MP 7,1 Apple Compressor and Afterburner quirk with PR4444 media

[PowerMike G5]

I've been testing the Afterburner in my Mac Pro and noticed a quirk. It's been accelerating playback of PR422 files fine. But I noticed that any files that have been transcoded to PR4444 or PR4444XQ using Apple Compressor aren't accelerated using the card and only use the CPU for playback decode. If I transcode using Adobe Media Encoder, then all PR4444 and PR4444XQ files are then accelerated with Afterburner.

Is there anyone here who has this card and Compressor? I'm trying to see if this is replicated elsewhere and is a software issue with Apple Compressor?

I'd like to stick with Compressor for transcoding, since I can use instances to maximize transcodes on my Mac Pro. It allows me to use all of my Cores/GPU/Afterburner and has transcoded much faster than using AME or my M1 Max MBP.

 

[bsbeamer]

Can you confirm AME is dropping/reducing CPU load in addition to full utilization of Afterburner with PR4444 + PR444XQ transcode? Have read some random grumblings on Adobe forums this might be attempting to utilize, but there are limitations with 4444 formats in actually utilizing AB for this, but maybe a recent update actually addressed it?

 

[PowerMike G5]

Well transcoding to any ProRes from another format does not use the Afterburner at all, given it is a decode accelerator only. Any transcodes from a PR format to another format will use it though and cut transcode times down a good amount.

Given Compressor's ability to create instances, the transcoding time differences to bring media into a PR format are pretty drastic. For example, transcoding a 2 1/2 min 10-bit 4:2:2 4K XF-AVC clip to PR took 6:31 using AME. It took only 1:16 using Compressor! Primarily because Compressor can use 100% of my 16-core CPU in the Mac Po while AME only uses about 15% of the CPU.

Even with the M1 Max's PR encode acceleration, my Mac Pro still finishes in half the time, since there is so much more CPU power and you're limited to only 2 instances on the M1 Max.

The issue I'm having is the PR4444 media from Compressor is not using Afterburner for acceleration. There's gotta be some software issue somewhere as the same media generated by AME is accelerated with Afterburner. Strange.