Pro Tools Editing Lag When Editing to Video

[Sound Editing MunKee]

Thanks Mufi! I'm going to try that software very soon! Thanks a lot for the suggestion.

[seanmccoy]

Originally Posted by mufi

That's what i am using
https://audiospot.audio/audiospot-creativetools
The tool is called DNxER. It has the option to transcode both to MOV and MXF.

Unfortunately they will cease to provide them for free in january.

The difference between mov and mxf is night and day, you shoud try it.

Does this transcode as fast as Shutter Encoder?

[Sound Editing MunKee]

So I've done a number of things here. First I upgraded my system to a new Samsung EVO PRO 980 PCIE SSD and dropped in a spare EVO 970 PCIE SSD I had kicking around to my PC. I reinstalled windows, pro tools, the works to the new 980 SSD. NO CHANGE with pro res video! I've tried with and without Quicktime 7 PRO and with/without the AVID codec PE packages (there's 2 of them I guess). I just tried transcoding my pro res video to DNxHD using the DNxER by Audio Spot and performance is incredibly fast! Granted I can use this as a workaround but I want to get to the bottom of this if possible as most of my clients send me pro res video or H264 and I don't always have time to transcode. Any thoughts fellow windows users? Many thanks!

Originally Posted by mufi

That's what i am using
https://audiospot.audio/audiospot-creativetools
The tool is called DNxER. It has the option to transcode both to MOV and MXF.

Unfortunately they will cease to provide them for free in january.

The difference between mov and mxf is night and day, you shoud try it.

[Sound Editing MunKee]

It seemed to do a 2 hour show conversion 720p 59.94 ProRes Proxy to 1080p DNxHD in the time for me to drive down the street to Best Buy and back lol (about 20 minutes but who knows when it actually finished)

Originally Posted by seanmccoy

Does this transcode as fast as Shutter Encoder?

[TVPostSound]

Im a Mac user, and CAN NOT even work with H264 video, too much memory and CPU spent trying to decompress/play.
I use Shutter encoder, and convert to DNXHD36, which is the best codec for me.

[Sound Editing MunKee]

Originally Posted by TVPostSound

Im a Mac user, and CAN NOT even work with H264 video, too much memory and CPU spent trying to decompress/play.
I use Shutter encoder, and convert to DNXHD36, which is the best codec for me.

I hear ya, H264 is a delivery format for streaming or used for recording consumer video footage, not an editing format so will not work well no matter what in PT. I'd dealing with Pro Res proxy files in this instance.

[Sound Editing MunKee]

Done some more testing and here's I've found. Pro Tools 2020.x on Mac or Windows does not like long ProRes files. I deal with a lot of 2 hour TV shows formatted in ProRes proxy 720p 59.94 FPS. Those videos play and, most importantly, scrub terribly regardless of which system I'm using (Mac HDX or PC Ultimate w/UA Arrow). I've also tried converting these videos from 59.94 to 29.97 without any gain in performance. A shorter 1 hour TV show video is improved, still not great but marginally acceptable. I also took a clip from my drone that's just under 2 minutes and converted that from H264 (the drone's native format) to ProRes 1080p 59.94, 720p 59.94, 1080p 29.97 and 720p 29.97. All of those short clips play and scrub with excellent performance!

I've also done tests with DNxER and converting all the above to DNxHD with an MXF container. Those files play and scrub perfectly on both systems regardless of length. Pro Tools must be trying to do some sort of caching thing with the ProRes videos that I can't figure out how to disable or work around (I've tried changing the Disk Playback cache size to various sizes without any change in performance one way or another). Hence the longer the video file, the worse Pro Tools works with the file. I suspect this all started when Avid changed out PT's video engine, this all began when I upgraded from 2019.x. Unfortunately I don't have access to any old installers to prove if this is true or not. Can anyone at Avid chime in? Or does anyone have any idea what could be causing this and if it's a settings thing what I should check? Many thanks!

[Sound Editing MunKee]

Anybody?! LOL

[Ray JB]

Originally Posted by Sound Editing MunKee

Anybody?! LOL

I've not had much experience with the huge duration ProRes video files you're mentioning but I regularly get Feature films in their entirety that are DNx36 and often 1 hour 45 mins in duration. They've always played fine in PT.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't believe that the disk cache settings in PT make any difference to the video side of things. Video playback performance seems more based on the speed of the storage your video files are based on.

One thing to try and I know it's a curve ball, but have you thought about breaking your long movies into smaller say 30 min chunks? First try just chopping the video file into a smaller piece in PT but if that makes no difference then use Davinci Resolve or something similar to export "same as source" ProRes video files that are 30 mins in duration and assemble the multiple video files on the timeline using the burn-in TC to check your assembly. Usually a "same as source" export from most video editing programs effectively means a quick export as there is no transcoding required.

See how you go with that.

Failing that of course, a transfer to DNx is your saviour as you've proven.

merry xmas!

[Sound Editing MunKee]

Hi Ray JB thanks for the idea of editing down the video clips, I thought of that too but my PC can chew through transcoding these shows pretty quickly, but maybe I’ll tinker with it over the holidays to see if that changes anything.

I have messed with the disk cache or whatever it’s called in playback engine, it seemed to slightly improve performance if I maxed that out with what my computer would allow before getting memory errors at 48 GB or so (I have 64 GB in the PC). Eventually though I’d set it back to normal as performance eventually drops.