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al_bergstein
al_bergstein
Inspiring
May 22, 2017
Question

GH5 4k MOV footage crashing Pr 11.1.1 (MacOS)

  • May 22, 2017
  • 1 reply
  • 800 views

I have upgraded to 11.1.1. and am still experiencing crashes with Pr and GH5 4k 8bit footage. The footage crashes Pr when I load it into the project and try and play/scrub it. This is reproducible at will.

Footage is of concert 47 minutes long. 58GB on one MOV file. (1/2 the concert)

1080p footage of all sorts never crashes Pr. The change has only happened and only happens when I start working on GH5 4k footage. I can edit 1080p footage that was shot of the same concert on a different camera without issue.

This is the first 4k footage in over a year. I shot some small clips on a GH4 a year ago and they worked fine on this system then, using an earlier version of Pr.

Using Proxies also crashes Pr.

Some basic info:

iMac 27" screen

32 GB RAM (Activity Monitor showing that when the 4k footage is loaded into the project prior to crashing, only 16GBs of RAM is being used.)

2 GB Video RAM  GTX680mx (could this be the problem? )

10.11.6 (el capitan) (is the newest OS upgrade better able to process the video in Pr)?

3.4 i7 processor

1 TB SSD drive internal

video footage on RAID 1 Thunderbolt mirrored drive (7200 rpm).

So... I can transcode everything to 2k, or fix this problem. (maybe transcode to ProRes 4k lite?) . Others on this board and elsewhere claim that they can edit GH5 4k footage on similarly configured but not identical Macs.

Any thoughts on what is happening here? Am I just using too small a video card for this? Obviously 32GBs RAM seems to be enough, according to Activity Monitor.

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

R Neil Haugen
R Neil Haugen
Legend
May 22, 2017

There are some "interesting choices" that were made by Panasonic in getting a fast compression of data to card when recording the 4k 10-bit ... which is a vastly larger data set to record than say 4k 8-bit or 1080 8-bit. And most of the NLE's out there are struggling to handle it with the settings that come from the camera. The PrPro team thought they had this fixed in the last partial update, but lo ... no.

They've acknowledged the problem and said they're trying to get something out quickly for this and a few other problems ... but never say exactly when "soon" will be.

Even when they get it fixed, I would strongly recommend ingesting that media with a proxy for most of your editing. Long-GOP media is a pain for the CPU in 1080p. 4k 10-bit with the long settings between I-frames that are used by drones & DSLR's is incredibly taxing on the CPU for cores/threads/RAM and other subsytems. And ... don't confuse small file size with good playback ... they are actually not even close to the same. For best playback the full intraframe codecs like Cineform YUV 10-bit, DNxHD/R, and ProRes edit far smoother with more effects ... even though they're 2-3 times the file-size per clip. Because ... there's far less for the computer to do to play that media back.

You might also check in on the Hardware forum ...

https://forums.adobe.com/community/premiere/hardware_forum

Neil

Everyone's mileage always varies ...
al_bergstein
al_bergsteinAuthor
Inspiring
May 22, 2017

Thanks Neil. I tried the proxy route and while it seemed to help, I still managed to have a crash while trying to edit the footage. Last night I transcoded both to DNxHD/R and down to 1080p Apple Pro Res HD. I'll see if that changes anything.

I'm wondering though how to find out if my graphics card could be running out of RAM on this. I can watch through Activity Monitor the RAM levels in the OS, but can't in the card. of course, there is no way to upgrade the card, which leads me to once again complain about Apple's lack of professional capabilities in their high end products, but that's another story.

Over the years, on both Windows and the Mac, when Pr runs out  of memory it usually just crashes like this. It's what led me to upgrade from 16GB to 32. Once there, no crashes have happened until now, with the move to 4k.

It seems odd that this hasn't shown up before in other 4k providers since Panny is using H.264 for it's video compression. H.265 is only used for 6k stills generation.

R Neil Haugen
R Neil Haugen
Legend
May 22, 2017

There are ​many​ choices for various settings for the use of H.264 and other long-GOP compression schemes. Some are perhaps, possible but not recommended?. Others are "there" but just haven't ever been used so NLE's might tend to ignore the possibility.

Many of the cameras that have been doing 4k are the big 'professional' rigs, REDs & such. They work in log, CinemaDNG, or ProRes typically ... none of which is in an interframe codec like H.264 or mp4. And the DSLR's that have shot 4k haven't been trying to ​also​ do it in 10-bit, which requires a ​ton​ more data be recorded than 8-bit.

The GH4 couldn't record data fast enough, small enough, to "pipeline" through to an internal SD card. With the compression settings they used for that camera. One of the "breakthroughs" for the GH5 was changing the compression settings for a more extreme level of compression, in order to manage 4k 10-bit for internal SD card recording.

So ... up to now, it hasn't been ​necessary​ to get off to the lesser-used settings for more "extreme" compression. Apparently, the GH5 uses the same compression settings for both 8 and 10-bit 4k. Which I got sort of ... ​mostly​ ... confirmed by one of the Panny people at NAB. Talk about willing to give info but NOT want to be quotable! Yeesh.

I'm hoping the next release of an update 'patch' for PrPro handles this properly. They have said "soon" ... be never define soon, of course.

Not sure which GPU they've got in that thing, but ... might be, might not be an issue. GPU's aren't hardly used for decompression, that's a CPU thing.

Neil

Everyone's mileage always varies ...
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