15.4.1 another big step backwards on my system OSX

[Jim Curtis]

Without OpenCL support, and relying on Metal or Software Only rendering, I get no real-time playback whatsoever with .mxf clips with one instance of Red Giant Colorista applied - even at quarter resolution.   A massive number of frames are being dropped, with only occasional bursts of real-time performance.

This is with 4K source footage in an HD Sequence, both at the same frame rate of 23.976.

This renders this version of Pr completely unusable to me.  For reference, Pr 14.9 is still working like a champ, which I infer is because of the OpenCL support that Adobe chose to discontinue for Pr 2021.

I have a powerful MacPro7,1.  System Compatibility Report finds "No Conflicts to Report."

MacPro7,1 - 2.7 GHz 24-Core Intel Xeon W - 256G RAM - AMD Radeon Pro Vega II 32 GB

ATTO R680 PCIe SAS SCSI RAID6 (8 drives)

OSX 10.15.7

I wonder if anybody with a similar computer gets acceptable results on Big Sur, or has any other idea for the reason for my thread title.

[Jim Curtis]

Update:  I just opened two older projects in which source footage and Sequence are 29.97, and getting better real-time performance.  One had ProRes sources, and another had .mxf.

I had tried several other projects with 23.976 sources (.mxf) and sequences, and got many many dropped frames on all of them.

[Jim Curtis]

Deleted by original poster

[Baffy19]

I concluded that the premiere itself works normally. But when you throw on the effects, THAT'S IT. You can finish and do no more. Why don't they eliminate it????

[Kevin-Monahan]

Baffy,

Are you also in a situation where you have only Metal GPU acceleration too? Can you share your experience too?

Thanks,
Kevin

[Baffy19]

Hello, Kevin.
I haven't talked about it for a long time. But, excuse me, I have a powerful station with an Intel processor (8 Cores, 16 Threads), an Nvidia 2070 Super video card, 32 Gb memory. Settings with CUDA support. Please check the Magnify, Circle and other similar effects. There are many of them. Look at how they behave. They lag when dragging, the response is weak, the timeline slows down because of them. Are we talking about performance??? This is just one effect. I use a lot of such effects in videos. It is impossible to work. Everything is fine without them. Please reach out to the Adobe developers. I wonder what they will say.
With respect to the Adobe team.

[Kevin-Monahan]

Jim,

Sorry. The best place for any bug report is here: Premiere Pro User Voice. I have yet to hear of any widespread problems, but the release just came out. I will keep an eye out. For sure, contact the manufacturer of these effects.

Thanks,
Kevin

[Baffy19]

here is a screenshot, Kevin 

[Kevin-Monahan]

PC, eh, Baffy? Looks like a different performance issue compared to what Jim is facing. We can look at your case separately.

Thanks,
Kevin

[Jim Curtis]

Kevin, and anybody else who's interested:  The performance under Metal in Pr 2020 / 14.9 is almost as snappy as with OpenCL - only a few frames every few seconds are dropped with Colorista applied.  That's the third party effect I use most.  Second most used is Samurai.  With OpenCL, playback is real-time, no dropped frames and no degrading of playback quality.

The difference between 14.9 and 15.4.1 with Metal is night and day.  Add one instance of Colorista in 15.4.1, and in some cases there's no playback of video at all.  In others, there's about four frames per second.  No real time whatsoever with any Red Giant, Boris, Digital Anarchy, or other third party effect.  And, forget about scrubbing the CTI in the timeline.

Pointing the finger at third parties isn't helpful.  Their effects work fine (for the most part) on Metal in 2020 / 14, and therefore I would expect them to point the finger back at Adobe, leaving us hapless customers as collateral damage in Vendor Wars.

As far as Apple discontinuing OpenCL, they are still selling hardware that supports it.  Their jillion dollar MacPros made for PROS are sold with cards with OpenCL supported GPUs.  Many of us PROS are still using their high-end machines.  I got ten years of service from the previous Mac tower, and I expect to be using the new one until 2029 likewise.  Adobe seems to be focusing their development of Pr on amateurs.  Maybe consider dropping "Pro" from the name of the Premiere Pro, if that's the case.  It's not that Adobe can't support OpenCL for while longer.  They've just chosen not to.

[R Neil Haugen]

Starting with Apple ... its been discussed around quite a bit, that they are 'deprecating' OpenCL support. They make very clear what they expect vendors to do ... and vendors go along with Apple on that sort of stuff or they get snippy.

To me, it sucks that they've been jerking their users around on GPUs over the last couple years. But Adobe needs to get along with them, so they'll do what Apple tells them to do. And yea, the engineers know this has been an issue with users but the engineers have no say what so freaking ever on the Metal/OpenCL issue. That's well up the management chain at Adobe.

As to difference between Metal and OpenCL performance say 14.9/15.4, that IS something well worth discussion. Detailed discussion. Very detailed discussion.

Part of course could simply be that 15.4 takes more hardware than 14.9. Sadly, this seems to always be the case with the software/hardware migration.

Part could be the way that Metal is implemented somehow between them ... which is definitely something that should be discussed and probed.

Of course, "here" we are mostly users. Over on the UserVoice, that's a portal directly to the engineers. We interviewed staffer James Strawn on a livestream Wednesday, and he was explaining that now UserVoice is ported out to the engineer's Slack channels, so any post there immediately pops up for numerous engineers to see.

And also, the engineering staff pays close attention to their Public Beta forum.

So I would urge all Mac users with this problem to both go to the UserVoice and search/post, along with the Public Beta forum and search/post. That gets you the best data directly to the engineers.

More and better data is always better.

Neil

[Jim Curtis]

Thank you, Neil.  I appreciate your and Kevin's insight.  I get that Adobe is at Apple's mercy on OpenCL.  I'm more than a little bugged that Adobe removed a well-functioning feature from Pr, replaced it with inferior performance, and calls it "an upgrade."  

I'd gladly do without all the non-essential "Essential" panels for better performance and stability.  I doubt OpenCL support was such a millstone that it made any sense to ditch it for silly features like "reframing" or "improvements" to a titling system that's still clunky and inconsistent with how Ae handles text.  "If it's not broke, don't fix it."

I'll take your and Kevin's advice and head over to User Voice, although that seems tilting at windmills, too.  There are dozens of complaints there about the crappy Track Matte effect, Mercury issues, and speed-ramping nested Sequences bug that have been ongoing complaints for YEARS without any changes or fixes.  These are features full-time pros want, but no, let's work on new toys for YouTube and TikTok producers.

There are three features in 15 that I'd really like to be using, but cant:  faster Warp Stabilizing, faster exporting of H264, and improved captioning.  Currently, I'm using 15 for captioning only, as 15 is stable enough when I import an exported movie from 14.9.  The problems start if I open a 14.9 project.  That's a no-go.  SRT export was broken up to 15.4, but there's a workaround that gets the job done.

[Baffy19]

Here you are, I'm not alone and thank God.
Kevin, you are the best specialist here with whom I managed to communicate, I believe in you and your team. It would be better if you yourself tell the developers about these performance problems. I write to the developers there is no answer.

[Jim Curtis]

---

@R Neil Haugen wrote:

And also, the engineering staff pays close attention to their Public Beta forum.

I get the feeling that most new releases are Beta, like, "Hey, let's put this out and see what happens."  I wonder what systems the engineers use to test new builds.  

Thank goodness different versions can coexist on the same computer.  With Avid years ago, if you upgraded, you were committed, and retrograding was a nightmare unless you cloned your boot drive first.  Adobe really needs to add a Save As Previous Version in Pr as they have in Ae.  I'm relying on third party utilities to retrograde projects.  So far, so good.

I took your advice and reported this on UserVoice.

Thank you.

[Kevin-Monahan]

Jim,

This is a valid concern. Get that User Voice post up detailing the issue. There might already be one up there, I have not checked yet. Once you do, I'll help advocate for the issue by making sure a bug is filed and that the engineers have it on their backlog (to do list) and place it in the proper priority.

I know it's not helpful to indicate third party effects manufacuturers, but I think it's an important thing to send a signal to them about the issues you are facing. That way, the third party folks will engage with engineering and things tend to get done faster that way - not trying to merely give you the runaround. Larger issues like this, are complex and might take some time to work out. 

Dev for Metal needs to be better for effects performance. Good request. Hope to help.

Thanks,
Kevin

[Baffy19]

I fully support your point of view. If you take Boris fx, Red Giant, it's even worse there. I'm just talking about the standard effects that are in the program. The performance of these effects is low, which affects the work of Premier. The program itself is still much more normal, working. But, with the effects, you need to think. Most simply do not use them, but in vain. Now there would just be a Wow effect.

[R Neil Haugen]

I would note that the removal of OpenCL support on the Macs is due to direct instruction from Apple. Sadly.

Neil

[Baffy19]

Without OpenCL support, and relying on Metal or Software Only rendering, I get no real-time playback whatsoever with .mxf clips with one instance of Red Giant Colorista applied - even at quarter resolution.   A massive number of frames are being dropped, with only occasional bursts of real-time performance.

This is with 4K source footage in an HD Sequence, both at the same frame rate of 23.976.

This renders this version of Pr completely unusable to me.  For reference, Pr 14.9 is still working like a champ, which I infer is because of the OpenCL support that Adobe chose to discontinue for Pr 2021.

I have a powerful MacPro7,1.  System Compatibility Report finds "No Conflicts to Report."

MacPro7,1 - 2.7 GHz 24-Core Intel Xeon W - 256G RAM - AMD Radeon Pro Vega II 32 GB

ATTO R680 PCIe SAS SCSI RAID6 (8 drives)

OSX 10.15.7

I wonder if anybody with a similar computer gets acceptable results on Big Sur, or has any other idea for the reason for my thread title.

By @Jim Curtis

I'll say this: both on the Imac system and on Windows, the use of standard effects (not to mention third-party plugins) is no good for a professional video editing program. Let those who are reading now experience the application of various kinds of effects to their project on their own machines. Am I interested in hearing the opinion of others??? Or is everything perfect for everyone??? I won't believe it. I have one opinion for the majority of users, so this is that they simply do not apply them to their projects, so there is no response.

[Jim Curtis]

I had some time to do more experimenting.  I trashed my 15.x prefs, reset the plug-in cache, opened a 14.9 project, deleted all the third party effects from my Sequence, and saw SOME improvement in playback.  It's still periodically dropping frames. 

So, I applied Colorista IV to some clips, and to my surprise, it played back SOME of the clip in real-time, but eventually started dropping frames.  

I have iStat Menus installed, and can see how my CPU (24 cores) and GPU are being utilized.  On starting playback, I occassionally see ALL my CPU cores being pegged for a few seconds, then slowly reducing to just a few cores working moderately, which is something I hardly ever see in any app.  I see my GPU meter going to about 60%, then slowly reducing.  This is completely different from what I see in Pr 14.9.

I wrote to RedGiant about this, Kevin, and I don't expect a reply for days.  Their support is usually marginal at best, and non-existent on weekends.

[R Neil Haugen]

Jim,

I've the full RG Universe ... and had the RG app manager stop taking my logon. Tried the Maxon app, wouldn't take my logon. Their site logged me in instantly but the app manager wouldn't.

Contacted RG/Maxon support and got an email back in only three hours. Which is a lot better than I'd have before. Basically, told me to uninstall the RG manager and go to the new Maxon one, try that. Which eventually worked.

But I even had followups from them! So maybe Maxon taking over RG might get us better support. Michael Szalapski (known as the ACP Szalam on the Ae board) is now with Maxon, and is a very good user-focused person. I hope that's a good sign.

And it's really a puzzler watching how PrPro and Ae play out on different systems. I can't always fit any logic to it. Some major machines choke, some fly. Some weak systems fly, many choke. What the ... ?

Just puzzling.

Neil

[Jim Curtis]

Neil, thanks for the info on Maxon support.  I don't have work for the next coupld of days, so this might be a good time to gamble on reinstalling RGAM, or whatever it's called now.  I still haven't heard back from RG with an answer to my question about compatibility with Pr 15.x.

I ran another test with 15.x, and started a new project, imported .mxf footage.  It played OK, but again, adding Colorista IV to a clip ended any kind of real-time playback.  I opened an old project and removed all effects on a sequence.  Playback was restored to real time, but again, as soon as I applied Colorista IV, massive frame dropping.

Sorry for tardy replies.  Notifications still aren't working on this forum.  They do work on User Voice, though.

[R Neil Haugen]

Jim,

Just went over and used the Colorista V panel in PrPro, latest shipping 15.4.1.

Worked just fine, actually ... no playback effect from doing a fair number of alterations including tonal and major hue shifting both direction and sat/darkness by those nifty two controls.

So I can't replicate. And I worked with both render options within the panel, Colorista IV and V.

Neil

[Jim Curtis]

Thanks for that info, Neil.

I heard from Maxon support a while ago.  Their advice was to run the upgrade installer.  I hadn't realized an update was available to Colorista IV.  The last time I ran Red Giant Application Manager, it told me my plug-ins were up to date.

I did some research and found that Maxon has their own app manager (Maxon App 2.0) that recognized my licenses for my RG products, AND it told me there was an update available to Colorista, now Colorista V, as well as other plug-ins in the RG Magic Bullet suite.

So, I updated Colorista to V, and that solves the dropped frame issue in Pr 15.  Progress!  Maybe!  Of a kind!

Since Maxon isn't selling individual plug-ins, and has moved to subscription mostly, the only way I can upgrade on their site is to pay the ransom for a subscription to the whole Magic Bullet Suite that hosts Colorista V.  They have fine print about upgrading permanent licenses, and tells you to contact Sales.  I've done that and am waiting to hear what they have to offer.

In the meantime, I reverted my plug-ins back to Colorista IV so that I can keep making money with Pr 14.9.

Then, I noticed a funny thing.  After launching Pr 15 again, I got better response with Colorista IV than I was before!  I'm seeing close to real-time playback with Colorista IV.

I noticed something else, too.  I ran an app, XRG, that graphs system info, like CPU and GPU utilization.  Under Metal and with FX disabled, Pr 15 was using 12% of the GPU.  Under Software Only, it was 3%.

With FX enabled, the GPU uses 50% of the GPU under Metal, and about the same under Software Only.

Seems the GPU is being under-utilized in Pr 15 under Metal, and the CPUs are doing most of the rendering.

So, I'm going to call this a mixed answer to my original post.  Colorista V solves the playback issue in Pr 15, but there seem to be NO merits to using Metal, which still makes Pr 15 a giant step backwards.  I suppose Adobe is going to blame that on Apple. 

BONUS TIP:  If you want to compare your performance of Metal to Software, open the Console with Cmd-F12.  Hit the play button.  Let it play for a while, then stop.  The Console will tell you how many frames were dropped, and what your effective frame rate was. 

I was getting 22-ish FPS under Software, and 12 FPS under Metal.  Adobe has work to do.  Or, keep blaming Apple.  Whatever.

[Jim Curtis]

I know I'm flogging a dead horse here, but here's some hard data on how OpenCL kicks butt on Metal performance.  This is data copied from the Pr Console.  Metal drops frames like a bandit.  OpenCL is far superior:

Metal:

<123145370017792> <Dump Playback Queue> <0> =============================== Queue Dump (2936) ===============================

<123145370017792> <UpdatePlaybackStatusInfo> <0>  Frames dropped during playback: 1045 / 2733, Preroll(ms): 2007.75

<123145370017792> <UpdatePlaybackStatusInfo> <0> Avg Prefetch(ms): 3430.04, Avg Render(ms): 60.636, Avg Display FPS: 14.8163

Open CL:

<123145370017792> <Dump Playback Queue> <0> =============================== Queue Dump (1776) ===============================

<123145370017792> <UpdatePlaybackStatusInfo> <0>  Frames dropped during playback: 88 / 1574, Preroll(ms): 242.077

<123145370017792> <UpdatePlaybackStatusInfo> <0> Avg Prefetch(ms): 2.93106, Avg Render(ms): 34.5634, Avg Display FPS: 22.6672

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi Jim,

We're going round and round on this topic. Not to be a jerk, but there's absolutely nothing we can do for you on community forums to change the course of Adobe development on OpenCL. If Apple makes a move, then Adobe will follow suit - without wavering.  State your case on User Voice, though, and may you receive many upvotes. Good luck.

Thank You,

Kevin