[info needed] Best/fastest codec for scrubing/preview?

Yamiks wrote on 11/21/2019, 9:32 AM

I've been poking and prodding different codecs for video to see which is better on my timeline and even the better ones tend to get bogged down enough for me to start constantly use Shift-B with DRAFT quality in order to review what I had made....

SO what is your take on the best,fastest codec to use for this?

NOTE : I use GPU accel on preview, but have tested without & it's worse 90% of the time (also have tested files from HDD & NVME SSD, no notable difference)

Things that I have tested :

>DxTory codec (quite uncompressed, but does get bogged down right away)

>UtVideo codec (better for filming, bigger size, uncompressed, the same preview/scrub speeds as DxTory)

>H264 (compressed with differnt quality levels,slower in de-code on scrub & preview)

>Lagarith lossless (better than DxTory, worse as UtVideo, uncompressed)

>Nvidia Shadowplay...thing (BEST performance on timeline, not exactly why, not the greatest quality, but performance is VERY notably better.....still buffers on timeline)

NOTE2 : I use H264 as a converted version. 1st film in UtVideo -> H264 conversion with following parameters (feel free to copy, this converts all AVIs in the folder into mp4 files...it's great!):

for /f "tokens=1 delims=." %%a in ('dir %1 /B /S *.avi') do ffmpeg -hwaccel cuvid -i "%%a.avi" -map 0:v -map 0:a -c:v h264_nvenc -preset fast -rc constqp -rc-lookahead 40 -no-scenecut 1 -init_qpP 18 -init_qpB 18 -init_qpI 18 -acodec aac "%%a.mp4"
pause

Comments

Musicvid wrote on 11/21/2019, 10:20 AM

Try XDCAM EX

joost-berk wrote on 11/21/2019, 1:51 PM

Also the XDCAM HD422 50Mbit/s is a very quick codec.

fifonik wrote on 11/21/2019, 3:45 PM

Recording to intermediate to have better preview speed only makes sense if your bottleneck is decoder.

Are you sure that this is the case? Decoders these days are quite fast and usually works fine. There are some exceptions when Vega's decoder fail on some footage from specific devices.

Ut is very fast to decode when comparing to AVC and you should have noticed difference between them if decoding speed was the issue.

If limiting factor is storage sub-system you'd also see huge difference between UT and AVC.

I would start with investigation -- what is actually causing the slowness that you'd like to fix. This investigation usually started from hardware information, checking performance in task manager, checking what decoder used by Vegas for your footage.

P.S. Technically speaking, UT/Lagarith are NOT uncompressed. They are compressed but lossless, so file sizes are much bigger than AVC and also higher requirements to storage sub-system.