Why am I not getting smooth playback of 4k footage?

Just a general question. What could be hindering the playback of 4k footage both in Resolve and other NLE's like Premiere?

I'd like to be able to see what I'm editing in real time, even at a lower resolution 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, whatever. But in Resolve and Premiere (both) my system can't seem to cache or keep up with the footage it's trying to display.

I have a 980GTX Hybrid.
Intel i7 5960X
64GB Ram
Samsung Pro SSD's as main and cache drives.

Things I thought would forestall this issue. What could I be doing wrong?

Many things have crossed my mind as to what the problem could be, too many to list here just yet.

Thanks.

Where does your 4K footage come from?

Mainly from HDDs which are connected via SATA6 to my mainboard.

The HDDs are all WD Black 4TB, I have a series of them.

The scratch drive is a Samsung 850 Pro GB, where I don't have anything else writing to or reading from except Resolve or Premiere (one at a time).

The main drive is also a Samsung 850 Pro, and no media is saved to it either.

When I meant "come from" I meant what device is recording the 4K footage you are editing and what format said 4K footage is in? 4K footage in itself doesn't mean anything.

Right, sorry, I thought you meant where is the data being pulled from into the NLE's.

Okay, well, since I've used the following 4 cameras, and generally speaking I think the footage from all of them except the pocket cam has the same problem.
Blackmagic URSA (original) - Raw
Blackmagic Production Camera 4k - using 4000x2160 RAW
Blackmagic 2.5K - Raw
Blackmagic Pocket Camera - 1080p Raw

In each case I'm shooting at 23.98fps

I am shooting RAW, but again, I think the problem lies with the computer, since when I color correct and export the RAW footage to QT in 4k resolution, I can't get smooth playback either in Resolve, Premiere, or even in QuickTime Player. But of course if I export the same footage in 1080p (generally into .mov QT), it plays back as smooth as anything, very well.

I can't speak for the 2.5k footage exactly being a problem, however.

Are you putting the RAW files onto the mechanical drives? If so they may not be fast enough to play back 4K RAW even in Raid

Yes I am, and I'd be happy to test out that theory right now. I'll get back to you with my results, excellent point.

Unfortunately, after extensive testing, I don't believe (at least in my case) that the playback issue has much to do with footage being on an SSD or not. I've encoded to (and moved) many 4k clips to SSDs and the lag issue remains.

Long time since my initial post.

I'm at a loss as to why this issue is happening (all things considered - read previous posts).


Let's just work with hypotheticals.

Let's say I was dealing with a near limitless budget like on "The Hobbit" ... what would their setup look like? Keep in mind I have approx 30TB of RAW 4K Footage from various BM cameras (along with quite a bit of 1080p footage to be outputted to a final print of 1080p) spread out on about 10 different HDD's (not SSDs - although SSD's are used as main drive, scratch, etc - and used in my tests for this problem).

Would the production company splurge for dozens of SSD's and this problem would not even crop up?

Would they put them in a RAID array? If so, what would that look like? Can I get some specific examples of hardware they might indeed be using.

I'd need nearly 30TB of SSD's and that can get ridiculously costly considering my budget, but if it means I will find closure to this issue, I'll see if I can budget for it.

HD and 2.5K RAW files should play even from single good HDD.
4K ones are outside single HDD possibilities, but 1xSSD is enough.

If you have playback problem even when footage is on Samsung SSD, then this is not disk speed issue, but computing (most likely GPU).

You also have problems with converted MOVs.
What are these MOV files? DNxHR, ProRes, Cineform?
What if you use smart caching with DNxHR set as cache codec?

You definitely don't need 30TB SDD RAID.