When Avid decided upon the AVE...

[Ray JB]

Originally Posted by TVPostSound

I spent over a year logging, documenting, and stopping down my work to
work with Avid on these issues, countless versions of 12.8 betas, and it paid off.

Switch to PT 12.8, and you will be free of crashes. Take my word..

I can now run a DNXHD in Protools, coming out of the native ATI Radeon card,
and Satellite a Media Composer machine together without crashes.

Best if you use DNXHD36. Stay away from H264.

So I recently moved to PT 12.8 HD from 12.4 where I'd been parked for some time due to video issues on later versions. But was having the odd unexpected crash in 12.4 and thought I'd try it out.

So far, I've been pretty much crash free (all 12.4 crashes were AVID Video Engine failures). 12.8 AVED seems to be more robust but started getting "AVE could not stop" messages using DNx36HD 23.976 Quicktimes. Strange.

One thing you could try if you are having these is to use Davinci Resolve and it's delivery page to make an MXF version of the Quicktime. It seems to take about 10-15 mins for a 30 minute reel. Upon using MXF wrapped video PT12.8 is playing ball for me now and I am not getting those messages which would require me to restart ProTools to dismiss the problem.

I'm on OS X 10.10.5, Mac Pro 5,1 32GB, AVID Mojo DX video hardware and ATI Radeon HD 5770 stock card.

Ray

[mgoorevich]

I have zero issues with AVE.
One thing that most of us still don't realize, that the AVE needs a quick video dedicated drive.
If you use Aja system test utility (free), you'll see that internal SATA 7200 rpm best drive will have a read performance from 100 to 150 MB/s. When an SSD (I have OWC one) has 260 MB/s! Thats 2.6 times faster that my previous problematic SATA Black Caviar drive!
Believe me it worths spending $400 for it.

[Ray JB]

Hi Michael

Forgot to mention that pix are playing off a Samsung 850 1TB Pro SSD. This is connected to my CalDigit 3G Sata card bus so I have twice the Sata bus speed of the built in Sata on the MacPro. As in I do actually get double the transfer rate of the SSD if indeed it was in a normal Drive Bay.

So not sure it's a speed thing?

Also forgot to mention there's a Sync HD and Blackmagic Tri-level Sync Generator providing ref sync at the correct rate.

[mgoorevich]

Ray, try to upgrade your OS to 10.12.5.
I am on the same machine Mac 5.1 as yours with even less RAM.

[Ray JB]

That's a possibility in the future once I get thru with this project, as I'm a little scared of such a major update mid-stream so to speak.

Have you noticed your machine is running better on this OS? I def did not want to go to El Cap and sat on Yosemite. My experiences with Sierra and a mix stage I work at regularly with PT 12.6 were nightmarish. I'm sure they must have ironed the bugs out by now eh?

Thanks for the thoughts.

Ray

[Frank Kruse]

Originally Posted by mgoorevich

I have zero issues with AVE.
One thing that most of us still don't realize, that the AVE needs a quick video dedicated drive.
If you use Aja system test utility (free), you'll see that internal SATA 7200 rpm best drive will have a read performance from 100 to 150 MB/s. When an SSD (I have OWC one) has 260 MB/s! Thats 2.6 times faster that my previous problematic SATA Black Caviar drive!
Believe me it worths spending $400 for it.

Even a modest modern spinning drive surpasses the speed requirements for an average QT (DNxHD36) by a multiple. My WD Black Caviar spinner does an average of 500frames/second of read speed (AJA test tool) for DNxHD36 1080P. Why would a drive that does over 1300frames/second for 400$ and smaller size make a difference when your maximum read speed is 29,97 or 60fps? About 40 times faster than what you need for playback of a 24fps QT.

We have done post to picture for decades with drives that were slower by probably factor 10 and now all of a sudden a 260MB/s SSD is the minimum requirement to get AVE to work properly? Seems a bit odd to me...

Some of my colleagues next door use SSDs for video and I don't see any difference in overall PT's performance or less AVE errors. The only difference is speed when you copy new QTs over but then a Gigabit network only does 100MB/s anyway so it's pretty rare that the 200+MB/s drive speed actually makes a practical difference.

I do see an advantage for large VI that need to load 30GB of sample for every song before you can play it etc. but for regular sound editing work I don't really get the 'obsession' about SSDs ;-)

What might make a difference is higher average seek speed of an SSD when you hit play so the ever so delicate AVE doesn't cough and throws up an error but it worked all the years before and it works on AVID MC with even slower drives and video over the network. No one ion the picture side stores the video footage on 30TB SSDs and they work with MUCH higher quality video on MC so why does ProTools all of a sudden need the "fastest possible liquid nitrogen cooled cutting edge" drives to even play an offline quality DNxHD QT?

F.

[mgoorevich]

Originally Posted by Frank Kruse

Even a modest modern spinning drive surpasses the speed requirements for an average QT (DNxHD36) by a multiple. My WD Black Caviar spinner does an average of 500frames/second of read speed (AJA test tool) for DNxHD36 1080P. Why would a drive that does over 1000frames/second for 400$ and smaller size make a difference when your maximum read speed is 29,97 or 60fps? About 40 times faster than what you need for playback of a 24fps QT.

We have done post to picture for decades with drives that were slower by probably factor 10 and now all of a sudden a 260MB/s SSD is the minimum requirement to get AVE to work properly? Seems a bit odd to me...

Some of my colleagues next door use SSDs for video and I don't see any difference in overall PT's performance or less AVE errors. The only difference is speed when you copy new QTs over but then a Gigabit network only does 100MB/s anyway so it's pretty rare that the 200+MB/s drive speed actually makes a practical difference.

I do see an advantage for large VI that need to load 30GB of sample for every song before you can play it etc. but for regular sound editing work I don't really get the 'obsession' about SSDs ;-)

What might make a difference is higher average seek speed of an SSD when you hit play so the ever so delicate AVE doesn't cough and throws up an error but it worked all the years before and it works on AVID MC with even slower drives and video over the network. No one ion the picture side stores the video footage on 30TB SSDs and they work with MUCH higher quality video on MC so why does ProTools all of a sudden needs the "fastest possible liquid nitrogen cooled cutting edge" drives to even play an offline quality DNxHD QT?

F.

Frank, it all makes sense. In theory any drive above 30 fps/sec should work just fine. In practice when I was a partner with a color grading facility I saw issues in real time playback with ultra fast massive storage servers (for Baselight).
I can admit that the drive speed is not the weakest link.
But it took me more than 3 years to figure out how to make my system AVE stable. So I think the trick of the AVE errors free workflow somehow is a combination of software / OS / hardware / video card / resolution. The thing is to figure out what combination would work within your system best.

Ray, I did saw performance increment when upgraded to 10.12.5.

[Brandonx1]

Originally Posted by Frank Kruse

Even a modest modern spinning drive surpasses the speed requirements for an average QT (DNxHD36) by a multiple. My WD Black Caviar spinner does an average of 500frames/second of read speed (AJA test tool) for DNxHD36 1080P. Why would a drive that does over 1300frames/second for 400$ and smaller size make a difference when your maximum read speed is 29,97 or 60fps? About 40 times faster than what you need for playback of a 24fps QT.

We have done post to picture for decades with drives that were slower by probably factor 10 and now all of a sudden a 260MB/s SSD is the minimum requirement to get AVE to work properly? Seems a bit odd to me...

Some of my colleagues next door use SSDs for video and I don't see any difference in overall PT's performance or less AVE errors. The only difference is speed when you copy new QTs over but then a Gigabit network only does 100MB/s anyway so it's pretty rare that the 200+MB/s drive speed actually makes a practical difference.

I do see an advantage for large VI that need to load 30GB of sample for every song before you can play it etc. but for regular sound editing work I don't really get the 'obsession' about SSDs ;-)

What might make a difference is higher average seek speed of an SSD when you hit play so the ever so delicate AVE doesn't cough and throws up an error but it worked all the years before and it works on AVID MC with even slower drives and video over the network. No one ion the picture side stores the video footage on 30TB SSDs and they work with MUCH higher quality video on MC so why does ProTools all of a sudden need the "fastest possible liquid nitrogen cooled cutting edge" drives to even play an offline quality DNxHD QT?

F.

Frank, AVE likes lower latency dfives better. Its not the throughput that helps, you are roght we have har the bandwidth for a while now. Spinning drives take a long time to start. Ssds havw a much lower latency and AVE has less errors with low latwncy drives