XAVC 4K playback performance on Mac Pro

2009 Nehalem 2.66GHz 8-core Mac Pro with 16GB RAM and GTX570, running OS X 10.8.5.
As part of my freelance post work, I've started tackling 4K XAVC-I footage from the Sony FS7. The footage loads alright, but is impossible to play without serious stuttering. Brand new project. I tried any playback resolutions between full and 1/8, same behavior. I can't play a single second without the drop frame indicator going orange and starting to rack up dropped frames.
CPU utilization during playback is steady at 70%, and drive reads are at 80MB/s (our SAN successfully delivers 350MB/s).
Tried both Premiere CC and CC(2014), same behavior.
Performance in DaVinci Resolve doesn't look much different.
It's going to be a week or so before I'm back at the machine, so I'm preparing my attack plan. "Gotta buy a new computer" is the easiest possible answer but also the most expensive (we can all predict the boss` reaction) and not necessarily accurate one. Maybe it is the right one, but part of my job is to eliminate other possible (and cheaper) causes first.
What is the current state of 4K playback in Premiere? Is it two camps of "always worked for me" and "never works for me"? Has anyone had playback issues that were fixed by updating CUDA drivers, Premiere patches, identifying odd bugs, etc.?
I'm going to play with the video output, Mercury settings, source drive, and transcode to 4K ProRes at different bitrates... any other suggestions?
We all know that the new black Mac Pro "can do 4K", but I haven't heard a statement that "no other Macs can". Surprisingly, I haven't found discussions (let alone official recommendations) of minimum hardware requirements for Premiere and 4K. I'd be happy to be pointed to any if they exist. The CPUs in this 2009 Mac Pro should still pack more punch than any iMac model in the market, and is 25% slower than the baseline 2013 MP. If it's the GPU, I'd be happy to hear at least one testimony like "never worked with my GTX570 but once I went GTX680 I finally set sailing".
Thanks!

I use a Sony Notebook with 4 K Display and a USB 3 disk 2TB with footage from the FS 7, sequence lenght 3 hours and I have no problems. All is working very well.

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How is the performance of Mac Pro if i use it as host for windows and linux virtual machines.

How is the performance of Mac Pro if i use it as host for windows and linux virtual machines.
I am planning to buy a high performance PC to run my Windows and Linux servers as vitrual machines for my testing purposes.
Initially i planned to build my own computer with recommended configurations but considering space constaints and cooling factors i think Mac Pro can be a choice. But need some inputs if Mac pro (Intel Xeon E5, 12 GB RAM) is good for running virtual Machines.

You could even run Windows natively and still run your VM servers.
I have seen reports and such on MacRumors and elsewhere - run Windows natively as well as VMs (can also do testing and run Mavericks in a VM under Mavericks)
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FCP Performance on Mac Pro

Hi! After 3 months of pushing, I finally got a Mac Pro 2.8ghz 8-core with Final Cut Studio 2. I just got the workstation setup and Final Cut Studio installed, all the updates are completed. Now I am getting down into some light training with some DV footage I have to familiarize myself with the capabilities of this system. So far I have not been impressed. I imported 2 30-sec DV clips, dropped them into the sequence with crossfades, and when I playback, I hear 2 seconds of audio followed by beeps, and at the point where the clips are supposed to cross-dissolve the playback stops with a warning that frames have been dropped. I had better performance with iMovie on my G4. I know that FCP is a bigger beast but having worked with Avid MC on a PowerMac 9600 I am expecting more out of this setup. What in the world could I be doing wrong?

LD Bear old wrote:
When I open the .dv clip in Quicktime it shows format: DV, 720x480 (640x480), Millions, Stereo, 48.000 kHz. What else should I check?
Ahh, I think I see your issue - and it's something that many folks who are moving up from iMovie experience.
Basically, FCP doesn't like .dv files. It likes .mov files. Open up you .dv file in QuickTime and export it out as a QuickTime movie (a .mov file). Be sure to select the Options... button in the export dialog (since you're bound to be overwhelmed, use the settings from your FCP Timeline as a guide) in QuickTime. Using the default settings in QT will not help you (the default is meant for web sharing, not editing, and will end up being step backwards).
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Hi there,
I am experiencing a strange issue with Logic 7.2.3 and my Mac Pro.
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The System Performance meters are showing that one of the CPU cores is at full capacity, whilst the Activity Monitor is showing a total usage of about 40%.
http://www.ephexis.co.uk/images/cpu-grab.jpg
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Great!
Thanks for the tips guys.
I have tried to find an offending loop or part in the sequence, but cannot find anything at all thats causing the issue.
My suspiscion is that using the focusrite Liquid mix on a part, that is in turn going into a delay compensated bus, which has another Liquid mix plugin on it, is causing the issues. I use the total mix software in the fireface to perform the summing of the busses, which I think in turn may be causing the PDC to glitch a bit more.
Which is a bit annoying, as the mix in this tune is my best yet!
So I will attempt to remove the liquid mixes that are running in series in a chain, and see if thats the problem, but if that fails, time to re-format again!
I'll let you know how I get on in the next couple of days!
Thanks again,
Adam
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Premiere Pro CC 2014 Playback Issue / Crash Mac Pro 2011

Hi,
I've been having a big crash issue on Premiere Pro CC 2014, since the 2014.1 update.
2014.0 has been working fine this year but the update has crashed some of my biggest current projects.
Programs just starts fine, workspace responds, but anything related to playback just crashes or freezes Premiere.
My config:
Mac Pro Mid 2010
Processor : 2x2,93 6-core Xeon
Ram : 24Go 1333
2x ATI Radeon HD 5770.
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- Flushes Premiere cache
- Reinstall premiere
- Updated to Mavericks (issue happened both in 10.9 and 10.10 - thought updating drivers+opencl would help, then again no)
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… and so on.
Nothing yet has solved my issue, anyone to help me on this major trouble ?
Thanks in advance, best regards !
Paul

Hi Paul,
Try the following:
Sign out from Creative Cloud, restart Premiere Pro, then sign in
Update any GPU drivers
Trash preferences
Ensure Adobe folder preferences are set to read/write in all 3 locations.
Delete media cache
Remove plug-ins
Repair permissions
In Sequence Settings > Video Previews, change the codec to one that matches your footage
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I placed the chief culprits in bold.
Report back if anything here worked for you.
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Thanks

My somewhat educated guess is that photoshop on the MacPro will be faster. The much faster cpu speed will offset the performance penalty of Rosetta.
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Take a look at these Benchmarks Actually the whole article is very informative.
Mike

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Sell the G5 and buy a MP. At this time of year it
often makes sense to wait for MacExpo SF January 8,
because new choices will be available (almost
assuredly quad cores) and prices of today's best
boxes will lower.
Hmmm... tricky. The MP boxes will be cheaper, but the resale value on my G5 will be lower too. I wonder if there's an advantage either way.

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Thank you
Fabrizio D'Agnano
Rome, Italy

Sorry, it is actually "upper", not "lower".
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Regards
Fabrizio

Best hard drive performance on mac pro for final cut express

This week I'll be setting up a basic 4 core mac pro with 16 gb ram and 2 internal- 2tb WD Caviar Black drives. I'm wondering what would give me the best performance for running final cut express, and I'm considering setting up software raid 0 or using one drive for boot and one for scratch. Or should I set up software raid 0 with boot and scratch partitions? Or other suggestions? Thanks.

My recommendations -
With 2 drives in your Mac Pro, use *one disk for OS X and all of your apps;* the *second disk for data* (including your FCE scratch disk location). Partition each drive as a *single partition,* which will maximize performance over time.
In addition, you should invest in at least 1 external drive to use for backup purposes; if you don't, the day will come when you wish you had.
I strongly recommend AGAINST doing software RAID. Certainly not for your situation with only 2 drives, one of which will be your system HD; but also because hardware RAID is faster, more reliable, and does not require CPU resources to run.
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Slow Performance On Mac Pro 12-Core

Hello Everyone,
I just recently purchased a 2012 Mac pro 12-Core and i have been getting unbelievabley slow performance with it. I am using Premiere Pro CS6 and it seems that the footage can sometimes get a bit laggy at times and not play back smoothly, sometimes rendering can take a bit of time as well. However here are the specs of my system:
Mac Pro 12-Core 2.4GHz (2.67GHz Turbo Boost)
40GB of Ram
ATI 5770 Graphics Card
1TB scratch disk (with a user on the drive that i can boot into)
OCZ 120GB Vertex 3 SSD OS/APPS drive
First question i would like to get answered once and for all.. Did i make a bad decision by purchasing a computer with such a slow clock speed (2.4GHz)?? I figured since The new editing software is switching to 64bit it shouldn't depend on clock speed anymore? (i just want to be sure that i purchased a more than capable machine) However i will be buying a Samsung 840 Pro Series 256GB SSD Drive for Scratch within the month. (I dont have the budget to buy a Raid controller yet to utilize 6GB/s transfer speeds, so 1 Fast SSD drive will have to do for now)
I should mention the current SSD drive im on right now only has 13GB remaining, would that affect performance? Also, my 1Tb media drive is filled up with CRAP from my previous computer (Migration transferred EVERYTHING to that drive, only 120GB remains) would that drive with the media im working with affect performance too? Also just as a test, i took some footage from my GoPro Hero 3 camera and put it on my SSD to see if that would eliminate the lag, but still lag was present in Premiere.. (the footage was in a crappy .M4P format, so that may have affected it, but I dont know)
Any suggestions are greatly appreciated!
-Thanks in Advance!

The new editing software is switching to 64bit it shouldn't depend on clock speed anymore?
Wrong, clock speed is everything.
I should mention the current SSD drive im on right now only has 13GB remaining, would that affect performance?
No, not really.
Also, my 1Tb media drive is filled up with CRAP from my previous computer (Migration transferred EVERYTHING to that drive, only 120GB remains) would that drive with the media im working with affect performance too?
When fill rates go up, performance goes down. With almost 90% fill rate, the disk performs only at around 50% of a new disk.
Two disks is absolute bare minimum, and your cores will constantly be waiting for the disks to read or write data, sitting idle most of the time.
Also just as a test, i took some footage from my GoPro Hero 3 camera and put it on my SSD to see if that would eliminate the lag, but still lag was present in Premiere..
GoPro material requires a very fast computer, which yours is not with the low clock speed, outdated E5620 CPU's, only two disks, and a non-CUDA capable video card.
Take a look at the PPBM5 Benchmark and look at the system at rank # 854, which is a MacPro, very similar to your system, dual E5620, AMD video card, less memory but uses three disks.
So, your system would be around the same rank as the one above, among the slowest 25% of all systems and something like 10 - 15 times slower than a fast system. You tax your system to the extreme with the GoPro Hero3 material, and the consequence is the slow performance you see.
Sorry, not much you can do, other than get a new system. If you sell it now, it may get you a price, good enough to get a much faster Windows system and maybe even keep the change. Simply said, you bought a MacPro for € 3.5 K, sell it for € 3 K, buy a PC for € 2.5 K that is around 5-6 times faster and your loss is recovered.
However i will be buying a Samsung 840 Pro Series 256GB SSD Drive for Scratch within the month
What a pity the MacPro does not have SATA 6G ports, only SATA 3G, because then that SSD will run at almost half speed.

Parallels performance on Mac Pro

I'm strongly considering a Mac Pro purchase to replace not only a Dual G5 but also a Dual Core Pentium Dell. I run large format posters and prints from my home office. I only have the Dell because the RIP software (Roland Versaworks) is Windows only. Can anyone running Parallels on either a 3GHz or 2.66GHz give me some insight as to performance of ANY apps that you may be using Parallels for.
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It would be real nice to be able to get those two heaters from under my desk!
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parallel currently does not work with the Mac Pro.
The folks at Parallels have said they will release an
update n the near future that will correct the
problem that keeps the Mac Pro and Parallels from
running.
Not 100% correct.
From the Admin user go into the terminal and enter
sudo nvram boot-args="-legacy maxmem=XXXX"
where XXXX is a number. Parallels suggest 1024 or 2048, but for me I had to go-to 4096 before it worked. Then reboot. This puts the Mac Pro back into 32 bit mode.
You can then start parallels again and create & run your virtual systems.
To reset back to 64 bit user
sudo nvram boot-args=""
A screen-shot of Parallels running on my Mac Pro
Here I am running both Suse 8.2 Linux and WinXP SP2

Does anyone else experience jittery playback even with Mac Pro 2013?

I completed installing all my software on a new Mac Pro late 2013 and eagerly began working in Final Cut Pro 10.1.1 to see how much more improved my editing experience would be versus my old 2010 27" iMac. I was already experiencing jittery playback that would occur usually right after clicking the play button, but I'm sad to say that I'm still having that issue with the new computer.
My specs are:
3ghz 8-core xeon, 32 GB RAM, dual Firepro D-500 graphics and my projects are not stored on a Pegasus R6 thunderbolt RAID 5.
I really expected skimming and playing back smoother like a hot knife through butter, but I'm dissapointed. I don't know if this is just a FCPX issue that still needs fixing, or if it's something that everybody experiences.

Thank you Russ. Here's more info and also when I said my projects were "not" stored on the RAID, that was a typo. They ARE stored in the same Library as the event on the RAID.
Media originals: H.264 MOV files shot with Canon DSLR at 23.98 fps 1920x1080.
Transcoded files: Optimized and Proxy
Project settings: Manually set at 1920x1080, 23.98fps, Pro Res 422, 48kHz sound.
Project playback: Proxy mode
There are no multicam clips created. I've created a few compound clips, the majority of which are for the purpose of linking a video track to another audio track (syncing cleaner audio recording).
The Library contains the one project I'm working on (the wedding video) and the one Event that contains the media. The footage in the event is of a wedding day with about 1,100 clips total, all of which are identical in format and settings so there's no mixing of frame rates, etc. The Library is stored where I store all my other libraries from other jobs: On the external thunderbolt Pegasus RAID.
I don't have any other events in the Library. My workflow is to have a new Library created for each job and keep everything together in it.
The current project I'm working on was created on 10.1.
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I may perhaps have unreasonable expectations from this machine. The reason I decided to invest in it was to have a glitch free editing experience and not have to worry about slowing myself down to let the computer catch up. The thing is, If this is normal, then my frugal mind would tell me why not return this expensive Mac Pro and save thousands with a maxed-out new iMac combined with my thunderbolt RAID?

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If you launch iTunes then choose iTunes | About iTunes you will see that when the credits scroll by, they scroll by all choppy and herky-jerky. Yes folks, that's right, Apple's fastest and most top of the line machine -- a Mac Pro with an X1900 XT -- is not sufficiently swift enough to properly display the credits for iTunes.
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Needless to say, I'm sticking with Tiger until Apple fixes the X1900 XT driver(s) in Leopard.
Can anyone else with a Mac Pro and X1900 XT please go to iTunes | About iTunes and commiserate?

Just for info; Leopard is not a full 64 bit operating system. In fact, there is only 1 Apple GUI app that is compiled for x86_64 and that is Xcode, and even that runs in 32 bit mode by default, unless you uncheck the "Run in 32 bit mode" box when you do a Get Info on it.
There are many 64 bit frameworks and libraries, but the rest of the operating system applications are all 32 bit.
You can see that for yourself by running:
file /path to applications/* | grep x86_64
In a terminal.
Hyperion:~ will$ file /Applications/Utilities//Contents/MacOS/ | grep x86_64
/Applications/Utilities/OSXPM.app/Contents/MacOS/OSXPM: Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
Hyperion:~ will$
I have 2 x86_64 apps, but only because I recompiled them to see if they worked.
There are a handful of x86_64 apps in /usr/bin and /usr/sbin, but thats about it. Oh, Apache is 64 bit by the way.

HD video performance on Mac Pro 4

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It has done all of the software updates.
The only software loaded onto the machine so far is FCS.
Now when I try to watch The BBC HD video at 1920x1080 that I download to my local hard drive (vide from here http://www.apple.com/quicktime/guide/hd/bbc-blue.html ), it is very choppy.
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To tell the truth, sending folks off to read a blog or another site when asking for help troubleshooting. And you fail to mention you have the X1900 in a non-supported or alternate slot.
Mixing 7300 GT and Radeon doesn't work. And having two Radeons???
There are lots of threads here on using the Expansion Slot Utility and video card configurations.

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Yesterday when I was composing a beautiful song I had a couple of instruments playing at the same time. At the bottom of the screen I see the notes of the score I´m composing as they are played. While this is nevertheless surprising, I am actually curious about how this would look on a Mac Pro.
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(I´m using a 30" Apple Cinema HD Display)

pink_snow wrote:
The hatter wrote:
Can you imagine a Mac Pro not handing it without breaking into a sweat? I can't.
What does this sentence mean? Please simplify!
I'm positive he worded that incorrectly. "What he meant to say is "Can you imagine a Mac Pro that couldn't handle it without breaking a sweat?" Basically a Mac Pro is designed to go the distance with applicaitons like this, given you've configured the machines with enough memory and storage resources.

XAVC 4K playback performance on Mac Pro

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