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Community Manager
Kyle PlumadoreCommunity Manager
Community Manager
May 19, 2020
Question

Feature Focus: Afterburner ProRes Hardware Decompression Support

  • May 19, 2020
  • 4 replies
  • 13964 views

Hey Everyone,

 

In recent beta builds (14.3.0 and newer) we've added support for Apple's Afterburner accelerator card which is an optional component available for 2019 Mac Pro systems. Currently we support decode acceleration of ProRes 4444 and 422 codecs using the Afterburner card. Please note: ProRes RAW acceleration via the Afterburner card is not currently supported - although CPU decompression is available for ProRes RAW. 

The Metal renderer must be selected for use in the applications (this is already the default setting):
  • After Effects (Beta): File > Project Settings... > Video Rendering and Effects > select "Mercury GPU Acceleration (Metal)"
  • Media Encoder (Beta): Preferences > General > Video Rendering > select Renderer: "Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration (Metal) - Recommended"
  • Premiere Pro (Beta): File < Project Settings > General > select Renderer: "Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration (Metal) - Recommended"

 

Unfortunately there is currently no way to identify utilization of the Afterburner card - but if you have a 2019 Mac Pro with an Afterburner card installed, and your workflow contains ProRes 422 or 4444 content,  please share your experience with us in this thread.

 

We look forward to your feedback.
 
Thank you,
Kyle Plumadore
Adobe

 

 

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    4 replies

    P
    PowerMike G5
    Participating Frequently
    January 27, 2022

    Hi Kyle-

     

    I've been testing Afterburner for various ProRes related workflows in Premiere Pro. 

     

    One usage case of interest was to try and utlize a higher-res "proxy" workflow of raw formats within Premiere for large longform edits for series and films.  So attaching same resolution ProRes 422 HQ files to Redcode Raw or Canon Cinema Raw, etc. and using those prores files for most of the work leading up to finalization of the master.

     

    I noticed that Premiere doesn't accelerate any decode of ProRes when the files are attached as proxies to other files.  It only accelerates ProRes files when they are standalone.  Is there any way to update Premiere to accelerate ProRes files when they are attached as proxies as well?

     

    I've been able to confirm this via monitoring using Apple's Activity Monitor.

     

    Thanks!

    M
    Adobe Employee
    MartieB
    Adobe Employee
    May 18, 2023

    Hi PowerMike G5,

    In the recent 23.4 release there was a related bug fix that should now enable hardware accelerated decoding of your ProRes proxies using Afterburner. 

    -Martie

    P
    PowerMike G5
    Participating Frequently
    May 29, 2023

    Hi Martie-

     

    This is great news!  Thank you!

    J
    jbry
    Participant
    June 24, 2020

    I just installed an afterburner card after seeing that it was now supported in Premiere Pro. It drasticly decreased the playback preformance of ProRes Media in Premiere. I have made sure that hardware accelaration is turned on and that the Metal renderer is selected. The afterburner is installed in a 16x slot with the pool allocated all to itself. Not sure where the issue can be. About to shutdown and try another slot in case there is an issue there but wanted to see if there were any other suggestoins, really hoping I didn't drop $2K for nothing.

    K
    Community Manager
    Kyle PlumadoreCommunity ManagerAuthor
    Community Manager
    June 24, 2020

    That's very odd - we haven't seen any cases where playback is worse with Afterburner than without.

     

    What resolution/format of ProRes media are you playing? If you are willing to share a sample clip, we can give it a try on our end.

    Are you playing the content within a timeline with effects or by itself?

    If you play the same content in the Quicktime Player does it have the same issue?

     

    What Mac OS version are you on? We found 10.15.5 had some performance improvements when using an Afterburner card.

     

    Also if you can provide the other specs of the machine, that would be helpful.

     

     

     

     

     

     

    J
    jbry
    Participant
    June 25, 2020

    Thanks Kyle! Some of the information you provided helped me find the problem. I hadn't tried playing a ProRes video in quicktime so I did and got the same result. My media is on a server with a 10Gb network connection, For whatever reason, when I booted up after installing the afterburner card, the network only initialized at 100Mb and just stuck there. I restarted the network card and it's working great now. Didn't think to check that since it's never happened before. 

    @
    @hechanovadigital
    Participating Frequently
    June 18, 2020

    Hello, Ive run a couple of tests in ME and MEbeta using 2019 mac pro with afterburner card and saw zero difference.     I just see now that there is a beta update as of TODAY and i am updating now.    Will update shortly.

     

    The basic test I was running was transcoding 4k h264 footage to pro res 422LT at matching source resolution.    For reference, I did put Me and MeBeta against a competitor software and the competitor was running about 6x faster.     

     

    Im aware these statements are rather vague, I was going to provide logs and exact numbers, but when i went to the CC app to get the version numbers of everything, I saw there was an update in both the beta and non beta versions of Me.       

    @
    @hechanovadigital
    Participating Frequently
    June 18, 2020

    Hi Adobe,

     

    Can you tell me what application you use in house to monitor hardware activity?    I get conflicting information with Apple activity monitor and XRG.     I am considering downloading iStat , but hoping you might have some insight on what to use so that any feedback from me is as accurate as what you will see.

     

    K
    Community Manager
    Kyle PlumadoreCommunity ManagerAuthor
    Community Manager
    June 18, 2020

    We typically extract numbers from Apple's Activity Monitor for these types of tests (using terminal scripts), as it is generally the most reliable. Note that we haven't provided any usage % for the Afterburner itself as there are currently no tools to monitor that as far as we know.

     

    Also After Effects may not be the best test for Afterburner. If you are interested primarily in seeing Afterburner's performance impact, I would reccomend transcoding from e.g. 4k ProRes 422/4444 to 4k h.264 with and without the Afterburner card installed.

    R
    rwood1123
    Participating Frequently
    May 23, 2020

    Premiere Pro doesn't seem to be utilizing the Afterburner card much if at all while working with ProRes files attached as proxies to MXF online footage.

     

    Media Encoder, on the other, somehow appears to be using the Afterburner quite heavily when encoding to ProRes, which is a bit confounding to me.

     

    MenuBar Stats 3 is the software I'm using to measure memory and processor use on the Afterburner card separate from the AMD Radeon Pro Vega II Duo.

    K
    Community Manager
    Kyle PlumadoreCommunity ManagerAuthor
    Community Manager
    May 26, 2020

    Hi RayWood,

     

    The last we checked MenuBar Stats 3 did not show Afterburner usage. Can you share a screenshot of where it shows Afterburner usage? Also, Afterburner does not support encoding - only decoding - so it is a bit odd that it would show any usage during encoding to ProRes unless of course your transcode source is ProRes.

     

    Thanks,

    Kyle

     

    R
    rwood1123
    Participating Frequently
    May 28, 2020

    I'm starting to wonder if MenuBar Stats 3 is pulling info from the Vega II Duo and mistaking it for the Afterburner. That would explain why I'm getting these odd readings (it showed usage even when not playing back the ProRes proxies):

     

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