Edius X and AMD 5950X and 5900X CPUs

[Ron Evans]

Mike, to first answer your question of quick placing colour grades on clips in Resolve. You save a still from the clip you like( right click on image in preview monitor Grab Still it will them appear in the gallery top left )), select another clip on the timeline in the colour page, right click on that still in the gallery and hit Apply Grade. Do this for as many as you like while in the colour page. Yes Resolve is different to most of the other NLE's for sure. In Resolve 17 lots can be done now in any page. The upgrade cost to the Studio version that gives a lot more capability is still a lot less than an upgrade of EDIUS.

Back to EDIUS. I think I have convinced myself that until EDIUS catches up with all the other NLE's to use multicore/threads and GPU it will end up looking slower and slower in comparison. Lets hope we get that in the next update.

Storage will be come more important so available PCIe lanes will be the key. For instance I can make Resolve on my PC seem slow,close to EDIUS by placing ALL files on the 6T hard drive and turning off GPU decode ( only available in the Resolve Studio version ). If I need to use a lot of pips etc the files need to be on the NVME drives. This requirement immediately puts AMD ahead of Intel for reasonably priced systems and for expensive systems Threadipper just crushes Intel anyway on all accounts. For the ultimate at the moment the latest Threadripper and NVIDIA GPU is king. For a turnkey system the Threadripper Pro. Maybe that will be available to everyone shortly too.. Going down the line the RYZEN 3950X is likely a good choice with PCIe add in card for extra PCIe 3 NVME drives though I still think Threadripper is a better choice for the extra PCIe lanes available to the motherboard. If GPU assist is available not sure a high core count Threadripper will be needed 24 core should be ample since a lot of the work should be done by the GPU. Another reason Resolve Studio has the advantage of using multiple GPU with assigned functions. I hope EDIUS moves in this direction too


No PCC does not run well needs to be off for editing then I turn back on for export.

[Liverpool TV]

Yes Dave I think those were some clips your sent me.......




Regards




Mike

Hi Mike.

I thought that clip looked familiar

As for Resolve. I know this very subjective but I don’t get on with it very well either. For me personally, the UI is a bit all over the place and it also feels very fragmented. While it obviously has many functions that separate it from any other post app, I personally feel that it’s doing far too much and suffers for it.

My old film company used to used to use it at a finishing facility, this was about 11 years or so ago, when it was called DaVinci and way before BMD bought it. Back then it was kind of like the finishing/grading tool for those who couldn’t afford to hire a Quantel suit

The difference back then is that it was purely a finishing/grading tool, no NLE, no audio, no 3D etc. Again, for me personally, I think it simply does too much and suffers for it and what it was built for is kind of suffering as well because of all the extra layers of complexity for other types of processing.

What’s also interesting is that it also feels different on Mac. On Mac with the ARM beta it feels slicker than it is on Windows, I have a friend who’s really into it and he’s just moved from Windows to Big Sur/M1 and says it’s almost night and day in it’s operation. Me personally, I’m still not convinced of its fundamental approach now that it’s trying to do everything, regardless of host OS.

Which brings me back to Edius.

While I’ve been vocal about issues in and with Edius 10 & GV and am not a happy camper as far as this version and release of Edius is concerned. I’d never trade Edius for Resolve, or any other NLE for that matter. I know that may sound a bit mad, given the general theme of this post and what we’ve been discussing about CPU utilisation etc. or lack thereof, but. As a NLE and accepting certain legacy niggles etc. Edius is unquestionably a solid NLE and in a number of particular workflows it’s very hard to beat and in my opinion is the best.

I know some people like using multiple NLEs for their productions but for certain commercial and professional workflows this is not an option. There’s a reason why a film production or a TV production will use only one NLE and that’s always been my approach. This is why for the best part, I’m still committed to Edius. Messing about between NLEs simply isn’t for me. If another NLE was going to do what I needed and better Edius in usability and scalability with my machines, then yes, I’d be pragmatic and consider the move.

Now with all that said, this is why I’m getting even more frustrated with Edius, actually, in fairness my frustration and anger is actually with GV. Without echoing absolutely everything that’s already been said, this underutilisation of system facilities, CPU and GPU, with Edius 10 is what’s really the main issue. That, and not knowing what to build to move forward with.

I know it’s all been said and I was the first to make the criticism of the lack of GPU acceleration with Edius 10, but. There’s now a lot more traditional Edius users who are not just seeing but also feeling the issue of a lack of GPU utilisation. Plus, the more we talk about it, it also appears that there’s a whole underutilisation of certain CPU, core and thread configurations.

Now, I’m not one to make direct comparisons from one NLE to another with regard their own unique functions but I don’t think it unfair to keep reiterating the big point about how most nearly all other NLEs utilise GPUs and possibly CPUs as well. This whole GPU thing isn’t going to become a big sticking point, it is already become a big sticking point as far as I’m concerned.

As I’ve mentioned in another post. Why didn’t GV at least have discreet GPU codec decoding with Edius 10, Nvidia and/or AMD? As has already been established, even if it’s not fully utilising all CPU resources, Edius does indeed work very well with YUV manipulation. A good mid-ground before full GPU utilisation (which may even be an impossibility with Edius’ architecture anyway) would have been the decoding of codecs via GPU to Edius’ YUV buffer and then Edius could do more with the CPU for the YUV processing.

What’s actually quite ominous, at least from my understanding and perspective, is that. Given that we got NVENC encoding with Edius 10, why didn’t we get the GPU codec decoding? This is all the more sobering when you consider that even a tiny camera like a GoPro9 records in 5K in H.265, which really does make Edius strain. Seriously, QuickSync is not the Holly Grail it once was.

I’m no software engineer, I don’t understand what’s ‘under the hood’ as far as Edius is concerned and I most certainly don’t know how APIs etc. integrate, but. It really does feel like all these bolt-ons to Edius’ core are now maybe running their course. It feels as if there’s only so much tinkering and bypassing/inserting that can be done.

Just to round things up. On the point of PCIe bandwidth and media drive utilisation etc. I think those points, while being valid concerns, are pretty much secondary concerns to Edius’ CPU utilisation as far as I’m concerned. In my setups the processing bottlenecks way before the PCIe/storage/data bandwidth/speed. I appreciate that isn’t the case for everyone but until we get to max out more powerful CPU configurations, I’m not gonna lose too much sleep over other system architectural concerns.

Anyway, I like the discussion going on in this post and it’s good to see that a number of us are gravitating around similar concerns.

Seriously, if there where a perfect time for GV to step in, this is it.

Cheers,

Dave.

[createmedia]

Yes Dave agreed

I would find it very hard to move to another editing system after all these years with it, as I really like the way Edius works and the user interface.

We need to lose the old V1 having its own scroll bar and the Vectorscope needs fixing as 100% and over colour distorts outside the graticule. I can't see the sense in Edius X dropping the Storm 3G Elite hardware as GV do not support deck control on any 3rd party offering, and of course Edius X has dropped firewire which is a mistake for the more serious hobbyist market.

I have used Edius first when it was Canopus as I needed to replace the Media 100 setup when they went out of business and got bought out by BorisFx one November, and I was promised that Media 100 would have firewire capture by January next year and I chose not to believe them, a good job too as it was 1 year later they implemented it.

I found Canopus Edius and got on so well with the UI and everything was so intuitive I have stuck that way ever since. I also pre-pandemic took in work experience students from the local college and they were up and running with Edius 7/8/9 within half an hour.

What has moved on since those early standard definition days and the start of digital tape recording, and then onto SSD media, are the video formats and the pixel counts per frame including of course 8K and of course BMD have a 12K camera now as well.

The efficiency of the code behind the editing system to best utilise the hardware is becoming increasingly important. For example, there is a vast lowering in CPU utilisation when playing the same files that Edius is struggling to playback on the desktop.

Because in the Windows OS world any editing system software cannot tell what hardware environment it is going to work in it is going to need to do a first run assessment and store it in an ini file and check for hardware changes on start up. With Edius X being structured as a database modular system this is an ideal opportunity to do this. This will mean that different playback engines can be used appropriate to the hardware.

I assimilate this to YouTube which on playback request it asks what device are you and what is your connection quality and sends you the appropriate resolution stream to match.

In those terms as Apple are in charge of the 3 main components, the hardware, the OS and the App, they ought to be leading the way but as Final Cut X only addresses 4 cores of the installed CPU it means UHD/4K playback is a struggle, so a friend of mine tells me. He was faced with 4K footage from a wedding which to use multicam resulted in him going down the proxy file route which took all night to render. That may change as Apple start putting their own silicon in new systems, but already they have had to bring back Rosetta which sits as an interpreter layer on top of the OS for Apps expecting Intel silicon to be present, which cannot in itself be that efficient.

I am therefore rather hanging my hat on the modular database approach of Edius X to fix the current poor playback issues of the increasingly high resolutions we are expected to handle.

Regards

Mike

[Ron Evans]

I moved from film to VHS editing with Fast Video Machine, then Premiere alternating with Ulead, Vegas from its beginning as an audio editor. I have never had the business pressure you guys have as it has always been a hobby ( though a little serious !! ) Edius came after these and I have maintained Vegas for audio and tape capture. Resolve Studio has come into use in the last couple of years mainly to solve some colour issues with the GH5 to start with. So I have three programs to compare both for performance and features on the same PC. Clearly the features are only ones I use of course. Focus of EDIUS is multicam, focus for Vegas is audio and tape capture, focus for Resolve is colour corrections. In these three categories they do not compete well with each other though Fairlight is close to Vegas for audio for what I want to do. With the new Speed Editor control in the Resolve CUT page it may be better than multicam in EDIUS. Performance comparisons leave EDIUS way at the bottom of the list on my system both for timelline playback and encoding. All three will happily use HQX files for playback and export so no problem moving between them if needed. For single track family videos I usually used Vegas as it was easier to edit. Last one I did in Resolve with the Speed Editor in CUT page and it was really fast. I think we all hope EDIUS X will improve with the next update but at the moment it is not cutting it against the competition.

[createmedia]

Thanks Ron

Yes I am trying to do everything in Edius so battling on. Interesting that you think Edius has fallen behind now as new edit systems are created, and at the same time we are pushing the boundaries wanting to use files with increased frame resolution. I have little trouble at UHD/4K with 25p, it is 50p that is the system killer.

My commercial work is unfortunately all about layers and even in HD it can get tricky. Typically it looks like this:

Layer 1 background jpeg
Layer 2 green screen footage (XAVCI)
Layer 4 Logo
Layer 5 Insert illustrative graphic supporting dialogue (jpeg or png)
Layer 6 QTitler graphic description
Layer 7 Subtitles (Vistitle)
Layer 8 Draft watermark.
Layer 9 Animation background (for intro) This layer and layer 10 is only used at the beginning and end of the package.
Layer 10 Animated logo

I haven't done a direct compare with Vegas, which one of the video club members I chair uses. There are 5 of us using Edius in the club and the membership is split roughly half and half between Apple and Windows. iMovie does for a lot of the Apple kit club members.

Regards

Mike

[Ron Evans]

I shoot everything at 60P because I want the smooth motion. So my multicam is two tracks of GH5 Vlog UHD 60P and one track AX100 HD 60P. Not possible in multicam with EDIUS. I first use PCC to move colour space to rec 709 from VLog and do my main corrections if needed then turn off PCC, I mute one of the GH5 tracks ( usually the GH5S ) and then do my multicam at 1/2 preview. I usually go back and then decide which GH5 camera to use to crop/pan/zoom. Then carry on in this way through the edit. For some of the dance shows this is clearly one dance at a time, so quite quick. Have to remember which camera I used to enable the correct clip when I eventually unmute the track for export. This why I like the EDIUS multicam since I can select the clip even if it has a muted track so that when I eventually unmute it will all work correctly. You can change cameras in Vegas or Resolve of course but I like the EDIUS way. Yes this has only really been a problem since UHD. For HDV or HD with XAVC-S it was not a problem. Hence my issue with EDIUS not keeping up with competition. I still like EDIUS for this as I have not yet figured out how to easily do the layouter function in Resolve. I can do it but of course like you I am more used to EDIUS. From what you have displayed most of your work only involves one layer of video the others being graphics/text of some sort. I think that is likely an easier task than several layers of UHD video. I only have an animated title ( usually make with layers of quicktitler, show graphic with layouter ) in the beginning and scrolling credits at the end.

[burnandreturn]

Have any of you that are complaining about Edius and the lack of GV's response even bothered to read up on Black Dragon? Black Dragon owns GV. Black Dragon is focused on big sports and news stations. Read that again! They are simply not interested in this segment of the market. You all are beating a dead horse. I have been with Edius since before Edius. Meaning I started with Canopus and Lets Edit. Times change and focus changes.

[Ron Evans]

Have any of you that are complaining about Edius and the lack of GV's response even bothered to read up on Black Dragon? Black Dragon owns GV. Black Dragon is focused on big sports and news stations. Read that again! They are simply not interested in this segment of the market. You all are beating a dead horse. I have been with Edius since before Edius. Meaning I started with Canopus and Lets Edit. Times change and focus changes.

Yes until news stations move to 4K and sports are 8K the attention will be on supporting the current formats and EDIUS does that well with integration with hardware from GV. The danger for them will come from Blackmagic who may both produce competing hardware and a better editing environment. I too have been with Canopus from the beginning but never stopped using the other products and have kept up to date with all but ADOBE when they went subscription. I still have CS6 Production Suite that I use for Photoshop I do not use AE now as since getting into Resolve I now use Fusion for the very few times I need something like that. I am more concerned that a product I really like will get run over by others for the sake of improving performance. I fear that if EDIUS does not effectively use modern CPU and GPU it will disappear. That will also be true for the broadcast environment they are in now. Compared to the competitors the price is not warranted as a new user wanting to do 4K and HDR.

[Liverpool TV]

Have any of you that are complaining about Edius and the lack of GV's response even bothered to read up on Black Dragon? Black Dragon owns GV. Black Dragon is focused on big sports and news stations. Read that again! They are simply not interested in this segment of the market. You all are beating a dead horse. I have been with Edius since before Edius. Meaning I started with Canopus and Lets Edit. Times change and focus changes.

As Ron has already said, TV production facilities etc. all use the same types of hardware architecture as the rest of us. Whatever we are discussing here as problems with Edius, will also be problems for TV production facilities etc.

I don't doubt that the likes of us typical users on the forum aren't at the fore of GV's concerns, that's quite obvious with the complete lack of input regarding these questions on the forum. However, typical users like ourselves do eventually benefit from the trickle down effect.

As Ron has also said, if GV don't get their act together with regard CPU and GPU utilisation for Edius and it carries on falling further and further behind its competition, Edius will become a very bad proposition for those in TV as well. I doubt GV will let that happen, due to the present Edius/GV infrastructure that many TV production facilities have around the world. Whether GV intend on sorting these issues with their own bespoke hardware/DSP/render solution, or they do indeed go down the route of CPU/GPU acceleration. This will only be a matter of time and one way or the other will give us some answers, eventually.

Anyway. We all know where we stand right now with these questions that GV are avoiding answering, there's really no need to carry on about it and there's definitely no way that anyone here knows what GV/Black Dragon's intentions are to supporting regular users like ourselves, so there's no need for anymore unfounded speculation.

This post has turned into a very interesting and helpful one where people are positively sharing their hardware observations and giving plenty of food for thought for other Edius users who are interested in hardware setups for their Edius systems. Let's keep it that way.

[createmedia]

Further hardware research revealed a few interesting facts. If you have a 2 channel memory controller then 1 DIMM should be put per channel. LR DIMM can run to two DIMMS on the same channel but non LR DIMM more than one will slow the clock speed of each DIMM. I have 4 Channels per CPU and only one stick per channel so I am OK in this respect.

I managed to tweak a bit more performance out of the Bios on my set up. Firstly turbo lock was on, turned off. I also delved into the power efficiency section and discovered C State at C6 which is highest power saving, changed to C0/C1 lowest power saving.

The overall comparison now with the world Passmark percentile is better now pointing at the RAM and the SDD as being slower items as was single core score. The SSD isn't used for video the RAID is, I guess they were comparing the SSD to M2 drives which are very fast so not concerned about that.

I am not very familiar with tweaking workstation mother board bios but I am getting there. I did not want to start tweaking voltages.

It is an ASUS Z10PE-D16 WS and the manual exceeds the 10MB upload limit for a PDF by 1MB.

Just added by Edit the pictorial Passmarks for my system

Mike

[Liverpool TV]

Further hardware research revealed a few interesting facts. If you have a 2 channel memory controller then 1 DIMM should be put per channel. LR DIMM can run to two DIMMS on the same channel but non LR DIMM more than one will slow the clock speed of each DIMM. I have 4 Channels per CPU and only one stick per channel so I am OK in this respect.

I managed to tweak a bit more performance out of the Bios on my set up. Firstly turbo lock was on, turned off. I also delved into the power efficiency section and discovered C State at C6 which is highest power saving, changed to C0/C1 lowest power saving.

The overall comparison now with the world Passmark percentile is better now pointing at the RAM and the SDD as being slower items as was single core score. The SSD isn't used for video the RAID is, I guess they were comparing the SSD to M2 drives which are very fast so not concerned about that.

I am not very familiar with tweaking workstation mother board bios but I am getting there. I did not want to start tweaking voltages.

It is an ASUS Z10PE-D16 WS and the manual exceeds the 10MB upload limit for a PDF by 1MB.

Just added by Edit the pictorial Passmarks for my system

Mike

Hi Mike. (You probably know all this but it may be interesting for others reading this post)

As long as your PCI bandwidth and media storage system are enough for your edits, I wouldn't worry too much about RAM and SSD speeds. Once your system is capable of the edits you are doing, you will find very little or no difference at all even if you replaced your RAM with faster RAM and/or even if you changed your storage to something a lot more faster. With the likes of Edius it's the CPU that will most nearly always be the bottleneck, speeding up your RAM and/or storage wont make any great difference if your speeds are already above your editing bandwidth. In fact, I'll be posting a video later that shows throttling and it has nothing to do with RAM or storage.

As for benchmark software etc. I'd personally take all that with a big pinch of salt. If it's software that measures a system's entire performance, which would see fast RAM and storage as a metric to add to its overall score. Then yes, this will show a performance boost because of the fast RAM and/or storage but that difference will have very little or no bearing on your Edius performance. Just because something is rated as being faster it doesn't mean that everything will benefit or even utilise that speed. For instance. Let's say you have an edit that is using a total of 1000MB/s in bandwidth and your media drive system is capable of 1500MB/s. Then changing to a drive system that's capable of 3000MB/s wont make any difference or gain you any extra performance because you only need 1000MB/s anyway. It's pretty much the same for RAM speeds as well, although RAM can be quite weird as you will most likely have to overclock and that within itself in relation to the CPU clock can be problematic, even with systems that utilise XMP. There are only certain real word tasks that take advantage of very fast RAM and as far as I'm aware, nothing in Edius will take advantage of it. The amount of RAM is also not a great concern, you most certainly don't need more than 16GB for Edius and you're likely, for the best part, to not feel any difference between running 8GB compared 16GB.

All the above assumes that a system is setup correctly and everything is matched and that the likes of any particular unique requirements are taken care of, things such as memory type/amount/placement for a particular motherboard/chipset.

As for CPU overclocking. It's something that I've not done for a long time, have very little experience of with modern systems but would generally avoid. I may be wrong but I'm not sure that Xeons, especially dual Xeons, lend themselves to be overclocked. Even if your system is capable of taking advantage of overclocking, for all the messing around, extra cooling, potential risk of damage, I would just avoid it.

Cheers,
Dave.

[ulyssesvideo]

who owns edius.... Black dragon..... its really up to them to what and how with edius. If edius falls behind the other editing software out there....will Black dragon really care? only time will tell.
for the basic editor...edius will work how it should.
as for me... I am not so worried about edius 10. Edius 9,8, 7, even 6 are still being used and working very well for those who use it.
for the record... will update to 9 soon....as it suits my needs, and why not 10... i really don't need the issues with edius 10

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