I recently upgraded my rig to a 5900X, RX 6950XT, and 128GB of RAM. I got tired of crashing Shotcut when my timelines got too complex or I had too many keyframes.
It exports using AMD hardware encoding just fine (and MUCH faster than my previous 5600X/GTX1650), but there seems to be an issue with proxies. It muxes them just fine, but then I only see a checkerboard grid when they are on the timeline. It doesn’t seem to matter whether I use software, H264, or HEVC hardware encoding, the proxies just don’t work right. This (obviously) has no impact on the final export, but it makes editing impossible.
Is there another setting that I should be digging up, or does shortcut just have issues with creating proxies with AMD hardware? Since the final exports work fine, I can quit my bitching and be grateful to have a beefy enough CPU to edit without proxies if I have to.
Maybe, but it is hard to say because I do not know what operating system you have (also I have no AMD hardware on a Windows or Mac machine). What you can do if you are skilled enough is to view the application log after a proxy with hardware encoding starts. Go to the end of the log and look for the ffmpeg command line. Paste it here or try opening a terminal window and using it. Does a certain change (perhaps discovered by searching the web) to the command line work for you?
With as much firepower as I am packing now, I thought I could get away with not using proxies, but it can’t keep up while scrubbing, with or without preview scaling. I’ll need to find my way to the bottom of this.
Edit: I did a little more tinkering, and the proxies all play just fine with VLC. It’s just Shotcut having problems displaying them, and it isn’t 100% consistent. Sometimes they all display. Sometimes none. Usually, a few do and a few don’t.
I have never seen that, but maybe the problem is your source videos have non-audio or -video streams before any usable stream. That is a known problem. Run ffplay against the source or open the source in Shotcut or choose Properties > menu > More Information, and paste the result.
I doubt it is the source videos. One of the ones that keeps tanking (but not every time) is a stock video of my intro that I have been using for years.
Now that I think about it, this began immediately after my hardware upgrade, but I also updated Shotcut to the latest version the same day. Could this be a bug in the new version?
Here’s the output from ffprobe (I assume that’s what you meant because that’s what Shotcut uses to pull file properties):
This computer is not an open loop, but I do have some stellar cooling on it and I’m a power-hungry nerd.
I have my CPU, RAM, and GPU overclocked right up against the wall, then I backed off a little bit to ensure stability. Benchmarks and stress tests have been perfect, so I had no reason to suspect the OC, but I backed all 3 off another notch, and the problems cleared right up.
It just goes to show that, even with 30 years of experience, there is always something new to learn.
Thanks for the help! You’ve been patient and awesome.
I sense controversy (or at least an “unofficial” tip/trick). I’ll do some googling.