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FX based transitions and effects
Posted by Geoff Addis
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Re: FX based transitions and effects April 07, 2010 05:55PM |
I haven't worked with those effects myself, but I can tell you that in general, Apple's definition of "real time" is pretty soft. Some of Final Cut's real-time effects are genuinely real-time: they work at full resolution and fully quality, and are suitable for, for example, laying off to tape without rendering. But others are only "real time" in the sense of being interactive at reduced resolution or quality.
Final Cut is a very ambitious program, really, because it will basically let you throw anything on your timeline, with any combination of effects, and it'll do the very best it can to make it all work. A hard-real-time system might require you to work uncompressed, for example, so the system doesn't have to expend any CPU cycles decoding your frames before it can process them. You're working with XDCAM material, which has to be decoded by the CPU before it can even be displayed, much less processed. So I wouldn't find it unreasonable that your effects aren't real-time.
For those effects that are GPU-accelerated, having a sufficiently powerful GPU ? and more importantly, the right GPU ? can help, but in your case it might merely make your renders faster, not give you real-time effects.
I can tell you that ProRes on an 8-processor system is almost exactly twice as fast as ProRes on a 4-processor system. But again, that will only help you when rendering. (Well, technically it'll give you more real-time streams of ProRes playback, but since you're not playing back ProRes, that doesn't come into play here.)
Finally, I'll just say ? without the benefit of any specific knowledge of your workflow ? that performance problems on Final Cut systems can often be traced back to idiosyncratic workflow choices. For example, I spent a little time last week on a real beast of a Final Cut system, with 8 3 GHz processors and a Quadro board. It was performing very poorly ? and it turned out that the editor had taken XDCAM footage and dropped it on a timeline, put a deinterlace effect on it, nested it inside another timeline at NTSC resolution, then nested that in a third timeline with a thick stack of color correction and other effects, including some effects that were canceling each other out. It was kind of a mess. When he asked me why his system was so slow, I really didn't know what to say other than "You're doing it wrong."
Final Cut is a very ambitious program, really, because it will basically let you throw anything on your timeline, with any combination of effects, and it'll do the very best it can to make it all work. A hard-real-time system might require you to work uncompressed, for example, so the system doesn't have to expend any CPU cycles decoding your frames before it can process them. You're working with XDCAM material, which has to be decoded by the CPU before it can even be displayed, much less processed. So I wouldn't find it unreasonable that your effects aren't real-time.
For those effects that are GPU-accelerated, having a sufficiently powerful GPU ? and more importantly, the right GPU ? can help, but in your case it might merely make your renders faster, not give you real-time effects.
I can tell you that ProRes on an 8-processor system is almost exactly twice as fast as ProRes on a 4-processor system. But again, that will only help you when rendering. (Well, technically it'll give you more real-time streams of ProRes playback, but since you're not playing back ProRes, that doesn't come into play here.)
Finally, I'll just say ? without the benefit of any specific knowledge of your workflow ? that performance problems on Final Cut systems can often be traced back to idiosyncratic workflow choices. For example, I spent a little time last week on a real beast of a Final Cut system, with 8 3 GHz processors and a Quadro board. It was performing very poorly ? and it turned out that the editor had taken XDCAM footage and dropped it on a timeline, put a deinterlace effect on it, nested it inside another timeline at NTSC resolution, then nested that in a third timeline with a thick stack of color correction and other effects, including some effects that were canceling each other out. It was kind of a mess. When he asked me why his system was so slow, I really didn't know what to say other than "You're doing it wrong."
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