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this journey begins over six months ago

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when i reached out to Intel about supporting us with some chips a

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low-power xeon to build the high-speed storage server for our new office that i

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first showed off here then a pair of their top of the line e5

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2699 v3 18 core xeon processors to build

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a network video rendering server also

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for the new office well as it turns out they couldn't send us the low power chip

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for the storage server so we bought our own but whatever the reason was they

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were able to honor our request for the pair of 4 500

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processors so it is with much thanks to Intel along

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with supermicro who provided a dual socket motherboard kingston who provided

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128 gigs of ddr4 ecc RAM and norco

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Noctua and fsp who provided our case cooling and redundant power that we are

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able to bring you these findings because you see the deal was this

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send us the chips and we'll make a video about how we're using them which sort of

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puts a lot of pressure on us to figure out not only if the concept of network

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rendering also known as a render farm works i mean that's been pretty standard

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stuff for years especially in animation but also to find a way to efficiently

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use those resources in our workflow

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so without further ado thanks to weeks of work by edsel and much patience from

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the rest of the team i am pleased to present our new editing workflow it's

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fast it has built-in redundancy for our files and to quote dimitri from hardware

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canucks who has already switched to it it brought the joy back to 4k video

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editing for me so here we go

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the logitech g303 features a lightweight design and advanced optical sensor with

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delta zero technology for precise tracking and RGB lighting to match your

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setup check out the link in the video description to learn more so the most

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obvious bottleneck in a video editor's daily life is waiting around for

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encoding tasks to complete outputting a finished ready to upload

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h.264 video file can take anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes for us with one pass

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vbr or even over an hour with two passes

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so that was the first thing we tried to tackle with the 36 core server machine

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for software telestream episode and sorenson squeeze desktop were the front

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runners initially telestream was intriguing thanks to its unique ability

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to split an encoding project into pieces

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processed them across many cores and then stitched them back together at the

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end regardless of the codec and sorenson

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due to its excellent handling of multiple concurrent projects also a time

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saver if you have many processing cores and its ability to utilize all cores for

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a single project with supported codecs

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so episode is a great concept but we abandoned it quickly due to stability

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issues sorensen on the other hand impressed the snot out of us the

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software worked their support staff was professional and even as a trial

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customer we were escalated to engineering whenever we encountered more

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complex issues outstanding so next we

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tested a variety of different output formats and found that thanks to

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optimizations within premiere pro our projects could be exported very quickly

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by our editing workstations in dnxhd to

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our server where sorenson would utilize all CPU cores to output an h.264 master

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copy that was suitable for upload to youtube and other video sharing sites in

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a fraction of the time that adobe media encoder could do it and all of this

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while leaving the video editors computers free to work on other things

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instead of just sitting there barely usable while they encoded video so

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mission accomplished then right well

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you know how the rabbit hole is the discoveries we made about how

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dramatically a program's optimizations around a given codec could affect

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performance raised more questions than they answered

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and while premiere pro's claim to fame is that

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unlike competitors like avid and final cut it allows any video file you want to

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simply be plunked onto the timeline and edit it in real time it made us consider

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the way that 4k footage off our panasonic gh4 camera just

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seemed to chug as you scrub through it on the timeline even on six CPU cores

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and a 10 gigabit network connection maybe there's some merit then too going

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back to the old way so we devised a

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workflow that would utilize our copious amounts of CPU horsepower to transcode

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footage from whatever format our various

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cameras captured in natively to an intermediary or mezzanine codec that was

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compatible with all the programs in our workflow so for a number of reasons

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avid's dnxhd was chosen and would you

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look at that comparing pre-fetch latencies with

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native gh4 footage the delay when moving the playhead in premiere was reduced by

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nearly 25 times at 4k depending which program

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exactly was used for the trans code so it was at that point that the goal

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actually changed obviously we could just have the

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individual video editors convert all the footage off the cameras to our mezzanine

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codec when they're working but then we'd be right back where we damn well left

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off with highly skilled video editors staring at their barely functional

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computers waiting for a big queue of videos to transcode so no

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we needed a way to avoid that by using

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our overpowered hardware and the answer of course is to do the transcode at the

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time of ingest or when the footage is initially removed from the camera

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and here's some bad and some good news while squeeze desktop sorenson's low end

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offering can perform a task like this across many

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CPU cores because we dump so many video

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clips off our sd cards at a time it just

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wasn't stable enough with our workload so we turned to their server offering

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which operated much more smoothly to automatically monitor our video file

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dumping folders and transcode everything we dropped in them so the benchmark was

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a folder of 41 video files totaling 16.7

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gigs and by prioritizing multiple tasks

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this could be processed in about 14 minutes a small price to pay even on a

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video that needed to be edited immediately for the improved timeline

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performance but unfortunately time wasn't the only price the server version

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requires a Windows server operating system to run on top of and costs 5 000

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plus yearly maintenance fees and furthermore despite the assurance we

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received from sorenson's engineers that there shouldn't be any gamma or color

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shifts using quicktime as a wrapper between squeezes dnx

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export and premier's import it was there

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and very difficult to compensate for so

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it was back to the drawing board somewhat which led us to a conversation

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with blackmagic design where they said that cineform could also be a great

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mezzanine codec an option that had been dismissed early on due to its limited

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compatibility with most software including sorensen squeeze although they

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had said they could add compatibility with the next yearly release

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so could we quickly transcode our footage to cineform it turns out that

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yes even with only 30 CPU utilization

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effectively 10 and a half of our 36 course adobe media encoder yes back to

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that again managed to kick sorensen's ass converting to cineform versus

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sorenson converting to dnxhd and all of

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this without a significant loss in

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quality regardless of whether we're working with native 4k footage for

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better green screen and punch in performance or settling for up sampling

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1080p footage for our finished project by the way please see this video for

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more details about the benefits and the drawbacks of 4k

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so that's all fine and good Linus but does cineform deliver the answer again

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yes while file sizes are significantly

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larger especially at 4k than even the

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source files timeline performance is

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better than even dnxhd thanks to an extraordinarily poorly documented

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feature of cineform it's GPU accelerated

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so even though dnxhd also performs like

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a champ it can eat 50 to 60

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of a 12 core xeon while scrubbing through footage while cineform is using

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the fancy titan x graphics cards that NVIDIA sent us for our workstations to

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keep CPU usage much lower

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so then here is the process that we finally settled on we're using adobe

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prelude 2015 to ingest our footage

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automatically dumping the raw files off of the camera to a local storage array

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on the machine in case of an emergency and then queuing up transcode jobs for

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each of those clips in media encoder 2015 to send to our network share we

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then use media encoder 2014 which is

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included with your creative cloud license by the way to monitor the watch

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folders that we export our finished jobs into and turn those into h.264 files

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ready for publishing on websites like youtube vessel yooku billy billy and

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facebook and while hitting both instances of media

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encoder we've seen CPU usage as high as

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90 percent but that doesn't mean that

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you need a multi-thousand dollar network

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render machine to utilize this workflow

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all we've demonstrated here is that it's scalable to that kind of hardware for a

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small team you could easily take advantage of this on a smaller scale

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with a low power networked machine if you just wanted to improve your timeline

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performance and not sit around waiting for exports

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on your main station while something else works on that in the background

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speaking of things that run in the background tunnelbear is an easy to use

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accessing things like geo-blocked websites

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try it out today thanks for watching guys if this video sucked

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come on this was a lot of work

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but if it was awesome please hit that like button

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get subscribed or even consider supporting us directly by using our

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affiliate code to shop at amazon buying a cool t-shirt like this one or with a

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direct monthly contribution through our community forum which you should definitely join links up there and now

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that you're done doing all that stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so click that little button up in

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the top right to check out luke's video where he goes through the ins and outs

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of password protection that is

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protecting your passwords making it so other people don't have them

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see you next time