YOP:

I'm having slow playback issue when tring to play in Color Corection mode.

It's always been slow for me when in CC mode no matter the hardware.

Thank you, Jeroen, for the clarification and for the link to Chris Bove's full Tech Talk of 2017. His one-pager, done in collaboration with Avid, is a great place to start! I went from an older PC to a 2008 Mac Pro and then came back to a PC when the first "trashcan" replaced it. The frontloading of the GPU was what I was trying to understand.

As an offline editor, I was working fine with 32 GB RAM on an HP Z440 (2016) 4-core 3.5 GHz Intel Xeon processor. On that machine, I went from Media Composer 8.5 to 2018.12. Recently I am having to do several layers of FX and titles and produce an HD quality video for online viewing and am noticing a slowing down in timeline responsiveness.

Now this could be due to one or more other factors. My media lives in an external Glyph StudioRAID which is RAID 0 (I back up each RAID volume to one external drive) but the USB 3.0 cable might be the problem. Since I am working to deadlines, I am hoping to learn ways to make my setup work for now.

So much to figure out! It's nice to have others show the way.

Joyce

hartfilms:

Now this could be due to one or more other factors. My media lives in an external Glyph StudioRAID which is RAID 0 (I back up each RAID volume to one external drive) but the USB 3.0 cable might be the problem. Since I am working to deadlines, I am hoping to learn ways to make my setup work for now.

Joyce, I would hazard a guess that USB 3.0 is almost certainly the problem - The same raid drives here (2 drives, Raid 0, Usb.3 speed) connected to usb-c 3.1 are far better and more consistently performing than when connected to usb 3.0 A ports. Certainly on Windows 10 usb.3 has never delivered its promise and is best to avoid for attached media drives. This is proven with BMD and AJA diskspeed utilities.

Thanks, Mercer.

Will look into that once I can upgrade. Unfortunately my GlyphRAID enclosure only has 3.0, Firewire and eSATA ports.

Joyce

Silly question but how does one find the media Cache settings in 2020.12? 

Why would such an important thing be moved?

While you direct the question at Pat I can give you an answer as well.

The general rule of thumb is that medium/large production houses and broadcasters upgrade their PC's every 5 years or so. It fluctuates as it also depends on many things, tax rules, how success makes a company grow or when difficult times make people hold back on an investment. I'm pretty sure you understand.

So at this time companies in our market will buy HP z4's and use their older HP z440, z420, z400 or even xw8600 workstations for other jobs. The specs for these can be easily found online.

An example. The now really old HP xw8600 with dual X5450 Processors @ 3GHz with 16GB of ram with an SSD and a quadro 580/590/600 upgrade can, running windows 10, still do basic SD/HD editing with MC 2018.12.x and these machines are mostly used as ingest stations (Link + consolidate), office use, internet access, uploading, downloading, etc... anything that can be offloaded from the Z4/Z440 editing suites so they can keep editing.

Often jourmalists or pre-editors watch ingested material, do multicam grouping, audio sync or a first rough cut in Media composer or mediacentral editorial on them. But occasionally also normal editing but never things with multiple layers of video effects, color correction, 2K, 4K etc...

Some try to stretch as much out of these as they can, I personaly do too for testing purposes in combination with storage/VM's/Interplay. 

Philip Kapadia:

I'm sure the online stations are usually high spec, and kept up-to-date lol

You'd be surprised. Whilst most dedicated top end facilities in the UK such as The Farm and Molinare will have the latest and greatest equipment in well designed rooms, a lot of 'facilities' are single production company set ups that serve only that company and they have often quite shoddy equipment, where they have spent the absolute minimum in support. Added to which that broadcast TV in the UK is still mainly HD, which is why they can get away with it.

This has been brought into focus more for me during lockdown. I built my own boutique facility before the lockdown and so I call it my Noah's Ark. But even though I have better equipment than most of the production company facilities I work at, there has been a resistance from them to allow remote working, even though this made sense and was safer and perfectably workable for most people and even though people like me have made no charge for their equipment during the Covid crisis. Their resistance was because they were losing rentals, they didn't care about anything else.

You will find most of these lash up facilities will have HP/Dell workstions and some kind of Avid/BMD/Aja video i/o but they will be quite old, ill maintained and Avid will be at 2018 and the monitors will be consumer grade, with a cheap mixer and mic for guide vo. The technical assistants will be underpaid and sometimes quite inept because of that. So you have to do your own troubleshooting. That doesn't happen at the Farm et al.

For online therefore, there will be less need for the all singing and dancing workstations, but hopefully they at least have a proper grading monitor, although once again for telly and HD the grade and the dub is basic. I know my equipment and monitoring far outspecs most of these facilities, except for the high end dedicated ones, and my facility rates are cheaper (or non-existant at the moment) yet there is still resistance. I don't mind as long as they pay me to edit but it has made me rethink the direction and focus of where I will find that work in the future. It's a brave new world and more and more the industry will I believe come to see the cost effective/quality merit in the boutique setups.

Mercer:

Philip Kapadia:

I'm sure the online stations are usually high spec, and kept up-to-date lol

You'd be surprised. Whilst most dedicated top end facilities in the UK such as The Farm and Molinare will have the latest and greatest equipment in well designed rooms, a lot of 'facilities' are single production company set ups that serve only that company and they have often quite shoddy equipment, where they have spent the absolute minimum in support. Added to which that broadcast TV in the UK is still mainly HD, which is why they can get away with it.

This has been brought into focus more for me during lockdown. I built my own boutique facility before the lockdown and so I call it my Noah's Ark. But even though I have better equipment than most of the production company facilities I work at, there has been a resistance from them to allow remote working, even though this made sense and was safer and perfectably workable for most people and even though people like me have made no charge for their equipment during the Covid crisis. Their resistance was because they were losing rentals, they didn't care about anything else.

You will find most of these lash up facilities will have HP/Dell workstions and some kind of Avid/BMD/Aja video i/o but they will be quite old, ill maintained and Avid will be at 2018 and the monitors will be consumer grade, with a cheap mixer and mic for guide vo. The technical assistants will be underpaid and sometimes quite inept because of that. So you have to do your own troubleshooting. That doesn't happen at the Farm et al.

For online therefore, there will be less need for the all singing and dancing workstations, but hopefully they at least have a proper grading monitor, although once again for telly and HD the grade and the dub is basic. I know my equipment and monitoring far outspecs most of these facilities, except for the high end dedicated ones, and my facility rates are cheaper (or non-existant at the moment) yet there is still resistance. I don't mind as long as they pay me to edit but it has made me rethink the direction and focus of where I will find that work in the future. It's a brave new world and more and more the industry will I believe come to see the cost effective/quality merit in the boutique setups.

Intesting, I don't mind older tech as long as it works... What does anyone need a physical audio mixer for when editing? 

Philip Kapadia:

What does anyone need a physical audio mixer for when editing? 

Because guide comm recorded by the producer is a constant need in factual entertainment. That and the way some of them have their audio monitoring wired. You need to mute the speakers while you record the guide comm and few of the BMD devices work with a direct mic input to Avid.

Hi,

I would like to bounce this old thread. Not just because the topic is still valid, but because Chris Bove has now joined Avid.

Chris,

Several years ago you wrote this on the Avid blogs:

http://www.avidblogs.com/how-avid-media-composer-uses-a-computer/

It was a good start to get some grip on the design and performance requirements of media composer. But we are still left to test ourselves how more CPU power, more GPU power, more memory, changes of cache settings, etc... affect media composer's performance. I understand practical comparison test matrixes with performance numbers, Fps, codec's, frame size, render times changing individual CPU, GPU, memory and settings are very complex and very time consuming to make and that maintaining such matrixes by Avid is simply not a viable option.

I'm hoping that, for example, the avid collect suite can be expanded with a performance module which tests storage, cpu and gpu performance, so we have something to compare systems.

Philip Kapadia:

What does anyone need a physical audio mixer for when editing? 

I eat my words (and my silly question) back in 2021...

...After serveral edit suite upgrades, with side stations and a VTR networked in and SDi'd into my machine all patched in through my mixer to my studio reference monitors. 

Absolutely get your point! It's frustrating when GPUs perform flawlessly in gaming but struggle with full-screen playback in Media Composer. Improvements are definitely needed to match up with the high standards set by today's hardware. Here's hoping for some updates that enhance the experience! 🚀✨

I have several high end pcs under my hand.

i have set 100 or even 200 GBs of RAM for avid video cache without any significant improvement on machines that have 384GB RAm.

When i set 100 GB ram for file cache that made an improvement but also glitches and errors came to play.

File cache is for UME playback of op1a mxf files. 

Even dual xeon is not a big improvement. Avid runs better on intel I9 xtreme edition cpu than on xeon because its more multimedia oriented. Xeon is just raw power.