Intel Quicksync - no hardware decode for 4K/UHD Video H.264?

[ccoehn]

Hi,

I am running Premiere Pro 14.2 on a Windows 10 machine with Coffe Lake Intel UHD 630 graphics and dedicated NVIDIA GTX 1060 card. Both graphics adapters are enabled and Premiere Pro should use Intel Quicksync to decode and NVENC to encode.

This works really nice for H.264 HD footage and H.265/HEVC HD +4K/UHD footage. However, for H.264 UHD footage, all decoding is done on the CPU, the Intel Graphics Video Decoder ist at 0% load.

That has the strange effect that playing footage and scrubbing through the timeline is actually much smoother in Gopro 8 UHD footage (which is H.265) than GH5 or EOS-R ALL-I H.264 UHD footage although H.265 typically is slower to decode.

I am using the latest Intel driver from May 2020.

Is there anything I can do to make Premiere use Quicksync for H.264 decode as well or could this possibly be a bug? Or is there any limitation in hardware decoding in regards to video bitrate?

Thanks you,

Christian

[ccoehn]

I did some more testing on this and recorded some sample footage with the EOS R in 4K, both in IPB and in ALL-I.

Result: Premiere Pro uses Intel hardware decoding on 4K IPB footage (approx 120 Mbps bitrate) and CPU decoding only on  4K ALL-I footage (approx 480 Mbps bitrate).

Anyone from Adobe who can comment on this?

In the meantime I'll stick to IPB compression ... much better to edit in Premiere than the EOS R 4K ALL-I codec.

Best regards,

Christian 

[CinegyDev]

Hello Christian,

Your problem can be solved right away by using a free plugin called Turbocut / Daniel2. You can find it either in the Adobe Exchange portal or directly at either: www.turbocut.com or www.daniel2.com

This is a new version of the Daniel2 plugin which has been around for over two years and also provide Nvidia hardware acclerated export of H.264 and HEVC. Now this has been extended for HEVC and H.264 Nvidia hardware decoding, which is what you are looking for. There are limtations as to what the Nvidia decoder supports, but a GTX1060 decoder should be quite OK with most formats, of course a newer Turing series card would be faster.

Give it it try. It's free.

[CinegyDev]

Hello Christian,

Your problem can be solved right away by using a free plugin called Turbocut / Daniel2. You can find it either in the Adobe Exchange portal or directly at either: www.turbocut.com or www.daniel2.com

This is a new version of the Daniel2 plugin which has been around for over two years and also provide Nvidia hardware acclerated export of H.264 and HEVC. Now this has been extended for HEVC and H.264 Nvidia hardware decoding, which is what you are looking for. There are limtations as to what the Nvidia decoder supports, but a GTX1060 decoder should be quite OK with most formats, of course a newer Turing series card would be faster.

Give it it try. It's free.