GH5 6K Rendering is SLOW!!

NCARalph wrote on 6/4/2018, 5:19 PM

I'm trying to come up with a workflow to render 6K video to a proxy file so I can work with it reasonably. I'm using a 4GHz Skylake I7 with its built in GPU and a Radeon R9 380. I've tried HVEC 1080p, Magix 1080p, CPU, VCE and QSV, plus a couple of others that were very very slow.

They all take a bit over 2X the clip length except the CPU version that takes almost 3X. The CPU is running about 75-80% and the CPU version about 95%. The GPUs are running, but only around 10-20% capacity which also makes me wonder if the GPU code is optimized for the 6K rendering. The RAM is less than 1GB and the disk usage barely registers.

4K video using Magix VCE renders in about 60% of the clip time and uses about 75% of the CPU and 65-70% of the GPU.

Based on the CPU and GPU utilization, I'm not at all sure that more hardware is the answer. Any thoughts on how to create proxies faster?

Comments

fr0sty wrote on 6/4/2018, 5:54 PM

That's to be expected when rendering that many pixels to any format.

OldSmoke wrote on 6/4/2018, 11:00 PM

It may not be any faster but have you tried Sony’s Catalyst Browse?

BruceUSA wrote on 6/5/2018, 8:55 AM

I never bother with the 6K video thing. After reading your post and I decide to test out 6K video. Actually, more like 5K video. The resolution I got is 4992x3744 with audio. When import the footage into Vegas TL. The resolution display incorrect (4096x3456) and in the project properties won't allowed me to change it to 4992x3744. It keep bounce back to 4096x3456. My sample shot is V_log L and I applied LUT and render out to 4K 2160P with AMD VCE. Takes 1:20s to finish a a 1:04s clip. This is a native .h265 clip .

OldSmoke wrote on 6/5/2018, 9:03 AM

From what I remember Vegas is limited to 4096x4096 resolution for projects.

BruceUSA wrote on 6/5/2018, 9:12 AM

From what I remember Vegas is limited to 4096x4096 resolution for projects.

That is.. You are right. I forgot about it. Thanks.

PS. OK I decide to treat 5K file as a still image on Vegas TL, just simply crop in 16x9, the image filled the preview screen. Edited and render out to 4K. Results look nice.

NCARalph wrote on 6/5/2018, 3:45 PM

I tried rendering 2160 with VCE and Vegas gave me an error message that it couldn't determine the reason. It worked fine with the CPU.

BruceUSA wrote on 6/5/2018, 3:51 PM

I tried rendering 2160 with VCE and Vegas gave me an error message that it couldn't determine the reason. It worked fine with the CPU.

To render 2160p with and vce you need high end card Vega 10 to be able to render 2160p. My other system with r9 290x get error. I used frontier edition card to render 2160p.

Kinvermark wrote on 6/5/2018, 4:33 PM

@NCARalph

For proxies you don't want to render to highly compressed formats anyway. Try XAVC-intra or better yet Magic YUV (can intall free version from their website). Two parts of this are slowing you down: (1) decoding the 6k hevc and (2) encoding to the new format. Can't change (1), but using a low compression codec and smaller resolution should gain you something.

NCARalph wrote on 6/5/2018, 6:13 PM

It may not be any faster but have you tried Sony’s Catalyst Browse?

I tried Catalyst Browse and it didn't even recognize the 6K video as something it could work with.

@Kinvermark That's an interesting observation, I'll give that a try.

Kinvermark wrote on 6/5/2018, 7:04 PM

Also... another challenge you have to deal with is maintaining the 6k resolution up to the point of final render of lower resolution material (eg, UHD or 4K DCI) - presumably you will crop / rescale / pan-scan as appropriate.

I don't know if swapping out a proxy inside Vegas will preserve any crops / pan-scans, and I don't know if Catalyst browse will keep your 6k resolution (doubt it).

There is a program from Acrovid called Footage Studio that can do this, but it isn't free (there is a free trial.)

NCARalph wrote on 6/6/2018, 5:24 PM

What I came up with for a workflow to wind up with 1080x1920 30P is:

Project set to 1664x1248 30P 8 bit View Transform Off. This is 1/3 the linear resolution of the original 6K but keeps the full frame.
Render the 6K files using 1664x1248 30P AMD VCE to proxy files with the same name as the 6K files. This seems to be the fastest rendering, it takes about 2X the original file length.
Switch files to use the proxies
Do my cuts, multicamera and pan/zoom edits. Since I'm using 1/3 the linear resolution, and I use the 16x9 template for all zooms, the largest,1080 zoom is 360 pixels high.
Switch files back to the original 6K files. Now all the zooms resize; since there is now 3X the linear resolution, the 360 pixel high zooms are now 1080 x 1920.
Switch the project to 1080 30P to do color correction, sharpening, etc. I could use the proxy for this, but like having the full resolution even though it's a bit slow to work with.
Render with the 1080 30P AMD VCE setting. Depending on what I've done, this also takes about 2X the length.

Not wonderful, but usable.