4k three camera shoot slow in Final Cut & Premiere

[orbitalpunk]

I'm trying to edit a 4k three camera shoot on a base model 2013 Mac Pro with 16gb of ram and its slow. I can't tell if its a processor, graphics card or hard drive issue. I separate each cameras footage on their own individual hard drive. Its not a RAID, but they do have they own drive. And even when I transcode the footage, its still slow. Activity Monitor shows the Disk Read at about 30mb per second and the cpu at around 600%. Does that mean its my CPU and a quad core mac pro can't handle multi-cam 4k edits?

Thanks for any input

 

[thats all folks]

what original codec? transcoded to what? you mention base model and quad core, what actually is it? multicam really calls for a proxy workflow.

 

[orbitalpunk]

the original codec is H.264/MPEG-4 AVC 100Mbps
premiere transcodes it to ProRes 4222
the Mac Pro is a 3.7 Ghz Quad Core Intel Xeon E5

 

[4God]

I'm guessing it's a read speed issue. 7200rpm drive? I have a 6 core 2013 Mac Pro with 32GB RAM and edit 4K multicam clips just fine using RAID or SSDs over TB2. Try transcoding to ProRes.

 

[LethalWolfe]

The entry level 2013 doesn't have a very strong CPU (which might make it choke on the native files) and it sounds like your drives are slow (which might makes it choke on the ProRes 422 transcodes). Have you tried adjusting your playback settings? In FCPX this is Better Performance vs Better Quality and in PPro next to the Source and Record windows there is a drop down that says "Full" (as in playback quality) by default, but you can select 1/2 and 1/4 playback quality.

 

[mBox]

Have you tried converting the h264 in FCPX as well?
Ive finished a full feature on a D500 with 32GB but it was all RED 4K DCI.
FCPX was set to read from original and Premiere was proxy till Resolve.

 

[whitestar27]

I edited a six camera 1080p H264 multicam shoot on my 2015 12" MacBook. Totally doable when I used proxies.

 

[LethalWolfe]

I edited a six camera 1080p H264 multicam shoot on my 2015 12" MacBook. Totally doable when I used proxies.

All other things being equal 4K is four times the size of 1080p so the OP's situation is the data equivalent to twelve streams of 1080p. Agreed though that with a workflow adjustment the OP should be fine.

 

[joema2]

I'm trying to edit a 4k three camera shoot on a base model 2013 Mac Pro with 16gb of ram and its slow. I can't tell if its a processor, graphics card or hard drive issue...each cameras footage...have they own drive. And even when I transcode the footage, its still slow...

By transcode if you mean proxy, Premiere 2017 should be able to handle that. I have edited three-camera 4k H264 on a 2015 top-spec iMac with media on a single RAID 5 array many times. However transcoding to proxy is generally required for decent performance on three-camera 4k, whether Premiere or FCPX.

The nMP Xeon CPU does not have Intel's Quick Sync hardware-assisted transcoding, and you have a low-end nMP. This could cause high CPU loads on H264 but normally transcoding to proxy will eliminate that since (a) It's a lot smaller and (b) it is ProRes and doesn't require CPU-intensive decoding.

Premiere only recently added proxy support but FCPX has had this for years. In FCPX after you transcode to proxy you must engage those files by setting the viewer to proxy mode.