Yes, I don’t know what was going on, but media encoder just raced through these files prores to prores. Like it just passed it through..
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MP 7,1 UI Performance in FCP X is seriously impressive vs Premiere!
- Thread starter chfilm
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Affinity Photo has most of Photoshop's tools, it's optimised for Metal and for most operations runs a lot faster. It's missing Smart Objects and Art Boards but I'm learning to work around that. Seriously worth giving it a try and getting used to it.
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Affinity Photo has most of Photoshop's tools, it's optimised for Metal and for most operations runs a lot faster. It's missing Smart Objects and Art Boards but I'm learning to work around that. Seriously worth giving it a try and getting used to it.
Thank you - I will check it out plus it's hell of a lot cheaper than that bloat-ware - I'm hating what Adobe have done and if I can persuade the business to get away from them I will - the nightmare in an enterprise environment to manage creative cloud is horrendous - and the cost of having support staff deal with is you don't want to know...
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The first-choice photo editor of millions of photographers, artists, and other professionals around the world – try Affinity Photo for free today!
Affinity Photo has most of Photoshop's tools, it's optimised for Metal and for most operations runs a lot faster. It's missing Smart Objects and Art Boards but I'm learning to work around that. Seriously worth giving it a try and getting used to it.
This looks pretty good! Thanks for sharing.
I'd love to be able to ditch Adobe, but until there's a legitimate alternative to After Effects AND something comparable to Adobe's dynamic linking, I'm sh*t out of luck. Honestly, I've sort of made peace with the random idiosyncrasies and performance flaws. I mean, it can't get any worse, right? Right, guys...? Guys...?
Another major flaw besides the aforementioned issues is the lack of native AAF export from FCP!
Fusion can replace AE (and I don't just mean stock AE... I need all the expanded functionality brought by Red Giant Trapcode and VFX suites, Element 3D and other VC plugins, and Mocha Pro for it to be feasible)? If that's the case, I'll definitely have to take a look.
Yeah, that's another good point. I've got a half-dozen plugins making After Effects usable (hey, let's not have a simple way to adjust anchor point positioning!) but there's another dozen that are essential to what I do. The ecosystem is something you at least have to pave the way for and aggressively court.
Tangentially related to this thread: I've been busily testing FCPX, Premiere, and Resolve (free version for now). My tests are very simple: ingest a 5 minute 4K/60 h.264 file, append one copy of the file at the end of the other (10 minute video now), and then export to either h.264 or h.265. Mind you, all of my source and output footage is highly compressed long-GOP formats. So, that's what I'm using to test.
I was half hoping FCPX would try to make use of the hardware encoder on the AMD GPU to help speed the encoding up. Hm. It basically wrote the file out in real time: about 10 minutes. That's not bad, but it should be about half of that if it were truly hardware encoded. This for both h.264 and h.265.
Premiere supposedly supports hardware encoding for h.265, so I tried that. Real time output: about 10 minutes. Its h.264 output looked like it was going to take around 15+ minutes; I stopped it as soon as I could tell it wasn't real time.
Resolve seemed closest to good. It wrote both h.264 and h.265 files out in less than real time. But: not by much. 9 minutes instead of 10, for instance. I don't call that a success, just better than the other two.
I've read multiple people claim the T2 chip has hardware h.264/h.265 encoding. If it does, it's either not being used, or isn't being used well be any of the software. Or... I'm doing it wrong.
I was half hoping FCPX would try to make use of the hardware encoder on the AMD GPU to help speed the encoding up. Hm. It basically wrote the file out in real time: about 10 minutes. That's not bad, but it should be about half of that if it were truly hardware encoded. This for both h.264 and h.265.
Premiere supposedly supports hardware encoding for h.265, so I tried that. Real time output: about 10 minutes. Its h.264 output looked like it was going to take around 15+ minutes; I stopped it as soon as I could tell it wasn't real time.
Resolve seemed closest to good. It wrote both h.264 and h.265 files out in less than real time. But: not by much. 9 minutes instead of 10, for instance. I don't call that a success, just better than the other two.
I've read multiple people claim the T2 chip has hardware h.264/h.265 encoding. If it does, it's either not being used, or isn't being used well be any of the software. Or... I'm doing it wrong.
Your 7.1 setup and its optimization with Metal means it should be exporting quite fast for a 10 min. 4k clip.
I know that speeds can slow down when FCPX is not the foreground application or when the computer is doing other work...
Neither is a concern. The machine is doing nothing except exporting. And, really, if it's properly using hardware encoders, it shouldn't matter. That's sort of the point of them. ;-)
Hey, do you happen to have any observations about timeline scrubbing/playback performance between FCPX, Premiere and Resolve? I know people tend to fixate on export/render times, but to me that's actually the least important thing (especially since I kinda like being able to shrug and say, "Sorry, can't help right now. Exporting.") But a stuttery timeline, on the other hand, drives me nuts... especially since I'm usually doing multicam edits with footage from 5-8 cameras.
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Media encoder just tells me Hardware encoding is not available on my machine (because of lack of quick sync)
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i can just tell you that FCP/DaVinci are waaaaayyyyyy smoother in the timeline!
So you’re claiming an MP7,1 is not at all capable of hardware encode in Adobe software when MBP16,1 and many earlier models, iMac, MacMini are fully capable of Adobe hardware encode? Check your settings. This is almost certainly user error involved. May also explain some of your UI gripes.
Yep, I'm quite comfortable in Pr and ME; having used them for years. When exporting, it clearly says that h.265 hardware encoding is available, but h.264 hardware encoding isn't. And when performing the h.265 encoding, it's... not as quick as it should be.
Per your later post: all or most of those examples have Intel QuickSync available, which Pr does use quite well. On Macs and on PCs. But obviously with the Xeons in the Mac Pro, QuickSync isn't an option.
These are two very conflicting reports...
@chfilm says hardware encode doesn’t work at all.
@jasonmvp says (as expected) hardware encode works with limitations.
The performance issues are entirely concerning, but let’s at least stick to basic facts when making claims. We can hope for better or more utilized hardware acceleration and/or issues to be addressed. Claiming hardware acceleration on MP7,1 is entirely not possible is just false. There likely are cheats to enable like people did with MP5,1 but that’s a different discussion and this is veering way off topic...
@chfilm says hardware encode doesn’t work at all.
@jasonmvp says (as expected) hardware encode works with limitations.
The performance issues are entirely concerning, but let’s at least stick to basic facts when making claims. We can hope for better or more utilized hardware acceleration and/or issues to be addressed. Claiming hardware acceleration on MP7,1 is entirely not possible is just false. There likely are cheats to enable like people did with MP5,1 but that’s a different discussion and this is veering way off topic...
Apple VideoToolBox API provides x264 and H265 native hardware acceleration with 2019 Mac Pro the exact same way as with iMac Pro 2017, via the GPU. If the app supports the native API, hardware acceleration just works, no tricks.
The "cheat" available for Pr is this. Earlier, he made an attempt at a MacOS version of the plugin, but he's since punted on it because he can't figure out how to get it integrate it with/on MacOS. I've used it heavily on Windows and it works wonders with NVidia's NVENC hardware.
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Right. One would assume that FCPX would be coded to use said API. And perhaps it is, too, but it just doesn't seem like it.
This might be slightly off topic but maybe a point worth considering when comparing Premiere and FCP.
Transferring / exporting (AAF) a project from FCP to Pro Tools works much more reliable compared to Premiere.
MC works best since you stay inside the AVID environment but with automatic duck + FCP you won't lose the original audio meta data. Working on Premiere projects is always a pain for me. Don't get me wrong, you can export AAF for PT in Premiere, the problem is in many cases the audio metadata which is required to sync to the original recorder tracks from set.
Transferring / exporting (AAF) a project from FCP to Pro Tools works much more reliable compared to Premiere.
MC works best since you stay inside the AVID environment but with automatic duck + FCP you won't lose the original audio meta data. Working on Premiere projects is always a pain for me. Don't get me wrong, you can export AAF for PT in Premiere, the problem is in many cases the audio metadata which is required to sync to the original recorder tracks from set.
I'll never not be floored by the fact that when I started working in video, Resolve was considered the ultra high end and turnkey systems easily cost $100K+. The computer I used to edit on was 50K €.