Multiple Renders Lossless?

[Adam Gold]

So I have this two-hour, four-cam shoot I've just finished editing. I'm using CS3 with Aspect.

As we know Premiere chokes on larger projects, I broke the show up into two Cineform 1080i projects -- one for each act. Each act has six scenes, so I gave each scene its own sequence.

When finished editing, I nested the six sequences in a row on a new timeline and got the dreaded "Push play and it jumps to the end" error. But each individual sequence plays fine in its own timeline.

So I exported each scene as a CFHD-AVI, assembled them in a new sequence, and exported again to a new CFHD-AVI that contained all of them.

Am I losing quality here? Or is the codec nearly lossless in this situation?

[David Newman]

No quality issues. The codec "settles", losing less with each generation.

[Adam Gold]

Thanks, David. Good to know. I'm guessing the loss even from first generation to second isn't really noticeable if I'm then going straight to Cineform m2t and then direct to standard DVD?

[Stephen Armour]

Originally Posted by Adam Gold

So I have this two-hour, four-cam shoot I've just finished editing. I'm using CS3 with Aspect.

As we know Premiere chokes on larger projects, I broke the show up into two Cineform 1080i projects -- one for each act. Each act has six scenes, so I gave each scene its own sequence.

When finished editing, I nested the six sequences in a row on a new timeline and got the dreaded "Push play and it jumps to the end" error. But each individual sequence plays fine in its own timeline.

So I exported each scene as a CFHD-AVI, assembled them in a new sequence, and exported again to a new CFHD-AVI that contained all of them.

Am I losing quality here? Or is the codec nearly lossless in this situation?

We're doing somewhat similar things, and since we have a good bit of CG and chroma stuff, the quality issue is a big one. The good news is that even with multi-generational cycles, the CF'd material holds up very well. I can't even imagine doing it any other way!

As you have discovered, the biggest prob is CS3's lack of headroom in the 32-bit environment. Many of the larger project probs seem to simply be from lack of addressable RAM memory. The PP3 fix will only come when Adobe ports their apps to 64-bit.

[Paolo Brambilla]

Although the OS is not supported by Adobe, i've found that all my preceeding issues about memory ended using CS3 with XP64/SP1. I run 8 Gb of DDR2 ram.

No more shortage of system memory, no more crash upon desktop while rendering a 2 hour Cineform project, and now dynamic link seems to work at his best (not to mention AE CS3 with Gridiron NucleoPro2, which is finally usable). I can leave oper Bridge too, or Photoshop.
Strange but this has been my experience.

One thing more...
I would pose the initial question in a different way: if i uncheck "always recompress" in PPro CS3 output settings, is the Cineform codec compliant, or recompression always takes place, also if no effect is applied to the clip?
I was wondering if i can use Premiere just to join cineform clips without rendering, in the way we used to do with DV.
From what I read in this thread, it seems not possible, althoug the loss of quality appears to be negligible to my eyes.
Correct?

Thank you

[David Newman]

Paolo,

Yes, XP64 does help Premiere. Under the 32-bit OS Premiere is limited to 2GB for virtual memory. Using the /3GB switch in boot.ini can help (can be dangerous), increasing the addressable space to 3GB. Under XP64 32-bit applications automatically get 4GB of virtual memory. So XP64 naturally doubles the memory CS3 can address, allow for more complex projects. In a recent update to Prospect line of products (not Aspect sorry,) rendering is performed in a separate process, reducing the memory footprint on Premiere for exports -- this help both 32-bit and XP64 OSes.

The "always recompress" flags is not used by CineForm exports. We could support it, it is just a low priority, lots of cooler things in the works.

[Stephen Armour]

Originally Posted by Paolo Brambilla

Although the OS is not supported by Adobe, i've found that all my preceeding issues about memory ended using CS3 with XP64/SP1. I run 8 Gb of DDR2 ram.

No more shortage of system memory, no more crash upon desktop while rendering a 2 hour Cineform project, and now dynamic link seems to work at his best (not to mention AE CS3 with Gridiron NucleoPro2, which is finally usable). I can leave oper Bridge too, or Photoshop.
Strange but this has been my experience.

Paolo, we use both x64 and XP 32bit on different workstations and it's true x64 helps, especially with AE. We have CS3 running under both OS's, but still have probs with large projects, including AE on rare occasions. Like David mentioned, the most recent version of Prospect does seem to help, but we've really not had much chance to test PP3 much under the x64 OS with it.

We thought about using Gridiron NucleoPro2 before, but only AE actually would have benefited from it at that time as far as we understand and now with AE CS3 it's not needed. How would that scenerio have changed now? Do you actually see memory access gains with Premiere CS3 using Gridiron NucleoPro2 under x64, or is it only with AE?

David, we see the memory access gain under x64 for AE, but does that 4GB space apply to Premiere? My understanding was that the limitation was that the 4 GB memory space was shared by all 32bit programs/processes running under the session, so the true gain was no where near double and that 8 GB of RAM would only benefit AE from the way it accesses memory and not Premiere. A little more light from you would really be nice and could maybe help us squash some of these probs with large projects.

[Paolo Brambilla]

Originally Posted by Stephen Armour

Do you actually see memory access gains with Premiere CS3 using Gridiron NucleoPro2 under x64, or is it only with AE?

I mean that 1 instance of Premiere, 4 instances of AE, 1 Bridge and all the rest (antivirus, blah, blah...) coexist and work without stepping too much over the feet each other. On XP32 this was simply not possible.
I've had some memory problem only in a long render using Cineform, Mercalli, Looks and BorisFx (this one for zoom in the frame stabilize with mercalli). It was probably a memory leak from Boris. We replaced it with the Cineform zoom/rotate and all worked fine.

Originally Posted by Stephen Armour

My understanding was that the limitation was that the 4 GB memory space was shared by all 32bit programs/processes running under the session, so the true gain was no where near double and that 8 GB of RAM would only benefit AE from the way it accesses memory and not Premiere.

It seems to me that WoW64 generates a 4Gb addressable space for every appl (maybe I have some remebrance from my work as a mainframe system programmer) and then remap it over the total memory of the system, acting also as a communication layer with the device drivers (that must be compiled in 64bit mode and stay in a different part of the total memory subsytem). The 4Gb limitation should apply also to the single AE instance given his 32bit architecture.

Regards

[Stephen Armour]

Originally Posted by Paolo Brambilla

I mean that 1 instance of Premiere, 4 instances of AE, 1 Bridge and all the rest (antivirus, blah, blah...) coexist and work without stepping too much over the feet each other. On XP32 this was simply not possible.
I've had some memory problem only in a long render using Cineform, Mercalli, Looks and BorisFx (this one for zoom in the frame stabilize with mercalli). It was probably a memory leak from Boris. We replaced it with the Cineform zoom/rotate and all worked fine.

It seems to me that WoW64 generates a 4Gb addressable space for every appl (maybe I have some remebrance from my work as a mainframe system programmer) and then remap it over the total memory of the system, acting also as a communication layer with the device drivers (that must be compiled in 64bit mode and stay in a different part of the total memory subsytem). The 4Gb limitation should apply also to the single AE instance given his 32bit architecture.

Regards

Thanks for the additional info, Paolo. When you say "4 instances of AE" are you refering to using dynamic link? As we understand it, only one program core instance can run at the same time, even under x64? We have stayed away from dynamic link due to the probs with using it under a 32bit OS.

[Paolo Brambilla]

I'm referring both using the multiprocessing feature option embedded in AE CS3, and using NucleoPro2. IMHO dynamic link is different, is a feature that calls AE in background for rendering, nothing more (really there is much more behind, but is OT here). When AE starts, it will start one ore more task depending the options you chose.

In task manager using Nucleo or the multiprocessing feature you can see many programs named AE running together.
I usually have 4 of them, and working together they can reach the full 8 Gb memory usage.

[Frédéric Salvy]

hi !
about this marvelous and smart software from gridiron

- now in AE CS3 adobe (at least) weak up and discover that they can render using all cores... never to late lol. so if you make ONLY 1 single render the speed is the same a is nucleo.
-nucleo 2 introduce much more than that : background rendering and commit to disk at least.
http://gridironsoftware.com/NucleoPro/

- for rendering you HAVE TO get 2GB per core. so on a quad-core machine 8GB is a must (in DDR2 to be cheap;). If you want more, you have to pay MUCH more for getting a 8 cores xeon with 16GB ram (like apple mac pro).
and i do think that with background rendering, 4 cores are enough.