Reference PC Workstation with Resolve - no realtime playback

Hello dear community,

I appreciate your previous help with putting together my new workstation and hope you can help me to get Resolve Lite working as well. Looking forward to buying the Blackmagic Cinema Camera and while waiting I conform myself to the new software and workflow.

I installed Resolve 9 beta as well as the newest driver from Nvidia on the system.
With normal 1080p30 material (simple 1 minute clips) from my 5D MK2 and my D800 I get
framerates of disappointing 4-16FPS as well as lots of red GPU signal. Sometimes even stopping.

Specs are closely related to the reference PC as in Configuration Guide August 2012:
* Windows 7 64 BIT SP1
* 64 GB RAM 1600Mhz (for RAM disk purposes - geesh)
* Geforce GTX 680 4GB DDR5 PCI-E PoINT OF VIEW TGT
* INTEL Core I7-3930K 3,2GHz 12MB Cache LGA2011 Boxed
* ASUS P9X79 Sockel2011 8xDDR3 max 64GB ATX Intel X79 (not the PRO version, as I will never capture, or have more than a second graphics card in the PCIE slots!)
* BE QUIET! Straight Power E8 700W
* SYSTEM HDD: CORSAIR SSD 240GB SATAIII 6GBPS 2.5IN
* MEDIA HDD: CORSAIR SSD 240GB SATAIII 6GBPS 2.5IN

2 points I did not follow from the configuration:
* not pro version of motherboard as it is overpriced
* for now the GPU is in the slot 1 (closest to CPU) and not slot 3. - Anyway I think that should not change much because there are no other PCIe cards.

In the project preferences the GTX 680 4 GB is recognized correctly. I did not select special drivers, just the ones from the NVIDIA Website, which to my understanding after studying manual and configuration guide should contain already the correct CUDA driver.

I did not change any settings at first, so it was the default settings.
Later I tried different FPS rates to conform before adding the media.

Optimized playback option was tried on and off but did not help either.

Yet Aftereffects, Speedgrade and Premiere runs very, very good and Cuda enhanced.
This computer is awesome and has the top grading in all categories of Windows 7 profiler.

Why this does not work?

I could put another graphics card the GTX 460 2GB as a GUI card because I have this one handy.
But I would rather get the system to work like this for now, because first tests showed that this card makes the system somehow more noisy.

This is the machine: http://imageshack.us/gal_old.php?g=407/ ... 155318.jpg

Thank you!

Best Regards,
jogi

Ok, I found out now using DBX export from Premiere CS6 that DBX seems to play better.
When pressing play shortly you can read 17FPS but then it goes to 30FPS and is 'pretty' stable.

Another thing I found out is that when creating the project you have to make sure everything is in 30FPS.

Actually not 'very' stable as when I have one tracker with one node the GPU indicator stays RED very long although it goes slowly within 5 seconds up from 7FPS to the desired 30FPS.

3 questions:
* Is the codec out of the DSLR not supported? It seems so when viewing this tremendous difference in performance of the 2 codecs. DSLR footage never goes better than 20FPS for me.

* More importantly: can I do something to improve the performance and avoid the GPU starting up so slowly?

* Is dbx fine, or do you suggest another codec for using 5d DSLR and later the Blackmagic Camera?

Thanks so much.

The DNxHD codec provides real-time playback on my PC, which is way smaller and slower than yours (great pics!). You don't need to improve your hardware, it's more a question of tweaking your settings. You'll see the whole list of what can help on page 298 of the manual: Project Settings for Improving Real Time Performance.

Thank you.
I missed that page. Printing it out now and will try.

That codec is surely cool when you work with the Blackmagic Cinema Camera, as it comes straight out of the camera.
But when working with DSLR material, are you converting before doing the editing in Premiere CS6, or only in the mixdown for the grading.

No idea how Premiere handles your DSLR footage. But if you want to save disk space, it's preferable to only convert the media you actually used in your final edit.

The disk space is not so much the problem. Premiere automatically only exports the correct clips with DBX. I have never worked with DNxHD.

Thanks to your posting I was able to figure out that I did not have that codec on my computer and found how to install it so I have it in all my video applications. Very nice =)
Will try if DNxHD gives me a better performance compared to DBX. Currently exporting.

Is there any recommendation regarding the DNxHD setting, I bet there is a lot to mess up there as well?
Color Levels: 709, RGB Levels
Alpha: None, Compressed, Uncompressed?
Bit Depth: 12, 10, 8 (for DSLR 8 should be correct?)

Thank you.

Best Regards

Ok, I just tried DNxHD works well, similar to DBX but from a very subjective view a little better.
Both are totally workable. DNxHD shows 30fps and green after 2,5seconds after starting the timeline without any optimations regarding the project settings.

Personally, I probably expected instant 30fps playback with such low bitrate material. But that was probably not realistic - the performance metering with the adobe programs might very well be just differently set up. Did some motiontracking, blurs and colorcorrections. Nice program.

Anyways avoiding the files from the DSLR play back very badly. 8FPS, Audio is therefore very jerky. So this should obviously be avoided. Interesting that this is not mentioned in the manual as this is the first thing an absolute beginner is going to do

Would appreciate a recommendation on setting the DNxHD codec, because I have no idea what setting makes the most sense here. The material I work with is again DSLR and soon BMCC (so probably 8 bit is ok for DSLR but too low for BMCC).

Thanks.

I always stay away from DSLR native files. The H264 codec is horrible for anything. I always encode to something else. Since I'm on a Mac, I make them ProRes. Makes no difference to me whether they're two frames or two minutes - they pull the performance down.


Can't answer for your other problems though. Do you have a RAID along with the single media disk you mention in your specs? Even though it's an SSD, I'm not familiar with how they really work for video stuff.

Regarding SSD, you can make sure about it by using BMD Disk Speed Test: page 9 of DaVinci_Resolve_Win_Config_Guide_Aug_2012.

Avid has a good doc explaining the different flavors of DNxHD: http://www.avid.com/static/resources/US/documents/DNxHD.pdf

If you're scratching your head on some of the terms they use, Eddie Hamilton will help you out:
Maybe fast forward the basic stuff in the beginning. If I remember correctly, it's only in the end that he talks about the DNxHD codec.

Thank you =)

Now I have this attached table where I can see the Mbps - that is really good. I missed that knowledge previously.
From this I see that working with Avid DNxHD 220x 1920 x 1080 4:2:2 10 should work well with 220Mbps, actually it is way over the top for the DSLR material I suppose.

Table on Mbps for DNxHD codec:

Mbps of DNxHD codec.JPG (187.59 KiB) Viewed 12804 times

I have another 2 SSDs from OCZ Vertex3 they are certified by Blackmagic but I have to put them in the system.

All tests are ok and are also attached as well.
I put here the system SSD (might sound weird) as this was the one I did my first test with.
Cannot attach more files than 3, but they all show a similar great performance on the other ssds.

bandwidthtest.JPG (40.41 KiB) Viewed 12804 times

TEstIOwin.JPG (64.3 KiB) Viewed 12804 times

Great news, now you just need to tweak the project settings inside Resolve

The DNxHD choice really depends on what quality you're after. One thing to keep in mind: even with 8-bit DSLR material, it's worthwhile to use a 10-bit codec when doing color correction.