Q for experts regarding GPU accelleration

[Jim Curtis]

I have one of the new 2019 MacPros with the AMD II GPU.  I get far better performance from CC 19 and 20 by choosing OpenCL (Deprecated) as my renderer than Metal (Recommended).  I see more yellow in my Timelines with OpenCL, and a lot more red with Metal (especially with accellerated third party plugs).

Why is this?  Is the fact that Metal and OpenCL are inferior to CUDA (which rocked on CC18 and my 2012 MacPro with an Nvidia Titan GPU)?  Is the shortcoming Apple, Adobe, AMD, or some combo?  And, if a combo, who gets more of the "blame" for inferior performance? 

Are Adobe or Apple incapable of or just slow to be able to maximizing the resources of AMD?  Why is Metal "Recommended" when it's demonstrably inferior to OpenCL (Deprecated)?

[Sumeet Kumar Choubey]

Hi Jim_Curtis,

I can get this checked from the team. What is the model number of the AMD GPU that is being used and the type of media files (format/codec, frame rate and frame size) you are working with? Also, have you applied any effects on these clips? Let us know, we're here to help.

Thanks,

Sumeet

[Jim Curtis]

Hi Sumeet.  Good to meet you. 

I have the AMD Radeon Pro Vega II 32 GB in my new MacPro7,1. 

Yes, I've applied hundreds of effects to hundreds of clips since I got this computer in December.  I'm a full-time editor working out of a home office.  Almost every clip gets color correction.  Many clips with interviews get Digitial Anarchy's Beauty Box for it's excellent Shine Remover.  It's GPU accellerated.

I first noticed the difference with Red Giant Colorista IV.  It was a remarkable downgrade over Lumetri in my 2012 MacPro5,1 with Nvidia Titan X on Pr CC18, in which Colorista was fantastic, with real-time updating.  On the new Mac on Pr CC 19 or 20 (or 13.x or 14.x), I get very sluggish performance using Metal, and significantly better in OpenCL, but both are still clunkier than I was experiencing with CUDA. 

So, now, I'm using Lumetri as my primary effect for color.  There are things I like better about Colorista, mostly the secondary matte creator.  I like the idea of the flesh tone overlay, but I've found it to be erroneous and unreliable.

Being available for hire to multiple clients, I use a variety of source media, but the majority of it since December has been Sony MXF, RED RAW 8K, some Canon C200, DJI, and GoPro.  I've done a couple projects with lower end codecs - 8-bit, Long-GOP, 4:2:0, AVCHD.  That may not help, due to the variety.

I'm naturally experiencing significantly better performance and faster rendering of codecs and effects that use the CPU, as my new MacPro is 24-cores.

[R Neil Haugen]

As to the OpenCL/Metal issue ... Apple decided to discontinue all relations with Nvidia and has gone all-in to AMD cards. They have instructed all vendors for apps on their machines to 'deprecate' OpenCL and instead set the apps to use Metal.

Unfortunately, not all cards actually work well with Metal. I think the newest AMD cards do, but not even all the other recent ones. Yea, there's been a lot of griping of Mac users on various forums about this. Hopefully it will get better, but ... that's not helpful for you and many others right now.

Premiere seems to be able to run up to about 12 cores now, but past that isn't making a big difference. I'd bet they're working on that, and with each major cycle, we'll see more cores used.

I use primarily the Lumetri ... because I've got a full Tangent Elements panel, and a Ripple when portable is needed. As I can map all sorts of things to them, such as mouse emulations (left ball/ring 'fine', right ball/ring 'coarse') and keyframe work, worskpace selections ... panel 'focus' ... and now including the Track mixer audio! ... they're my Swiss-Army knife editing tool.

But I've also got the full Red Giant suite to get Cosmo for skin ... and have a separate color workspace I created using the Colorista IV in full panel. And with the Looks/Mojo options, that adds a greater width/depth to the availalbe toolset.

I've also been playing with ColorCone, and ... that's got a third very different approach, and I think I'll buy that plugin and build a third color workspace.

Using them, I've realized I might want to bring back my Logitech track-ball mouse ... ball about the size of my Elements balls, with four big paddles around it. I'm also using a Razer Orbweaver Chroma ... a gamer's 'button-box' or bash-box, whatever you want to call it. Twenty buttons you can set to actions or full macros in six 'levels'. Including something I've found handy, setting a macro for "IN", and ... a separate one for "OUT when you touch a button.

Neil

[Jim Curtis]

Hi Neil,

Normally, I export from Pr for my review movies, but yesterday, I was mastering some approved videos and had a use for how AME allows for two simultaneous encodes of the same sequences.  In this case I was exporting H264 and ProResHQ.

I've got iStatMenus on my menu bar, and I noticed that AME was using, and maxing out all my cores AND my GPU while encoding.  I hadn't notice that before when exporting from Pr.  I had read that AME uses the same renderer as Ae and Pr, so this surprised me a little.  My computer got sluggish, too, as expected when all my resources are being maxed out.  But, normally when I'm exporting from Pr, I can switch over to Firefox, Mail, Excel, etc, and not notice any reduction in overall performance.

Sounds like you've got a pretty nice setup going.  I'll look into ColorCone.  I've been researching alternatives for color work.  I found a cheap ($25) plug-in on AeScripts called ClearPlus that does AMAZING things with blown out skies, but it tends to introduce artifacts and posterization on some settings.  I'm looking for that "magic bullet" (by any company) that can do the same thing without the downsides, if that's possible.  So far, I haven't found anything close.  What it seems to do is add contrast to highlights only.  I can get close with the Curves in other plug-ins, but not close enough.  I corresponded with the developer, and he told me that it uses some of the Adobe Content-Aware technology.  I can see that internally, it's creating a secondary, due to the glow effect I see on secondaries I often create in Lumetri and Colorista.

Shame on Apple for telling people to deprecate a superior technology.  The onus is on them to bring their Metal tech up to par, if not exceed what they're telling people to diminish.  I keep hoping the next rev of Catalina will bring that, and sooner rather than later.

[jasonvp]

"Shame on Apple for telling people to deprecate a superior technology.  The onus is on them to bring their Metal tech up to par, if not exceed what they're telling people to diminish."

I'm not sure that's exactly what's going on here, though it may seem like it from the end user perspective.  Rather, Apple is abandoning a GPGPU tech that the market didn't latch onto very well.  That being OpenCL.  Unfortunately, this sudden "context switch" to use a computer geek term, caught a few application developers by surprise.  See: Adobe.  The resulting appearance is that things are all amiss in Apple-land.

Metal appears, for all intents and purposes, to be far superior to OpenCL.  For... well... everything.  But it's going to be up to the app developers to step up and re-code to the Metal APIs.  That means Adobe and company have a lot of work cut out for themselves.  For better, for worse.  And it certainly also appears as though Apple didn't warn the developers this was coming; truth be told they've been making noises about this for some time.

Metal is the way forward on MacOS.  It's up to the app developers, not Apple, to step up.

[R Neil Haugen]

Interesting comments, Jim.

Good to hear that Me is using so many cores ... I'm moving "up" to a new 12-core rig from 6, and ... that should be a much nicer experience.

One of the things that really helps secondaries in Lumetri ... is using the Track Matte effect. This requires a three-clip high "stack" of video ... Alt/drag the clip up a track to V2, then again to V3. Use the Lumetri Secondaries tab to set a key ... and use the white/black mask option and leave that active!

Now go to the clip on V2, apply Track Matte effect, set it to take Matted data from V3, and composite using Luma.

Now use Lumetri ... or any other color correction! ... on V2, and all your controls are available to work on the keyed area. That data is passed down to V1, and over-rides anything else in the selected pixels. This gets a solid, stable key no matter what else you do to grade the clip.

Neil

[Jim Curtis]

I have tried using Lumetri as a track matte.  It's not ideal.  Rather than stack 4K clips in a 1080 timeline, you have to nest them first in a 4K sequence because the Track Matte scales with the matte layer.  What would make this scenario even better is if Adobe would implement a Minimax effect (Ae has one.).  That would allow us to grow or shrink our track matte layers.  Neither Lumetri or Colorista allow for matte growing or shrinking; just blurring which results in shrinking, and "giving away" the effect.  That could also be implemented in the effect without resorting to Minimax and separate layer mattes.

I investigated ColorCone.  Looks pretty cool and reasonably priced, but I have a resistance to FxFactory, and how you have to install their app to use their plug-ins.  Sadly, RedGiant has adopted a similar model with their Application Manager app that's constantly "phoning home" on my computer, according to my Little Snitch network traffic monitor. Please let us know if you find ColorCone has changed your life.

jasonvp, thanks for the info on Metal, etc.

[R Neil Haugen]

Thanks for commenting about matte scaling ... I don't think I've changed scaling mid-clip on anything I've used a Track Matte on. And that is not the behavior that I was expecting!

If you use a track matte with a clip that doesn't change scaling, copying the clip up twice of course ... scaling doesn't matter.

But ... if you animate any change of scaling, the Key track set on V3 scales to match the original on V1. But the Track Matte on V2 layer scales ... differently ... than either of the other two. And I can't figure out how to even match them manually!

Very bizarre.

Neil

[Jim Curtis]

Neil, we've gotten off-topic here, but while we're at it...

I complained about the Track Matte effect years ago.  At the least, Adobe should add a checkbox for the matte not to scale with the tracked layer.  In the meantime, nesting is the only workaround in Pr I know about.  Synching keyframes can be a challenge, but at least when we double-click a nest, the CTI matches the relative location in the nest as in the holding Sequence.  I do a bit of jumping back and forth between the two, do the keyframing bit by bit.  I use Ae when I want something more complicated. 

I prefer to stay in Pr to do my work when I can.  I'm surprised no third party developer has taken the challenge to make a usable track matte effect.  Hard to believe there isn't more demand for one.  FCP7 had alpha and luma track mattes in their menu of compositing modes where Add, Multiply, etc. resided.  How Adobe can't (or won't) even get similar functioning to ages old After Effects capabilities is beyond me.

[R Neil Haugen]

I've just been over to UserVoice, and there's several there on the Track Matte's off-behavior in scaling/animation. I selected the one with most votes ... and found I'd commented on that one two years ago! Forgot all about it.

But ... here that is. PLEASE ... anyone reading this, go vote on it. The upper managers for Adobe that decide program/engineer budgets live by metrics, and this is the metric they most use. Give them some metrics!

Neil

https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911233-premiere-pro/suggestions/35708812-fix-the-track-matt...