Hi RJ,
As you
probably know, H.264 can accommodate varying bit-rates, and as I
mentioned already, he lower the bit rate, the more the CPU has to work
to decompress the video on the fly.
I’m not familiar with the
"HEVC Main 10 BT2020 HDR codec” unless that just happens to be invisible
to me. The only time I dive deep into encoder settings is when I get
specifications from an ad distro like AdStream or HDFastChannel, etc.
I
call video compression / decompression one of “the black arts.” A lot
of it is magic, as far as I know.
Ae will tell you if you’re in a
16-bit or 32-bit project and you apply an effect that’s only 8 or
16-bit.
In Pr, you can tell which of the effects are 32-bit
color (or GPU accelerated or YUV) by the icons to the right of the name
in the Effects Tab. This is why, if I can do projects in Pr as opposed
to Ae, I choose Pr to make use of my Titan GPU.
There are ways
to purge RAM without restarting. There are some utilities for this
(like MemoryClean), and you can do it in the Terminal with sudo purge .
You can run those without quitting Pr.
The “noise” you mention
might be layers of compression artifacts. You might have better luck
with your layering and noise if you transcoded your files to a lightly
compressed intraframe format like ProRes4444 or DNxHR 444. That would
also take stress off a CPU decoding multiple layers of Long-GOP.
I
have no experience with Resolve or FCPX. So, I can’t help with that
question.
As for stability and Pr, CC17 and CC18 have been the
most stable for me. I don’t think the OS has that much to do with it. I
think most of the past issues were in the Adobe code. I have one
client who runs CC18 on Windows machines, and they’ve been more
problematic, but my anecdote is hardly universal.
Prior builds of
Pr used to be bad at corrupting their own preferences, render and cache
files. I haven’t noticed that nearly as much in the last two major
releases. Most of the issues I have with Pr in the last couple of years
have been due to corrupt media, corrupt sequences, corrupt projects,
and corrupt plug in instances - all of which were easily fixed, once I’d
figured out what the culprit was.
About the only complaint I
have now is that the Dynamic Link between Ae and Pr can become unlinked
as I switch around projects, and that the DL to AME is pretty flakey
some times from either Pr and Ae. And I suspect that’s also a code
problem, not due to OSX. My other complaint has been aired on this
forum by many others, that Ae seems to render less efficiently than it
did going back to Ae CC14. Most of my Ae crashes now are either plug-in
or GPU related.
