Recommended CPU for Edius X

[Ron Evans]

Just tried a few clips at 25P and 50P from my GH5S. EDIUS X will multicam at least 5 tracks of 25P with full buffers. The source was Vlog. When I apply PCC to correct to rec709 on one track it will still play on two tracks buffer is not consistent and three it will not play. PCC on all 5 tracks but preview at 1/2 and it will play. For 50P two tracks will just about play but once PCC is applied it will not but will just manage at 1/2 preview.

By contrast I gave up after 10 tracks of 25P fully corrected to rec709 with Resolve and 5 tracks of 50P. Using the 1080Ti for decode makes a big difference.

[noafilm]

I think that Noa and I had different problems starting at the same time. I got repeated frames or fields while Noa got black frames

You can't believe how relieved I am to finally get rid of these black frames, I have wasted hours, days over a period of 4 years checking and fixing black frames on exported footage and not to mention the time wasted getting the cpu up to speed when I first got it. It's only been a few days but I"m in the middle of a new project with the new pc and have done some exports for client review (I even did check for black frames now to be sure :) but just to know I can render with confidence and move on is such a time saver. I actually enjoy editing again since things ran smoothly right out of the box, I just hope it stays that way.

[noafilm]

By contrast I gave up after 10 tracks of 25P fully corrected to rec709 with Resolve and 5 tracks of 50P. Using the 1080Ti for decode makes a big difference.

In my case, the 5950x does what it needs to do, in realtime with full quality preview up to 4 (or 5 but I mainly do 4 camera multicam shoots) camera's and with fast exports but the codecs I use are not as demanding. I intend to work with these type of codecs for several years to come so this pc will do just fine for another 4 to 5 years. If I had to deal with the type of codecs you use in a multicam setting or if I had to work a lot with h.265 files or any other demanding codec I would have chosen another path and invested more in a fast GPU and changed to another NLE or just entirely changed platform to a Mac.

[Ron Evans]

I am pleased you seem to have solved your problems with black frames. Must be a relief for you. I expect I may make my workflow even more complicated for I will likely get a 6K or 8K camera next year as that would improve the way I now shoot especially as I get older and need the shoot to be easier to do. Multicam and then crop/zoom/pan of the clips. What I edit with I think will depend on what I get then as that may decide what I need to do.

[noafilm]

I will likely get a 6K or 8K camera next year

The URSA Mini Pro 12K would be the perfect camera for you with a codec that would play nicely with your second favorite NLE :) It actually is not that expensive considering what you get in return.

[Ron Evans]

The URSA Mini Pro 12K would be the perfect camera for you with a codec that would play nicely with your second favorite NLE :) It actually is not that expensive considering what you get in return.

The issue is all the other pieces needed to get it to work. I think that BM may start to think of an 8K Pocket which would be the attractive one for me but still require lenses. I will still look at the GH6 when it comes out ( if ) as I have a selection of MFT lenses already. I think the new year may offer some new cameras as the trend is to 8K I think. You are correct in that the codec will be h265 or RAW I expect.

[noafilm]

As for this whole talk of AMD CPU’s. Right now, anyone choosing AMD has made the wrong choice for Edius. This post was entitled “Recommended CPU for Edius X”

It's only a wrong choice if you buy it for the wrong reasons, I did state in my first post what codec and nr of camera I plan to use it for, nl multicam edits with 4 to 5 camera's with a 4K 25p 100mbs 4:2:0 codec and for that the 5950x proves to be a good choice so far as it used all cores very efficiently for either de- or encode. If I ever need to edit a very demanding codec I can always convert to HQXAVI or create proxies or switch to a other NLE I have access to which does utilize the GPU and also CPU for decoding in a much better way. Why not switch to that you might ask, well, I"m so used to Edius now that anything else feels like driving a car in the UK as someone from the EU :) I only will move completely to another NLE if I have no other choice and currently there is no reason for that.

[Liverpool TV]

It's only a wrong choice if you buy it for the wrong reasons, I did state in my first post what codec and nr of camera I plan to use it for, nl multicam edits with 4 to 5 camera's with a 4K 25p 100mbs 4:2:0 codec and for that the 5950x proves to be a good choice so far as it used all cores very efficiently for either de- or encode. If I ever need to edit a very demanding codec I can always convert to HQXAVI or create proxies or switch to a other NLE I have access to which does utilize the GPU and also CPU for decoding in a much better way. Why not switch to that you might ask, well, I"m so used to Edius now that anything else feels like driving a car in the UK as someone from the EU :) I only will move completely to another NLE if I have no other choice and currently there is no reason for that.

Actually, you never stated the codec, you mentioned the resolution, frame rate, bit rate and chroma sub sampling but not the codec. If I were to guess I’d say you’re talking about H.264, in which case you’ve not chosen the best CPU available right now for Edius. If you ever use H.265 then you’ll also see a bigger difference in favour of Intel. As for converting to HQX or creating proxies. If you want to spend on a new computer with proxies as part of your plan, that’s up to you. I’ve recently bought a new computer and part of that buying decision was to definitely not waste time rendering and transcoding to proxies or any intermediate. Given your rationalisation and workflow for buying into AMD for Edius, it does not surprise me that you drive on the wrong side of the road :)

[Ron Evans]

Making CPU choices at the moment is also interesting since it is almost impossible to get a good GPU. So if one is just using EDIUS the best choice would likely be a 10th gen Intel with QS. Cost effective and no need for a GPU at all for using EDIUS. Sad part is EDIUS will not use the integrated GPU's in the AMD CPU family in the same way which could be another alternate to the GPU shortage. Of course one can make EDIUS work with all sorts of CPU it is just a question of whether EDIUS uses the available resource efficiently. It works with my Threadripper but not well ,marginally better than my old 4790K. Of greater interest is the effect that the M1 Mac's will have on the marketplace and the impact that will have on Windows only software. I am not interested in a laptop but it may well be that a Mac Mini with the M1 Pro or Max chip will cost less than me trying to buy a NVIDIA 3xxxx series GPU. The current Mac Mini M1 is about half the posted price of a RTX3080Ti that you cannot get!!

[Liverpool TV]

Making CPU choices at the moment is also interesting since it is almost impossible to get a good GPU. So if one is just using EDIUS the best choice would likely be a 10th gen Intel with QS. Cost effective and no need for a GPU at all for using EDIUS. Sad part is EDIUS will not use the integrated GPU's in the AMD CPU family in the same way which could be another alternate to the GPU shortage. Of course one can make EDIUS work with all sorts of CPU it is just a question of whether EDIUS uses the available resource efficiently. It works with my Threadripper but not well ,marginally better than my old 4790K. Of greater interest is the effect that the M1 Mac's will have on the marketplace and the impact that will have on Windows only software. I am not interested in a laptop but it may well be that a Mac Mini with the M1 Pro or Max chip will cost less than me trying to buy a NVIDIA 3xxxx series GPU. The current Mac Mini M1 is about half the posted price of a RTX3080Ti that you cannot get!!

Alright Ron.

On top of all that there’s also another consideration and one I’ve only just worked out, VRAM, or more precise, something very specific although it could be related to 11th Gen. Even if you have an Nvidia GPU that isn’t being used for processing, it’s likely that its VRAM is being used for UI screen drawing. While we’ve all know for a long time that Edius needs VRAM, it’s probably not for what most people think it’s for. Again, I didn’t truly realise this until a few days ago, again, as long as this isn’t an 11th Gen issue.

What’s really odd is that the files don’t need a render, so why would the GPU RAM need to be so specific for just drawing to the the screen. I recently had to send my BMD Mini 4K back, so can’t test to see if this only effects the internal preview and not external. Although, the assumption is that external should be fine as everything is showing as not needing a render.

I’m in the middle of breaking down two of my X86 PCs and selling their GPUs on and then selling the base machines. While doing this I’ve had Edius being used on one of them, an 11th Gen. Once the GPU was taken out, Edius became very sluggish with screen drawing and real-time playback stopped when previewing full screen, even though the system was showing real-time and the timeline was nowhere near needing a render. Now, you may expect this was an issue due to a lack of VRAM but the system had well enough dynamically allocated VRAM via the iGPU. I still have another MB somewhere that had the ability to apply fixed VRAM in the BIOS, I’ll have to dig that out and see if it’s any different.

Here’s another thing to consider on the point of discreet graphics. From the 1050 Ti with only 4GB of VRAM, up to the 3080. There is no difference what so ever with Edius and it’s timeline playback, in fact, even with the 3080 Edius will drop and pause frames in full screen. The exact same thing happened with the 2080 Ti and it’s 11GB VRAM and even with a 1650 and again only 4GB. Som it’s obvious that anything above 4GB worth of VRAM for Nvidia GPUs is not utilised by Edius with regard screen drawing. Also, certain ‘so called’ GPU specific functions in Edius (decoding of esoteric codecs as an example) don’t seem to scale at all across these GPUs.

So what’s going on here? The system doesn’t need rendering but the timeline won’t play back properly when using the iGPU. It will playback properly when using a discreet GPU but that discreet GPU is all but a waste of money as nothing else on it is being used on it, if using the iGPU for H.265. It’s almost as if you’re forced into having to use something that’s very expensive just to get a simple screen draw function. It could also be an issue with Edius and 11Th Gen but only GV would have that answer.

It’s going to be very interesting to see what the next Edius update does. Will it have the same issue with the 12th Gen iGPU and therefore require a very expensive discreet GPU option just to playback the timeline? Are we going to see new functions that take advantage of DG2? Will AMD finally get leverage for those CPUs that have iGPUs?

Whatever the next update brings, I have a good few solid tests for it and not least this anomaly with iGPU VRAM.

Given that most of us would expect the Intel iGPU and it’s VRAM (dynamically allocated system RAM or not) to be enough. It may be the case that Edius only works properly with discreet GPU RAM for the UI.

Actually Ron. If you get time would you mind trying your 4790K without the discreet GPU and see how it responds to full screen playback while on its iGPU.

Cheers,
Dave.

[noafilm]

If I were to guess I’d say you’re talking about H.264, in which case you’ve not chosen the best CPU available right now for Edius.

Alright David, no need to guess, I"m telling you now it's h.264 and for my particular needs it is a good choice, I never shoot in H.265 as it's a delivery codec, not something you would use for editing and for those very rare cases, if ever, I would have to edit it there are other options. Since the 5950x now also supports cpu and gpu assistance in exporting to H.265 (my 1950x is not able to export h.265) I"m also covered for fast h.265 exports if needed but currently I only export h.264 as that plays on any device without issue.

Also for someone who was so desperate to get a 5950x himself a year ago it looks like you have learned something in the meantime then? :)

[Liverpool TV]

Alright David, no need to guess, I"m telling you now it's h.264 and for my particular needs it is a good choice, I never shoot in H.265 as it's a delivery codec, not something you would use for editing and for those very rare cases, if ever, I would have to edit it there are other options. Since the 5950x now also supports cpu and gpu assistance in exporting to H.265 (my 1950x is not able to export h.265) I"m also covered for fast h.265 exports if needed but currently I only export h.264 as that plays on any device without issue.

Also for someone who was so desperate to get a 5950x himself a year ago it looks like you have learned something in the meantime then? :)

Although I personally don’t think that inter-frame codecs are something that we should be shooting with and should only be used for end delivery. I’d be very careful passing off H.265 as a delivery codec. It’s not that long ago people were saying the same about H.264.

I remember thinking the exact same thing about MPEG2 when I used to sell and build systems based around the DC1000 and DC2000 and to a certain degree the TARGA3000. The problem is always going to be one of file size, whether we actually need the small sizes or not and the inevitable technical issues they bring, the industry will always choose convenience over what is technically best.

H.265 is a shooting format, whether anyone likes it not, just ask Sony and the growing list of advocates.

As for your choice of CPU. It’s clearly not the best for Edius, even for H.264. However, given the way things are going with Edius, I’d say that building a system primarily for Edius is probably a very bad move anyway. I should know, I’ve built two systems in the last 12 months that I’ve come to regret, because they were built with Edius in mind.

The smart money right now is AMD. If I were building a Windows X86 system right now, it’d be a 5950x. Right now, it would represent the best value for money and 12th Gen Intel doesn’t beat it in pure performance across the board. For production work (obviously outside of Edius) the 5950x is the best desktop solution in my opinion and more so if you pair it up with a powerful GPU.

I also agree with something you said earlier to Jerry, there’s always something just round the corner. If you need something now, you need it now and not in a couple of months time. Also, the 5950x is tried and tested and aside from that stupidity with MS and Win11, once the dust settles I doubt those efficiency cores on 12th Intel will mean much on an architecture that was based on single core speed as its main driving force anyway.

I’ve just committed a lot of money to a platform that was never my main platform, on a product that has historically been a very bad investment financially. Why? Because ‘right now’ I need a particular outcome and this new platform is giving me that, and more. In a few months time this new machine will be old hat but its value to my production workflow will not have diminished. In a few months time I’m sure you’ll be saying the same about your new computer, especially if you broaden out and are forced to drive on the wrong side of the road :)

[Ron Evans]

For Dave. My 4790K does not have a discrete GPU the whole system just runs off the 4790K iGPU. It gave me all sorts of problems when I bought the 1080Ti to make things faster !! That is when I made the Threadripper and used the 1080Ti in that. My current main system.

So , I just ran a GH5 UHD 60P h264 150Mbps file in an EDIUS X UHD timeline playout to the Benq 4K monitor that is now attached to this PC. EDIUS X played timeline full screen at what looks like full frame rate as far as I can tell from audio sounding fine. With normal editing screen, buffers were full after a few seconds. This was a file that was shot with "Like 709" picture profile rather than Vlog so no need to use PCC. As a test I did apply PCC and that killed it.

System has 16G RAM. So you can see why Resolve will not run at all on this system. Vegas will run similar to EDIUS.

[noafilm]

I’m wondering if Edius X will utilise the new AMD CPUs, hence this post.

I thought I would answer your question you never got an answer on a year ago; the 5950x uses all the cpu power it can get for either de- or encode, it's around 98% as it still has to leave some for anything else that requires processor power :) So basically total processor usage is 100%

without an NVENC capable Nvidia GPU, just how does any AMD system export H.265, or how well does it decode H.265 even by comparisons to a 9th Intel CPU. That was rhetorical BTW as anyone buying into AMD should have already know that answers before buying into AMD specifically for Edius.

I am wondering how you are coming to this conclusion, have you tested both systems side by side and can you share the differences in either playback and encode? This would be interesting for other users.

I just shot 10 minutes of H265 3840x2160 25p 4:2:0 10 bit 72mbs HLG footage on my gh5s, I can playback 4 tracks in a multicam in realtime with full preview quality when the project settings is 3840x2160 25p 8 bit, when I change the project to 10 bit I can still do 3 tracks realtime. exporting this 10 minute timeline to a H.265 codec takes 3,5 minutes. Can you tell how much better a 9th intel CPU would perform?

[Liverpool TV]

I thought I would answer your question you never got an answer on a year ago; the 5950x uses all the cpu power it can get for either de- or encode, it's around 98% as it still has to leave some for anything else that requires processor power :) So basically total processor usage is 100%



I am wondering how you are coming to this conclusion, have you tested both systems side by side and can you share the differences in either playback and encode? This would be interesting for other users.

I just shot 10 minutes of H265 3840x2160 25p 4:2:0 10 bit 72mbs HLG footage on my gh5s, I can playback 4 tracks in a multicam in realtime with full preview quality when the project settings is 3840x2160 25p 8 bit, when I change the project to 10 bit I can still do 3 tracks realtime. exporting this 10 minute time line to a H.265 codec takes 3,5 minutes. Can you tell how much better a 9th intel CPU would perform?

What are you using for exporting H.265?