Solution to XAVC 10 bit playback?

[Paulo5CD1]

Thank you in advance to anyone that has suggestions (besides proxies) on how to make premiere playback XAVC 10 bit footage?

So I'm confused why Premiere struggles with playback for files from my A7SIII (XAVCS 10bit) but footage from my SONY FX6 plays back smoothly? They're essentially the same camera with same file type yet Premiere is beyond terrible when dealing with the footage. My desktop is fast enough to handle it (I believe) here are my computer specs.

• i9 Processor
• 64GB RAM
• 2 GTX 1080i graphic cards
• Editing project timelines on an internal SSD 

Is there a codec firmware update available that I missed? I took my footage and ran it on my friends PC with similar specs (who uses Davinci) and it played back fine. I'm just starting to wonder why Premiere can playback newer codecs even though the A7SIII came out a year ago so Premiere has had plenty of updates to fix this issue. Does Davini really handle sony codecs better? It is frustrating that I have a more than capable computer and I still have to resort to proxies. Kind of dissapointed in Adobe for how lackluster they've become with newer tech. Any productive solutions would be much appreciated. I love Adobe but its almost unbearable to edit on Premiere these days. Thanks!

[dand28933274]

I'm having the same issue.  For some reason, the 10 bit footage struggles - seems like my issues started with the new 2021 update.

[R Neil Haugen]

This seems to be a hit and miss thing. I've worked a fair amount of A7s3 media, including we shot a bunch for my Adobe MAX 2021 class, S565: Thinking Like a Colorist, Color Correction in Premiere Pro. Which is of course available free for anyone to watch.

For that session, we shot media with a RED Dragon in raw, a BlackMagic Pocket Cinema 4K in raw, and the A7s3 in a 'log' mode. All of them played beautifully on my machine. My rig is a 24 core Ryzen with 128GB of RAM, and a 2080Ti.

But the A7s3 media certainly has issues for some users. I would note that, looking at your computer specs, Premiere doesn't work much with a second GPU, users are better off with one 'major' GPU than two smaller ones. Resolve does better with multiple GPUs for certain. (And yes, I work a lot in Resolve also.)

Now, as to your cameras, my understanding is the FX6 is just a wee bit more major as a pro level video cam than the A7s3. The A7's are fine cameras, make no mistake. But the Fx6 is at a higher level, and the media files from them are apparently not encoded the same "under the hood". At least, from what I've seen and heard 'around'.

Among other things, I have seen a fair number of colorist comments that they really find the A7s3 skin tones to need correcting, and the yellow-greens to be re-routed a bit. And occasional playback issues. The comments about working with the Fx6 media, are simply that it's pretty nice stuff.

We all have our preferences of course.  😉

Neil

[Peter Sinter]

Great video Neil! I didnt think about applying corrections to the source clip - I always worked only in the timeline. Do you have more videos online? :))

[R Neil Haugen]

Glad it helped you. Although most of my tutorials have been for MixingLight.com, and are behind their paywall.

My old blog, *seriously* old ... still has relevant information especially showing the actual actions of the actions of the Lumetri controls, especially the Basic tab. Using both a 10-step 'box' and ramp side by side, so you can see the curve of the shape the controls make, and ... due to the boxes being at specific intervals ... you can see exactly where about each 10 iRE line goes from specific movemements.

I'll be doing some more this spring for public YouTube use.

I teach a LOT of use of the Source process. That's how I accomplish the things in Premiere ... like essentially remap each camera's hue response to closer to 'normal' for that project. Think of it like creating your own OETF recipe ...  😉

[Warren Heaton]

The formats may seem similar, but XAVC-I 4:2:2 10-Bit,  XAVC-L 4:2:0 8-Bit, and XAVC-L 4:2:2 10-Bit are not essentially the same as XAVC HS 4:2:2 10-Bit, XAVC HS 4:2:0 10-Bit, XAVC S-I 4:2:2 10-Bit, XAVC S 4:2:2 10-Bit, and XAVC S 4:2:0 8-Bit.

Of all of those, only XAVC-I is good for editing.  

[R Neil Haugen]

Great comments, Warren.

The XAVC-I is I for intraframe. Meaning every frame is a complete frame, just compressed, similar to ProRes, Cineform, and DNxHD/R. These are great editing  codecs, but take more space on card or disk.

The other XAVC options are I believe all interframe long-GOP formats. They cut down the amount of space on card or disk by recording complete frames only every so many frames, with a matrix of changing pixels in betrween. They can be encoded real fast in-camera with specialized chips. And they put a LOT bigger load on the computer for playback while also editing them compared to the intraframe XAVC-I and others I mentioned above.

Neil

[MyerPj]

Yes, thank you Neil for posting that link. Really informative video. I'll look forward to your YouTube videos this spring. 

"Apples to apples", should be easy to remember! 🙂