MP 7,1 Want me to test something? (Afterburner?)

[chfilm]

Hey guys,

I have the 16 core Vega II, 192gb Ram here at home, but tomorrow I‘ll go to the local Apple Store where I have one hour of personal testing time with a 16 Core Vega Duo and Afterburner.
They told me I can bring footage and play around with it, with and without the Afterburner, at least that‘s what they said. Sadly they dont have any Adobe Apps installed.

I‘m definitely gonna take some Sony MXF Footage and run it through compressor to Prores and either they will let me remove the Afterburner and repeat the test, or I‘m gonna run the same test on my machine at home to compare results.
I want to answer if and how AB can help with transcoding TO Prores, and also gonna take some Prores 4K Red files and will test how effectively it can render Prores Proxy Files.

If you have anything else that I should test, any footage or so, let me know.

 

[tommy chen]

I don't think the afterburner card is transcoding anything to prores

 

[chfilm]

I don't think the afterburner card is transcoding anything to prores

We will find out tomorrow!

 

[Korican100]

doesn't afterburner only work on prores footage?
Initially i was under the assumption that you could take native camera codec footage (From Canon or Sony alpha cameras) and throw them in your timeline and start editing right away, but I was later "corrected" from various sources saying the afterburner was strictly for prores footage

 

[tommy chen]

in my opinion apple only writes from prores playback and transcoding from prores to delivery codecs

 

[chfilm]

I’m afraid you might be right, but there’s only one way to find out
So far, all I’ve heard is speculation. Don’t know why nobody who actually owns one did a test yet.

 

[H. Flower]

Can you load your Adobe account, install and do some Encoder/Premeire/After Effects tests? ?

 

[tommy chen]

I don't understand why nobody's taken tests

or apple don't want this?

 

[chfilm]

Can you load your Adobe account, install and do some Encoder/Premeire/After Effects tests? ?

I’ll ask not sure if they’ll let me, but after all- why the hell not?
It would be awesome to know if AB speeds up things in Premiere and media encoder.
After I did some tests in my machine today I’m beyond disappointed by the performance of the Adobe suite in comparison to Apple Compressor and final cut...

 

[Kedbear]

I’ll ask not sure if they’ll let me, but after all- why the hell not?
It would be awesome to know if AB speeds up things in Premiere and media encoder.
After I did some tests in my machine today I’m beyond disappointed by the performance of the Adobe suite in comparison to Apple Compressor and final cut...

View attachment 886346

Hey chfilm. The afterburner card speeds up the decoding of prores, not the encoding. So where it will be amazing is eg playing 16x 4K prores 4444 streams at the same time. Instead of the cpu having to do the decoding, the afterburner will take the weight off the cpu. So transcode your 4K file to prores 4444, then see how many streams you can have running at the same time before skipping frames with the afterburner card vs without. Would also be interesting to see how fast prores is exported with the afterburner vs without it. Worth testing in final cut x and also da Vinci resolve.

 

[bsbeamer]

Apple has allowed DEMO/TRIAL installs of Adobe software in the past for in-store testing purposes, but was the kind of thing you really needed to ask about ahead of time. Often needed to be downloaded in-store vs. being brought in via installer USB. These days they tend to only allow Mac App Store downloads/installs, but if you're working with a business rep it shouldn't be a problem. Worst case they re-image the machine when you're done...

You could also boot from an external with 10.15.2 and Adobe software pre-configured if you want to really test without messing with their system boot drive. Again, would need permission ahead of time so T2 external boot can be enabled.

 

[AppleTomsk]

Any news?

 

[OkiRun]

One question I do have is when you compound clip a massive project in FCPX with multiple streams of 4k Prores footage and lots of visual and audio special effects and other static images, will the AB Card treat this as a proxy Prores file and accelerate it?

 

[chfilm]

One question I do have is when you compound clip a massive project in FCPX with multiple streams of 4k Prores footage and lots of visual and audio special effects and other static images, will the AB Card treat this as a proxy Prores file and accelerate it?

sorry I guess this thread is a bit out of date because it was related to a session I had at the Apple store about the afterburner back in January.

 

[AppleTomsk]

I thought that some more details will be revealed since nothing came after your initial tests... @chfilm

 

[OkiRun]

I thought that some more details will be revealed since nothing came after your initial tests... @chfilm

Well, his signature was never changed to include the AB Card

 

[chfilm]

Well, his signature was never changed to include the AB Card

Yea well all I can say is that the 16c Mac pro Is just so overwhelmingly powerful that I‘ve never missed the AB card so far.. I‘d rather have a 2nd GPU to be honest.

 

[AppleTomsk]

How can you tell if you never did the a/b?
@chfilm

 

[chfilm]

How can you tell if you never did the a/b?
@chfilm

Well I just look at the CPU activity during all my tasks and it‘s usually in the 30% range except during final export, but even then, most of the time it‘s not very busy. GPU is though. I wouldnt expect any massive performance gains in my current day to day work scenarios Sicne the CPU has plenty of headroom still.

 

[AppleTomsk]

30 Percent CPU Usage while playing back six streams of 8K footage simultaneously at 29.97 fps?

 

[chfilm]

30 Percent CPU Usage while playing back six streams of 8K footage simultaneously at 29.97 fps?

I wrote specifically during my day to day kind of tasks. Those involve usually up to three streams of 4K prores, usually most of the time still HD actually or one 4K stream. I have yet to personally encounter prores raw or 8k footage.