this journey begins over six months ago
when i reached out to Intel about supporting us with some chips a
low-power xeon to build the high-speed storage server for our new office that i
first showed off here then a pair of their top of the line e5
2699 v3 18 core xeon processors to build
a network video rendering server also
for the new office well as it turns out they couldn't send us the low power chip
for the storage server so we bought our own but whatever the reason was they
were able to honor our request for the pair of 4 500
processors so it is with much thanks to Intel along
with supermicro who provided a dual socket motherboard kingston who provided
128 gigs of ddr4 ecc RAM and norco
Noctua and fsp who provided our case cooling and redundant power that we are
able to bring you these findings because you see the deal was this
send us the chips and we'll make a video about how we're using them which sort of
puts a lot of pressure on us to figure out not only if the concept of network
rendering also known as a render farm works i mean that's been pretty standard
stuff for years especially in animation but also to find a way to efficiently
use those resources in our workflow
so without further ado thanks to weeks of work by edsel and much patience from
the rest of the team i am pleased to present our new editing workflow it's
fast it has built-in redundancy for our files and to quote dimitri from hardware
canucks who has already switched to it it brought the joy back to 4k video
editing for me so here we go
the logitech g303 features a lightweight design and advanced optical sensor with
delta zero technology for precise tracking and RGB lighting to match your
setup check out the link in the video description to learn more so the most
obvious bottleneck in a video editor's daily life is waiting around for
encoding tasks to complete outputting a finished ready to upload
h.264 video file can take anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes for us with one pass
vbr or even over an hour with two passes
so that was the first thing we tried to tackle with the 36 core server machine
for software telestream episode and sorenson squeeze desktop were the front
runners initially telestream was intriguing thanks to its unique ability
to split an encoding project into pieces
processed them across many cores and then stitched them back together at the
end regardless of the codec and sorenson
due to its excellent handling of multiple concurrent projects also a time
saver if you have many processing cores and its ability to utilize all cores for
a single project with supported codecs
so episode is a great concept but we abandoned it quickly due to stability
issues sorensen on the other hand impressed the snot out of us the
software worked their support staff was professional and even as a trial
customer we were escalated to engineering whenever we encountered more
complex issues outstanding so next we
tested a variety of different output formats and found that thanks to
optimizations within premiere pro our projects could be exported very quickly
by our editing workstations in dnxhd to
our server where sorenson would utilize all CPU cores to output an h.264 master
copy that was suitable for upload to youtube and other video sharing sites in
a fraction of the time that adobe media encoder could do it and all of this
while leaving the video editors computers free to work on other things
instead of just sitting there barely usable while they encoded video so
mission accomplished then right well
you know how the rabbit hole is the discoveries we made about how
dramatically a program's optimizations around a given codec could affect
performance raised more questions than they answered
and while premiere pro's claim to fame is that
unlike competitors like avid and final cut it allows any video file you want to
simply be plunked onto the timeline and edit it in real time it made us consider
the way that 4k footage off our panasonic gh4 camera just
seemed to chug as you scrub through it on the timeline even on six CPU cores
and a 10 gigabit network connection maybe there's some merit then too going
back to the old way so we devised a
workflow that would utilize our copious amounts of CPU horsepower to transcode
footage from whatever format our various
cameras captured in natively to an intermediary or mezzanine codec that was
compatible with all the programs in our workflow so for a number of reasons
avid's dnxhd was chosen and would you
look at that comparing pre-fetch latencies with
native gh4 footage the delay when moving the playhead in premiere was reduced by
nearly 25 times at 4k depending which program
exactly was used for the trans code so it was at that point that the goal
actually changed obviously we could just have the
individual video editors convert all the footage off the cameras to our mezzanine
codec when they're working but then we'd be right back where we damn well left
off with highly skilled video editors staring at their barely functional
computers waiting for a big queue of videos to transcode so no
we needed a way to avoid that by using
our overpowered hardware and the answer of course is to do the transcode at the
time of ingest or when the footage is initially removed from the camera
and here's some bad and some good news while squeeze desktop sorenson's low end
offering can perform a task like this across many
CPU cores because we dump so many video
clips off our sd cards at a time it just
wasn't stable enough with our workload so we turned to their server offering
which operated much more smoothly to automatically monitor our video file
dumping folders and transcode everything we dropped in them so the benchmark was
a folder of 41 video files totaling 16.7
gigs and by prioritizing multiple tasks
this could be processed in about 14 minutes a small price to pay even on a
video that needed to be edited immediately for the improved timeline
performance but unfortunately time wasn't the only price the server version
requires a Windows server operating system to run on top of and costs 5 000
plus yearly maintenance fees and furthermore despite the assurance we
received from sorenson's engineers that there shouldn't be any gamma or color
shifts using quicktime as a wrapper between squeezes dnx
export and premier's import it was there
and very difficult to compensate for so
it was back to the drawing board somewhat which led us to a conversation
with blackmagic design where they said that cineform could also be a great
mezzanine codec an option that had been dismissed early on due to its limited
compatibility with most software including sorensen squeeze although they
had said they could add compatibility with the next yearly release
so could we quickly transcode our footage to cineform it turns out that
yes even with only 30 CPU utilization
effectively 10 and a half of our 36 course adobe media encoder yes back to
that again managed to kick sorensen's ass converting to cineform versus
sorenson converting to dnxhd and all of
this without a significant loss in
quality regardless of whether we're working with native 4k footage for
better green screen and punch in performance or settling for up sampling
1080p footage for our finished project by the way please see this video for
more details about the benefits and the drawbacks of 4k
so that's all fine and good Linus but does cineform deliver the answer again
yes while file sizes are significantly
larger especially at 4k than even the
source files timeline performance is
better than even dnxhd thanks to an extraordinarily poorly documented
feature of cineform it's GPU accelerated
so even though dnxhd also performs like
a champ it can eat 50 to 60
of a 12 core xeon while scrubbing through footage while cineform is using
the fancy titan x graphics cards that NVIDIA sent us for our workstations to
keep CPU usage much lower
so then here is the process that we finally settled on we're using adobe
prelude 2015 to ingest our footage
automatically dumping the raw files off of the camera to a local storage array
on the machine in case of an emergency and then queuing up transcode jobs for
each of those clips in media encoder 2015 to send to our network share we
then use media encoder 2014 which is
included with your creative cloud license by the way to monitor the watch
folders that we export our finished jobs into and turn those into h.264 files
ready for publishing on websites like youtube vessel yooku billy billy and
facebook and while hitting both instances of media
encoder we've seen CPU usage as high as
90 percent but that doesn't mean that
you need a multi-thousand dollar network
render machine to utilize this workflow
all we've demonstrated here is that it's scalable to that kind of hardware for a
small team you could easily take advantage of this on a smaller scale
with a low power networked machine if you just wanted to improve your timeline
performance and not sit around waiting for exports
on your main station while something else works on that in the background
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