ARRI RAW performance

Report · Jun 17, 2021

Why is AE so painfully slow at reading ARRI RAW files? I can get realtime playback in Resolve but AE takes about 2 seconds to read one frame.. I'm not expecting Resolve type performance but this seems ridiuclous. They are impossible to work with.

Report · Jun 17, 2021

OS? System? AE Version? What else is going on?

It takes Arri Raw files (which are image sequences) just a tiny bit longer to decode the first time than Tiff Sequences which take longer than EXR sequences, but once the footage has been cached, adding effects does not seem to slow anything down. Here's a test with some sample footage from Arri. The system I ran the test on may blow your mind. It does mine. I'm getting about 17 fps preview renders when I make color changes using Lumetri.

I don't care much for the Drag & drop here feature, but it works OK for this demo.

Report · Jun 17, 2021

Win 10, AE 17.2, AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X 24-Core, 128GB Ram, 2x 3080, 2TB SSD for AE Cache.

My ARRI files are in the newer MXF wrappers at 4448x3096. Caching obviously helps but i can't help but wonder why they are so much slower than other RAW files. R3D are much quicker to decode for example. I'm not expecting realtime here but 2 seconds per frame on my system is painful. I've got numberous10 second sequences that are taking 8 minutes to cache each. I think I'm actaully going to render out EXRs from Resolve as it's that painful to watch it chug through.

I noticed that Resolve has two options to decode ARRI RAW - Resolve's own and ARRI's. Resolve's is much quicker so I'm guessing AE uses the slower ARRI version. I think this is where the problem lies.

Report · Jun 17, 2021

You are probably correct.EXR image sequences are probably the fastest to the code on all of my systems. For a lot of my clients that is the preferred delivery format as well.