8core vs Quad for AE

[Jimmy Brunger]

Of course…I just ran mine and my RAID is showing up 7fps read and 7fps write for 8bit 4:2:2 SD!!?!?

Yikes, better get that checked out. That doesn’t sound right.

What I mean was – with several cores going at once with Nucleo, do you need to up your disk speeds even with SD?

*Production Studio Premium / *Combustion 3
————————————-
Win XP Pro SP2 / Intel P4 3GHz / 2GB RAM / GeForce FX5200 / DeckLink Pro / Sony BVM-20G1E / DVS SDI Clipstation / 110GB boot/80GB media/600GB RAID-0

[Steve Forde]

Short answer – depends.

Long answer –

If you use many source assets in your projects – this causes AE to do alot of “reading” on your drive. The good news is – reading is lightweight in terms of drive speed. There is a tipping point though. The more concurrent reads a drive has to do, the slower it will become.

RAID’s make that easier by utilizing the compound nature of multiple drives, and striping the data across all of them (reducing the thrashing of a single drive head trying to do too many things at once).

The real culprit are Writes. This is when things are written to your disk, and it is much more labor intensive.

I can’t speak to how AE CS3 does it – but I can say how Nucleo does it.

IF you render to image sequences – each instance of AE that Nucleo starts will write to your disk on its own. This makes things really fast – but only if you are on a RAID. The more CPU’s you have, the more instances there are, and therefore – the more frames will be written simultaneously from each instance. The bigger the frame, the worse the slowdown. RAID with fast disks solve this problem.

IF you render to movies all the time – with Nucleo – you don’t have to worry about writes. This is because movies need to be encoded, and only one instance of AE does the encoding in Nucleo’s world (same for AE CS3). This means that only one instance is ever writing to your disk. You will still need to worry about reads, but they are far less of a problem than writes.

Hope this makes sense….

Steve
GridIron Software Inc.

[Jimmy Brunger]

Interesting…well nothing will be reading or writing to my RAID at the moment! Seems it’s on the blink… 🙁

So Steve, does that mean rendering to image sequences as oppossed to AVI, QTmovs is quicker? Did I read that right? I render to AVI at the mo, just because it speeds things up on playout as I don’t have to re-interpret each sequence in Premiere. Will going back to TGA seqs (especially when I get Nucleo) make rendering alot faster?

Thanks.

*Production Studio Premium / *Combustion 3
————————————-
Win XP Pro SP2 / Intel P4 3GHz / 2GB RAM / GeForce FX5200 / DeckLink Pro / Sony BVM-20G1E / DVS SDI Clipstation / 110GB boot/80GB media/600GB RAID-0

[Steve Forde]

The caveat being if your drive is fast enough. Key thing is – AVI, QT etc require encoding (however minimal). With Nucleo – only one instance can encode. In the case of TGA sequence – every instance can write those on their own. (meaning faster – if drive can handle it)

Steve
GridIron Software Inc.

[Jimmy Brunger]

So with AVIs, etc. the rest of the AE instances (the other processors in essence) are only being used for previews? So does that mean renders to AVI won’t be any faster with or without Nucleo/more than one processor?

Sorry to sound a bit simple!

*Production Studio Premium / *Combustion 3
————————————-
Win XP Pro SP2 / Intel P4 3GHz / 2GB RAM / GeForce FX5200 / DeckLink Pro / Sony BVM-20G1E / DVS SDI Clipstation / 110GB boot/80GB media/600GB RAID-0

[Steve Forde]

No worries.

When rendering an AVI there are actually 2 different things going on. Rendering, then Encoding.

When Nucleo renders an AVI – all instances are used for the rendering portion (using all CPU), which then feed the one instance rendered frames to do the encoding. If as an example you had nothing to render, but just encode, then Nucleo will not provide any speedup, as it focuses only on the rendering portion. For reference though, its rendering that takes the most time – hence the Nucleo speedup.

Make sense?

Steve
GridIron Software Inc.

[Francois Driessen]

Thanks, S.

I’m not in the habit of buying new stuff just cause its out there. But if more procs are the way things are going, I’ll probably make the investment now having to get a 2nd workstation anyhow. Thought I’d start with 4x1Gig + 4×512 RAM chips (appartently better to use 4 matched pair chips?). When the big one comes in I’ll upgrade adding 4x2Gig chips. Or should I re-consider my RAM strategy here?

Will the plugins for AE have to be changed to take advantage of 8c or is that handled by AE?

[Jimmy Brunger]

Yeah, brilliant. Thanks Steve. I’ll stick with AVI in my workflow for now and see what differences I see with TGAs when I get Nucleo next week. I just wanted to check I wasn’t going down the wrong route with AVIs. I guess it makes sense, as AE encodes a bunch of extra info with a movie file like P.A.R, etc…suppose it can’t take to long for that portion of the render.

Cheers Steve.

[Antony Buonomo]

Steve

Pardon my stupidity (sometimes it takes words of one syllable to get through) – are you saying that the 8/quad-core machines, along with Nucleo Pro, should only be considered with a RAID set-up? If so; how big a RAID? And is it RAID-0? I am most interested in a speed-up of my previewing times.

Cheers

A

[Danny Princz]

if you are doing anything in AFX that has muliple layers where the drive needs to be accessed constantly, i would suggest a raid on any afx system, but when you are talking 4 or 8 cores then definitely.

who is that masked man…