green.  The program windows runs smooth at 1080p, full playback resolution.

Dave_Gish wrote:

 

Huh?  I usually add 2-3 effects on every clip, and with CUDA there's no need to pre-render.  Yellow bars might as well be green.  The program windows runs smooth at 1080p, full playback resolution.

Yes, presumingly this is the case when you're using a CUDA card that's supported by Adobe. But as you may have read from my previous posts, I am not using a CUDA card that's supported by Adobe yet.

Dave_Gish wrote:

 

To be clear, Adobe is saying that if you enable CUDA with a card that's not on their list, then they're not going to support you if you have a problem.  However, since many people are doing this, there's a lot of information on the web to help users resolve CUDA problems on their own.

1. Can you please point me to this piece of information in the official documentation?
2. I'm a customer, not an information scout. So: I'm paying, Adobe is supposed to deliver. No-one else, and not vice versa.

Thanks, Will, for sheding light on this and sharing your knowledge with me!

OK then, in the meantime I have also read this blog post by Todd...

So I'd like to amend my wish from stating "yellow and red" to "anything that Premiere Pro recognizes as not being able to render in realtime in an acceptable quality, i.e. frame rate".

Full resolution rendering would not necessarily be a feature required for automatically rendering previews in the background, because most of the time the preview window is just a small part of the full screen. If speed is an issue, Premiere Pro could provide an option to render previews in a two-pass process: Low resolution rendering first, then high resolution rendering when there's no more clip/effect left to be rendered in low resolution. Parallel processing should be performed, i.e. Premiere Pro should spawn multiple background rendering threads, one per idle CPU core.

Just like Windows 7 is able to calculate a system performance rating according to some benchmark tests, Premiere Pro should be able to do the same at installation time in order to being able to estimate which of the clips/effects in particular whould require pre-rendering - depending on the built-in hardware.

I'm new to PPCS5.5 and need to get a GPU card that supports CUDA - before I buy a Quadro 4000 (I'm on a Mac) to replace my outdated ATI Radeon HD 3870

- there won't be any change/compromise in my ability to use openGL in Photoshop, correct?  I'm assuming that a better video card is better accross all software?  I just need to make sure that my performance in PS is as good (or better)...

many thanks!

jason dewey wrote:

 

I'm new to PPCS5.5 and need to get a GPU card that supports CUDA - before I buy a Quadro 4000 (I'm on a Mac) to replace my outdated ATI Radeon HD 3870

- there won't be any change/compromise in my ability to use openGL in Photoshop, correct?  I'm assuming that a better video card is better accross all software?  I just need to make sure that my performance in PS is as good (or better)...

 

many thanks!

I'm not a heavy Ps user, but I am a heavy Ae user.  The only diff I noticed after replacing my GE Force 8800 with the Quadro is that it hobbled some of my GPU accellerated effects, such as Optical Flares, Shapefifter and Freeform.  I've read that the issue is with the drivers for 10.6.8, and that when I upgrade to Lion, I should be able to use Freeform and Shapeshifter again.  I can use Optical Flares now, but I have to turn GPU accelleration off, or Ae will crash every time.  Freeform and Shapeshifter both crash Ae upon invoking the effect with 10.6.8 and the current Quadro driver.  So, take that into your consideration.  You might hear similar stories in Ps forums.

I'm getting the idea that people shouldn't go into the GPU/Cuda business expecting to encode quicker right?

But on the website of NVIDIA they have this video in which they proudly present the fact that encoding in AME is so much faster due to the use of the GPU, see: http://www.nvidia.co.uk/object/adobe_PremiereproCS5_uk.html

What am I missing?

Sebastiën

Clear Todd, thanks.

Just as a side question then: If you render out the project in PP before going to AME and then check the "use rendered files" box in AME before hitting export, does that have any influence (negative or positive) as opposed to not rendering the project in PP and having AME do both the rendering and the encoding?

Thanks a lot,

Sebastiën

lasvideo wrote:

 

the only advantage to what you decribed is a bit of time saving when you Export. If you dont mind rendering the timeline with lots of various effects before the export process, and you choose a high qulity codec for your Preview filesa as well as Export files, you can save some time on the back end when you export.

Except that this doesn't always work in Pr Mac 5.5.2.  I routinely render my sequence using ProRes422 Previews, and when I export to ProRes422, it takes just as long to export as it did to render, no matter what settings I use.  I've tried them all.  Some times the exports are fast; other times, I might as well not have rendered my Sequence.  I can find no predictable pattern to when it works or not.

This should be a huge timesaver in Pr... more than "a bit of time" saved.  Too bad it always isn't.  Hope it gets fixed in CS6.

True.  But, most of the time, I work alone, without benefit (ahem) of client in the room.  My projects often go through dozens of iterations, and I might be making one or two little tweaks before I FTP an mp4 off to my waiting clients.  That's the case where there's no advantage to rendering first, especially if the Export is going to ignore my renders.

What's odd about it is often my computer is fast enough to play all the effects without rendering, but the exporting is 10x the actual run-time of the spot.

Well, it took a few decades and advances in technology to get where I could work alone.  If I had to buy all the digital tape decks, it would have been much harder to bring my business home.  FTP, DG FastChannel, and card/drive media has enabled a paradigm shift.  I hardly ever see my clients.  Even the new ones, who I got on referral.  I have a couple I still haven't met face to face.

Something is not right for sure with my exporting.  I wish I could figure it out.  I've tried all the standard repair and troubleshooting tactics.  Tried the new Mac OS (10.7.3).  I haven't reinstalled Pr yet, but I suppose that's on the list of things to try.

Yes, that's the reason I get such great real-time performance.  I try to mainly use accellerated effects.  Hard to get around not using Magic Bullet Looks, though.  It's not on the list (yet... hopefully some day). 

I haven't noticed any speed improvements in Ae, which I use a lot.  In fact, the Quadro is not compatible with a few plugs (ShapeShifter and FreeForm Pro), but I've been able to work with OpenGL on, with fewer problems.  So, I guess maybe that does give some speed to Ae.

Oh, yeah.  I have a 8-SAS drive 6Gbs ATTO RAID.  AJA System Test reports between 1500-2100 MB/s reads and writes on the Sweep Video File Sizes test. 

And as I mentioned, the export slowness comes and goes, even in the same project.  I'm working on a three minute promo, and the exports can be between 7 and 25 minutes.  Even 7 seems slow, on a rendered sequence.

I have other weird issues with Pr as well.  Some times, I'll scrub the CTI, and there is no updating whatsoever in the Record window.  Some times it's 1 FPS.  Some times it's thousands of FPS.  I'm just not detecting a cause/effect relationship.  I've read some other threads here lambasting Pr for having memory leaks.  I don't even know what that really means, and consequently if it applies to my situation.  If it weren't for the CUDA processing, I'd frankly probably be working in Media Composer or FCP7.  The pros outweighs the cons for Pr at this point.

The last time I recall getting consistently fast exports was with 720 .mpg footage in a 486 ProRes Sequence.  I'd think that would be slower, due to the transcoding and scaling on export, but my exports were super fast.

The promo I'm on now is ProRes footage, ProRes Seq settings, and ProRes export, often choosing "Use Sequence Settings."  One would think that this would give the fastest performance.  And this is the one where the exports are either 7 or 25 minutes.  That's what I mean when I say I don't detect a pattern yet.

I have an 8-core MacPro3,1 with 32G RAM.  All drivers are current.  I truly don't think it's due to lack of power.  Ae renders at consistently high speeds.  I generally take my projects to Ae to finish anyway, but I don't like to go there until the client has signed off on content.  Much harder to make drastic changes.

Yes, I noted the similarities to our systems a while back.  I have the LHi and more RAM.  So, when you report things are working for you, I can generally presume it's not my hardware configuration.

Thanks for your very kind offer to test, but I think I've achieved some success now. 

Since about the only thing I hadn't tried was uninstalling and reinstalling the application, I just tried it, updated, reinstalled the Adobe AJA software, did a Permissions Repair, launched my promo project, exported it, and got a three minute export.  This is more like it!