4K Choppy playback - unable to edit

Legend

4k drone media is going to be long-GOP, the nastiest stuff to edit made. Where on many colorist machines, real monsters ... 8k RED/Arri media plays beautifully, even on those beasts 4k drone/DSLR/phone long-GOP media is a pain.

First thing to do is make Cineform proxies in PrPro's slick internal proxy process, use those for playback. Use the Cineform proxy preset that ships with PrPro.

For projects in process, right-click on media in a bin, Proxy/Create Proxies.

For new media, used the Media Browser to ingest and create proxies by setting that to Ingest and selecting the Create Proxy action in the ingestion setup dialog, and among the options, the smallish Cineform preset.

In the Program monitor, click the + icon to the far right, hover over the control option icons that appear until one says Toggle Proxies, drag that to your control area. When that's clicked and turns blue, you're viewing proxies. Click again and it's gray, you're viewing original media.

It ALWAYS exports from the original media so you don't have anything to even think about there. Very easy, very slick.

And ... Quadro cards don't often provide much more than a pain to the wallet compared to recent GTX cards. In most workflows.

Neil

Everyone's mileage always varies ...

A

ApexRising

Participating Frequently

Hey Niel,

I'm having a really hard time with my drone footage and I was hoping you could clarify/elaborate the Cineform Proxy preset process.

In my existing project, when I right click on media in a bin, as described, I get no "proxy" option at all.

Additionally, I cannot find "ingest" options/settings within the media browser.

Help would be massively appreciated as there appears to be very little information after Googling this for nearly an hour now. I am in desperation and am getting increasingly frustrated.

Thank you!

Kevin-Monahan

Community Manager

Hi ChrisC,

Sorry to hear about your playback problems. I have seen issues like this before. Since you have 2 GPUs, I suspect the wrong one is chosen. Can you please check your GPU control panel or settings to make sure the more powerful GPU is selected? Let us know if the right one is selected or not. Please let us know if you are still having trouble.

Thanks,
Kevin

Kevin Monahan - Sr. Community and Engagement Strategist – Adobe Pro Video and Audio

Participating Frequently

For instance, if we color grade the video while using the proxy method, it will apply to the final image?

Legend

Yep, anything you do to the proxy will apply to the final render. This includes scaling any effects from the lower-resolution proxy to the full-res render.

Participating Frequently

You have all been a great help, I really appreciate it. Is there a link, breaking down and explaining the proxy method? I just want to be sure that I'm doing everything correctly in order to get the best 4k image.

Work offline using proxy media |

Legend

Premiere will render using your original 4K footage so there's really no wrong way to do the proxies. Here's a quick video on proxy workflows:

Participating Frequently

Just downloaded MPC -HC player and it worked great. And yes, I did mean that we were experiencing long times to produce the proxies. We're just unsure if it would be worth switching over to a different drone, or just try to make the Phantom 4 Pro work for us.

Legend

If you've got a lot of media to either transcode or proxy, scheduling for say lunch time or over-night processing can be of great help. That way, you come in to start the day, and your media is all waiting for you.

From my understanding of comments here, elsewhere, and from friends ... I don't expect switching drones will make a big difference in transcoding or proxy-creation times.

That's an informed guess ... however. If you could acquire some of the other drone's media & test, you'd know.

Neil

Everyone's mileage always varies ...

Participating Frequently

Do you guys think that the GoPro Karma drone would be easier on the PC to edit 4k? Would you also need to edit utilizing proxies for the Karma?

Legend

Most any 4k media, especially from any DSLR or drone, I'd expect to use proxies for. It's a seamless and easy process, btw. Spiffy.

Neil

Everyone's mileage always varies ...

Participating Frequently

At the moment, I cannot watch the 4K footage from the Phantom 4 Pro using Windows Media Player, but I have 0 problems when viewing 4k footage from my GH4 camera. That's why I was wondering if the Karma was less demanding.

A

Anonymous

In fact, you may not see any real differences if you're not doing much to the footage. One of the huge benefits to 4K, that you can do a lot to the image and retain detail for a beautiful 1080p finish. For those who wanna play and edit 4K Phantom 4 Pro videos on old computer(editing a 4K video requires more computing power and it could be more time consuming), we suggest you to convert/render all DJI Phantom 4 Pro 4K clips to 1080p then edit the project in 1080p and smart-render.

Source: Convert/Render DJI Phantom 4 Pro 4K to 1080p - Video Editor's Studio

Participating Frequently

Thank you for all of your suggestions. It was a big help.

Legend

What's crazy is that the Phantom 4 Pro footage uses 90% of the CPU in Premiere during playback (and is choppy with dropped frames) whereas it uses less than 2% of the CPU on MPC-HC when hardware acceleration is enabled.

E

excited_Genie16B8

Legend

AMD Motherboard
i7 4 core processor

Huh?!

Legend

I've never looked at Phantom 4 Pro footage so I downloaded a 4K sample online from YouTube: Phantom 4 Pro footage (with link to source in video comments)

I see the same thing as you - laggy to start playback, very choppy thereafter. I compared it with 4K footage from my LX100, which doesn't show these symptoms. They're both around 100 Mbps but the Phantom footage has twice the GOP length - 30 frames vs 15 on the LX100. That likely explains the difference. With the LX100 footage my CPU utilization is around 68%, so not much processing room to spare for the Phantom video with twice the keyframe length. I'm running an i7 4770k with a GTX 970. You'll definitely want to use a proxy to edit.

For reference he's a visual comparison of the Phantom 4 Pro sample footage frames vs my LX100. The peaks are the I-frames. The vertical bitrate scale is much higher on the Phantom graph vs the LX100 (auto-scale from the bitrate viewer):

Legend

WOW .... 30 ... frames, between I-frames?

I'd never heard of that. No wonder the stuff edits so bad! That is going to suck a huge amount of CPU/RAM to compute all those in-between frames from an I frame that far away. I can see the use to the camera maker, however ... it's got to be heavily compressed from what it would be otherwise.

Neil

Everyone's mileage always varies ...