Discuss : M1 Hardware Accelerated Decode for AVC Intra

[AnishBansal]

With the latest Adobe Premiere Pro Beta build we have enabled Hardware Accelerated Decode on Mac M1 for AVC Intra in .mxf container.

What does this mean for you? It means that decode times for your AVC Intra footage are significantly faster on Mac M1 systems. Following flavours of AVC Intra will get benefit from this:

• Panasonic AVC Intra
• Sony XAVC Intra
• Canon XF-AVC Intra

Minimum OS version required for this feature to be enabled is macOS 10.15. However, for AVC Intra Class 200, minimum OS version required is 12.2.1.

Hardware-accelerated decoding is ON by default and is controlled by media preference that can be located via:

Navigate to Preferences > Media

Enable hardware accelerated decoding (requires restart) checkbox should be enabled for HW decoding.

Restart of Adobe Premiere Pro is required in case preference is changed.

Please see attached screenshot.

Feature is enabled in Adobe Premiere Pro Beta and Adobe Media Encoder Beta.

Please try out the feature and share your feedback.

[Beneditor]

Excellent to see you now getting into this kind of optimisation work on M1. Will be testing this today. Do you plan to accelerate XAVC wrapped as .mp4 as well? Asking for a client with Sony FX3 cameras. 

[mayjain]

Hi @Beneditor ,

Thanks for asking this. XAVC in .mp4 container is already hardware accelerated on M1 systems. You can try and let us know how it goes. We will also wait for your update on MXF testing.

Thanks,

Mayjain

[Beneditor]

Hi Mayjain 

One thing Ive noticed with h264 XAVC is that playback drops off when you have a caption layer active. Playback is also hindered by Lumetri or other plugins so some extent but captions is the biggest effect on playback. It is almost as if the hardware decoding is not functioning when a caption is present. This is on M1 Ultra with 128Gb RAM and latest beta 22.5 (as of 12/5/22) 

[mayjain]

Hi @Beneditor ,

Thanks for the update. So far I don't see any impact of captions on H264 XAVC playback on my local systems. Can you please share some media files/possibly your project to help us reproduce this issue locally ?  I will certainly check and report back.

Moreover, please let us know your MXF testing results/feedback also when you get time.

Thanks,

Mayjain

[Ann Bens]

Excuse my ignorance and changing OS, but is Canon XF-AVC Intra decoding added to windows/Nvidia?

[AnishBansal]

It has been added for M1 only.

[Nick Lear]

Any plans to have MXF hardware support for Windows?