CF Intermediate playback - what's the deal?

Marco. wrote on 5/27/2006, 3:27 AM
What kind of system specs are recommended to have full playback performance of Cineform 1080i intermediates (rendered in Vegas)?

Using preview setting Best (Full) we can't get more than about 12 fps out of it (PAL here).

We tried fast CPU systems just like a Athlon X2 4.200+ (1 GB Ram) with a single S-ATA (also tried an external firewire HDD) as well as a 3.2 GHz Pentium (1 GB Ram) with a very fast Raid system (which playbacks uncompressed RGB SD AVIs with full 25 fps). But whatever a system we take we don't get more than 12 fps playback performance out of it with having the preview set to Best (Full).

So it seems like neither fast CPUs nor fast Raid-systems does help here. What does?

Marco

Comments

farss wrote on 5/27/2006, 4:25 AM
Do you need Best/Full?
Also are you sending preview to the internal Preview or using the Secondary Display option. The latter seems to perform slightly better.

I can get 25fps at Preview Auto to the secondary display @ 1920x1080 out of a dual Xeon 3Ghz and SATA raid. My only bugbear is around every 10 seconds the playback rate drops like a stone and then comes back up, real PIA. Yes I have the T/L zoomed right out! It might have something to do with the amount of preview RAM I've allocated in Vegas.

Bob.

Marco. wrote on 5/27/2006, 4:34 AM
>> Do you need Best/Full?

It's same with any Full setting, except of Draft.

>> Also are you sending preview to the internal Preview

Yes, I only tested the internal Preview.

>> I can get 25fps at Preview Auto to the secondary display @ 1920x1080 out of a dual Xeon 3Ghz and SATA raid.

Interesting. So you think using the Secondary Display is it what makes your performance that good (compared to ours which also are not that slow ;-) )?

Marco

David Newman wrote on 5/27/2006, 12:41 PM
Preview and the Full settings will result in very different performance, enabling the timeline to process at half the image size speeds operations up greatly.

David Newman
CTO, CineForm
Marco. wrote on 5/27/2006, 2:56 PM
I wish it would. Using half the size I still only get about 18 to 22 fps when using Cineform intermediates (converted with CHD 3.0) but using the original HDV stream I have full 25 fps.
Seems like if I don't use filter I'd better stay using the .m2t-files.

Marco
fldave wrote on 5/27/2006, 3:46 PM
Are you sure the drive(s) your intermediate files are on is OK? if you have enough CPU to decode the m2t, then the intermediate should be a piece of cake.

I'd check your drive throughput / DMA settings / drive too full?
Marco. wrote on 5/27/2006, 4:07 PM
The drive works fine and is pretty fast for a non-raid system. But I also tested a second drive with same result and I checked my results against other ones which are similar (even one with a very fast raid system who has full playback speed with uncompressed RGB AVIs). So I doubt it's the drive.

Marco
JJKizak wrote on 5/27/2006, 4:13 PM
It would be nice if someone somewhere would post Vegas preview playback performance data with different hardware setups and configurations. Like what can I expect for an AMD dual core 4800+ or (4) opterons? SCSI raids? SATA raids?

JJK
Marco. wrote on 5/27/2006, 5:17 PM
I tried it again several times. Using preview setting Preview (Auto) with a display size of 720x540 I have 25 fps with occasional drops down to 21/22 fps using the HDV original and same happens when using the CF intermediate. With this preview setting the intermediate isn't slower but isn't faster either.

If I wanna have a constant 25 fps playback I have to reduce the display size to 480x360 (and have to stay at the preview quality).

Marco
David Newman wrote on 5/27/2006, 5:44 PM
Sounds like something is up as my old 3.0GHz P4 has no issues to doing 29.97 (20% harder than your 25fps) yet it crawls with MPEG data.
Marco. wrote on 5/28/2006, 3:49 AM
Looks like my system is almost perfect for .m2t-editing ... ;-))

Marco
Marco. wrote on 5/28/2006, 7:16 AM
BTW: When I playback the Intermediates directly from the Vegas Explorer or from the Vegas MediaPool I get full performance of 25 fps even if the preview is set to Best (Full). Same to the original HDVs. Full playback rate this way.

The performance drop only happens when playbacking the files from the Vegas timeline.

Marco
farss wrote on 5/28/2006, 2:06 PM
What else have you got running in Vegas?

Having the Video Scopes open with RT updating can eat a lot of CPU resource.
Also (might be dumb suggestion) is the project audio properties 16/48K and is all audio on the T/L 16/48K.

Bob.
Marco. wrote on 5/29/2006, 2:54 AM
There's nothing else running, neither inside Vegas nor outside. A clean system. Performance is great in common. All of the media properties match exactly the project properties. I tried both Ram Preview set to zero as well as some different values. I don't think it depends on my Vegas settings. They couldn't match better.

Marco