This IS the Avid L2: Re: [Avid-L2] Re: best editor for H264?

Saturday, September 20, 2014

Re: [Avid-L2] Re: best editor for H264?

I find background transcoding can interfere with foreground performance even of the Avid GUI -- for instance when running Quickeys macros, it tends to lose keystrokes when transcoding is using a lot of CPU in the background.

However, how much CPU gets used by background vs foreground transcoding varies a lot between different types of footage, which is more of an issue, I think.

On a 24-core Westmere, background rendering of F55 XAVC 4K footage maxes out at around 250% CPU, whereas in the foreground, it gets up to about 2000% CPU -- so 8 times faster. There's a tradeoff between foreground usability and background transcode speed, but I wound up going back to foreground transcoding for the bulk of this footage. Just too slow in the background to get anywhere unless you leave it overnight, which defeats the purpose.

5D footage, on the other hand, seems to transcode at the same speed whether in the foreground or the background, maxing out around 200% CPU, which is pretty weak.

I've had other footage (RED or Epic, I think?) hit 1800% on a background transcode - so not too much of a time penalty, but it definitely made foreground tasks more sluggish.

Cheers,
--Michael

On 2014-09-20, 7:53 AM, Andi Meek kwikpasta@hotmail.com [Avid-L2] wrote:

For me, this is one of the areas I'd like to see more movement on from Avid; GPU acceleration and CPU optimisation. Everyone else seems to be pretty keen on taking advantage of CUDA/ OpenCL and it's near impossible to find any information about what Avid actually uses fully. As far as I can tell it's some Boris effects which seems a bit crap. If background render is coming, I want that render to be fast and not getting in the way of operating Avid the way that a background transcode currently seems to. Do others notice a noticeable drop in performance when using background transcode or is it just my old z400 showing it's age?

Andi

To: Avid-L2@yahoogroups.com
From: Avid-L2@yahoogroups.com
Date: Sat, 20 Sep 2014 10:23:25 -0400
Subject: Re: [Avid-L2] Re: best editor for H264?

Newer Xeons do support it.

DQS

On Sep 20, 2014, at 10:13 AM, "Oliver Peters oliverpeters@oliverpeters.com [Avid-L2]" <Avid-L2@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

I don't believe that applies to Xeon processors, though. Only the Core i5 and i7 CPUs.

- Oliver

Posted by: Dom Q. Silverio

modern Intel CPU has a built in acceleration of h.264 decode and encode. In some tests it is better than NVidia's implementation. Unfortunately, Avid does not support it.