Luckily ProRes has become pretty standard across my editing. Most cameras can record to it, and it works great, with so little processing power. Personally I don’t even like bringing any MP4’s in, and convert even them to ProRes Proxy.
Of course now with a Blackmagicdesign 6k Pro I have been shooting BlackMagic RAW and it in 6K certainly seems to take more processing power than ProRes, but it is also more compressed.
I would like to see how the M1 processors can handle H.264, which might mean less recompressing. I just see standardizing on a format to make Premiere work more like AVID, which has always been the most stable editing system.
Of course we don’t really know anything, other then it is coming, so it is literally all speculation. We think it will be based on the M2, and it might be 5nm or even 3nm, and we don’t know ports and it is rumored to have 40 cores, or double the M1 Ultra.
I wish this machine was a known quantity as it really should be my next machine if it isn’t too expensive.
It is really interesting that it says there was a M1 MacPro ready but they decided to wait for the M2, which means they won’t make the 2 year promise on the move to Apple Silicon.
Honestly it is likely because the M1 could only do dual, and the performance would not have been hugely more than the Mac Studio if there was not a quad option. So likely the M2 can do Quad.
Mac Performance Guide is quite negative on Mac performance, and it is the only place I have seen to show negative performance of Mac Studios, and he is certainly right on the Core Rote in Apple Systems. And this article on Spotlight Indexing is very interesting as I hate when does things that you have no control over. Spotlight is one of those things, especially when it indexes and you have no control over it. A simple pause indexing would be an amazing thing.
Personally I hate Spotlight as it doesn’t find everything for me, I use Find Any File for any major searches.
And for core rot I have to bring up my issue with Apple Music and moving iPhone sync to the finder. Also the fact that the damn sync has to sync twice to sync any files to my phone. Why? WTF!
So I am in the middle of making 2 short films shot on my BlackMagicDesign 6k Pro, and I am shooting in 6k 23.976 Blackmagic Raw Constant 8:1, and both have serious visual effects. And I have been having issues with running out of memory in After Effects.
Now my machine is getting old, it is a an iMac Pro with the upgraded Radeon Pro Vega 64X with 16 GB of RAM, but I only have 64 GB of DDR4 RAM, which I am thinking is the main issue. And I am running of a RAID 5 with 36 GB of mechanical drive space, which has at least half empty. And I have even moved the After Effects Disk Cache to a fast external SSD with a 250 GB cache.
For BRAW support I am using the amazing BRAW Studio from Autokroma. This plug in really is great in Premiere Pro because it allows selection of multiple BRAW clips to allow editing if they are all shot the same, and also to save out a sidecar file easily so any program can see what you have done. It works in Premiere Pro and After Effects and replaces Blackmagic’s BRAW plugin which has more limited functionality.
Still using this I do seem to be having RAM issues with RAM previews where my RAM is running out very quickly and won’t render out a whole shot. I find myself having to restart after effects to get a longer RAM preview, and many times even a computer restart.
Now I am also doing a lot of green screen and using Maxon formerly Red Giant’s Primatte Keyer 6 to key, so that might be also a RAM hog here. I have never had an issue with 4k Alexa ProRES footage in green screen though.
I tend to think it might be the BRAW , as on some shots I used BRAW Studio to do the initial grade and save out a sidecar, and then render them in Media Composer in ProRES HQ. With this footage I get much longer renders. Now I know it is less compressed, as the files are larger, and with the LUT added, there is less to decode, but this is very drive intensive.
And sure the 6K is bigger than 4K, and eating more RAM.
And the new M1 chips with ProRES processor wouldn’t help here, because it is BRAW, and 128 GB of shared memory and video memory doesn’t seem like a whole bunch more.
I am hoping the whole lesson isn’t that BRAW 6K is just too processor intensive.
