R5C intra frame codec in Premiere Pro

[greggyp89]

So I've been shooting with an R5C for the past month for client work and personal.I had a huge project with five different camera manufacturers and terabyte of footage. For some reason using premiere pro I end up getting drop frame indicators only on the Canon footage. I try to shoot intra frame whenever I can but sometimes I'm constrained by data limits. Does anyone else experience this issue? I try to transcode the footage but when I switch back and forth between the proxies premiere is crashing and eating up a bunch of RAM.  If anyone could offer me some information I'd be grateful. 

[AtticusLake]

I'd like to help, since I use the R5C and premiere extensively, but I'm having trouble figuring out what your problem actually is.

Actually I think I've figured it out....

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.. using premiere pro I end up getting drop frame indicators only on the Canon footage.

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You don't mean drop-frame timecode, which would be normal if shooting 23.976 etc... you mean indicators of dropped frames during playback?

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Does anyone else experience this issue?

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Yup.  I normally have those indicators turned off, so I don't see this; but if I turn the indicators on, it's pretty normal for me.  I don't think it really affects anything; it's just an indicator of how smooth your playback is.  I'm on a laptop BTW, pretty high-end, but about 3 years old.

Whether you see these indicators on footage from any particular camera will depend on how that footage is encoded, and at what bitrate, and on how powerful your computer is.  Basically more complex or highter-bit-rate footage may be too much for your computer, and Premiere will drop frames during playback.  Try reducing the playback resolution, if it bothers you.  Again, I don't think this will affect your edited movie in any way, it's just a playback thing.

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I try to transcode the footage but when I switch back and forth between the proxies premiere is crashing and eating up a bunch of RAM.

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If Premiere is crashing, then that's a Premiere bug.  Premiere should not crash regardless of what input you give it.

Personally, I use the R5C regularly, and I always use proxies -- I even made a tutorial about that.  There have been issues, but not the crashing you're describing.  I just tested this, both All-I and Long GOP, at 23.976 and 24.00.  No crashes.  I'm using Quicktime / ProRes med res proxies.

[greggyp89]

Yes I would be very interested to watch those videos you are talking about. I am using 59.97 frames per second 90% of the time. I just built a brand new system with an i-91 14900K with 92 GB of DDR5 RAM and a 3080 video card. I am using a separate NVMe 4.0 drive for video storage and scratch drive. I also reduced my RAM from the original 192 GB to render these projects. I have now put the four sticks of RAM back in equaling 192 GB at 4800 MHz. Yes the video codec is definitely high bit rate and difficult to edit but I've only been seeing these crashes and rim usage recently. I always update creative cloud in between projects. I will also note that I moved the original project between premier pro and premiere pro beta because of the crashes. They both ended up having the same issue but in beta it was less often. I would have lumetri color open and I would not be playing any files for moving the timeline, but I would have to wait one minute every time I moved a slider for the computer to load. Then it would eventually crash at around 90 to 100% RAM usage. Also I would get stutter and crash if I had the effect controls window open that shows the timeline for key framing effects and animations. I would have to minimize that window to get the playback to run properly. 

I am seeing this error every time I hit play or pause and I am getting a lot of lag before and after the dropped frame. Also when I go to render the project it also freezes and gives me an error about the dropped frame. Funny enough this computer is so powerful I can edit Canon raw light at 59.97 seconds with no issue. I never had the issue before I switched to xvavc format intra frame over the past few months and that's when I started having this issue. 

[greggyp89]

So I stumbled across this on a Reddit page. It definitely makes a lot of sense considering I just started having this issue once I switched to XF AVC. It still doesn't explain the other problems I have encountered. I'm going to make sure to transcode all files and in the future for my personal work just use a different video codec. Unless there is a more practical solution to making proxies for every single file I'm using. 

"XF-AVC uses MXF container files, Premiere does not currently support hardware decoding of MXF even if the streams are supported by the hardware in your system - expect to use proxies for those formats, even on powerful hardware.
MP4 HEVC 4:2:2 10bit and MP4 4:2:0 8bit should be the most performant on your system, as your i9 can decode it in hardware

[AtticusLake]

If you're interested in my proxy tutorial, it's here, but bear in mind this is aimed at a beginner level: https://moonblink.info/MudLake/tech#Proxy

And again, if you're having Premiere issues, there's not much point in raising them on a Canon user forum.  if you have a problem, it would be better to raise a bug report with Adobe, which you can do here: https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/support.html

Even if your issues only occur with Canon footage, that just means that something in the files is triggering a bug in PP.

[greggyp89]

Thank you very much I appreciate your help and insight. Although, bringing up the issue in a Canon forum is pretty valid. Canon like other manufacturers of production equipment, Will work with Adobe to make sure their file wrappers and video codecs can be edited in premiere pro and after effects. Also, I really value other creators opinions and oftentimes my use case is very niche. There are plenty of videos about CRM files. Not too many videos about MXF or R5C video codecs, accept the one on Canon's YouTube channel. Which specifically recommended to use MXF file, called it the workhorse of the R5C. Definitely appreciate your insight and I will raise the issue with Adobe as well.