Beating a Dead Horse For Good Measure: OpenCL, CUDA, and GPUs in Sony Vegas

[Kell Hymer]

[John Rofrano] “If I were you, I would use GoPro Studio to convert the GoPro footage to CineForm Digital Intermediary format. There will be no quality loss and playback will be very smooth”

As an amateur editor, I decided to look this up along with “transcoding” and “intermediate codecs”. Wow! My mind is blown! So if I understand correctly, the GoPro is recording in a highly compressed H.264 format. The compression must be intense as Quicktime can’t even playback the 1080 60fps files without dropping frames. This confirms the online reports of various software not being able to playback GoPro footage. In-fact, GoPro’s website highly recommends using GoPro Studio to convert to CineForm before using the content in other NLEs.

So, converting to CineForm will decompress the video into a much larger, but more manageable file as far as editing is concerned. I read that it literally copies the reference GOP and places it back into the video where it was once removed for compression by the GoPro camera. This way Vegas does not have to reference the original GOP on top of adding effects and other edits. This is why transcoding is lossless. Wow! This is awesome stuff! The tech side of video editing is just as intriguing as the creative side of the work.

Current System: Intel i7 4930K | Asus P9X79 Deluxe | Nvidia Quadro 4000 & 2000 | OCZ Revo 480 GB PCI Express SSD | Windows 7 64 bit | Vegas Pro 12 (64)

[John Rofrano]

This is the only information that Sony has on GPU hardware from their Release Notes:

NVIDIA

• Requires a CUDA-enabled GPU and driver 270.xx or later.
• GeForce GPUs: GeForce GTX 4xx Series or higher (or GeForce GT 2xx Series or higher with driver 297.03 or later).
• Quadro GPUs: Quadro 600 or higher (or Quadro FX 1700 or higher with driver 297.03 or later).
• NVIDIA recommends NVIDIA Quadro for professional applications and recommends use of the latest boards based on the Fermi architecture.

AMD/ATI

• Requires an OpenCL-enabled GPU and Catalyst driver 11.7 or later with a Radeon HD 57xx or higher GPU.
• If using a FirePro GPU, FirePro unified driver 8.85 or later is required.
• Radeon HD 7xxx or higher recommended for native 4K editing.

Intel

• Requires an OpenCL-enabled GPU (such as HD Graphics 4000 or higher).

There is no mention of what version of OpenCL that Sony requires.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[John Rofrano]

[Kell Hymer] “So, converting to CineForm will decompress the video into a much larger, but more manageable file as far as editing is concerned. I read that it literally copies the reference GOP and places it back into the video where it was once removed for compression by the GoPro camera. This way Vegas does not have to reference the original GOP on top of adding effects and other edits. This is why transcoding is lossless. Wow! This is awesome stuff! The tech side of video editing is just as intriguing as the creative side of the work.”

Yup, you understand correctly. CineForm uses wavelet compression and you can re-render those files again and again and again and see no visual loss in quality. That’s what a good Digital Intermediary should do.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Kell Hymer]

I emailed Sony and they confirmed that they use OpenCL 1.2 and 2.0. However, they did not provide details about the specifics of the OpenCL support and if the shared GPU/CPU memory makes a significant performance difference when using an OpenCL 2.0 GPU.

On a side note, the following article does a good job in explaining the difference between a professional GPU and a gaming GPU. I am posting here so others have access to it should they have questions.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Adobe-Premiere-Pro-CC-Professional-GPU-Acceleration-502/

Current System: Intel i7 4930K | Asus P9X79 Deluxe | Nvidia Quadro 4000 & 2000 | OCZ Revo 480 GB PCI Express SSD | Windows 7 64 bit | Vegas Pro 12 (64)

[Kell Hymer]

[John Rofrano] “I would go for the Radeon R9 290x”

I recently upgraded my CPU from an i7 3820 to an i7 4930K. In light of the discussions in these forums about the AMD R9-290 series, I also pulled the trigger on the XFX R9-290X 8GB model. 8GB is overkill for Vegas, but I wanted the extra headroom to run 3 monitors from the card and to dive into 3D applications. I wanted to know how much better it would perform when compared to the CPU, my NVIDIA GTX 460, or my NVIDIA Quadro 4000. I ran a series of rendering benchmarks using the Sony Vegas Red Car project and codecs that I frequently use. However, I am more concerned about real-time preview performance. To test this, I ran FPS tests by setting my preview window to maximum settings. I hope this information is helpful for others.

Current System: Intel i7 4930K | Asus P9X79 Deluxe | 32GB RAM | AMD R9-290X w/8GB RAM | OCZ Revo 480 GB PCI Express SSD | Windows 7 64 bit | Vegas Pro 12 (64)
Overclocking Note: CPU OC’d to 4.339 GHz During CPU and NVIDIA GPU Renders. CPU OC’d to 4.608GHz for R9-290X Renders. A more accurate test would maintain a constant CPU speed but the 4.339GHz OC Failed After AMD GPU Installation.
GPU Drivers Employed: Quadro Driver 341.05 | GTX Driver 344.75 | Radeon Driver 14.501.1003.0
Software: Sony Vegas Pro Version 12, Build 770

Render Benchmarks

Screenshot #1

Screenshot #2

The R9-290X significantly improved rendering times. I also noted that setting the dynamic RAM preview to 0 significantly lengthens the render time. However, no improvement is gained by increasing the allocated RAM amount once it is above zero (5MB in these tests).

Preview Frame Rate Benchmarks

Note: Sony’s Red Car project is split into 7 regions. I notated the minimum and maximum frame rate observed during each region. The values observed are relatively accurate, give or take a frame. This is because the fps indicator fluctuated rapidly, making it difficult to notate.

Note: As I was able to attain fairly high frame rates, I did not test the R9-290X here. To test the new GPU, I modified Sony’s Red Car project by adding the below effects to the project (Kelken Version below):

During the course of the testing I changed the following setting and found it had no impact on frame rates:

Additionally, I found that the fps increased with subsequent playbacks/previews. It appears that it is loaded into the dynamic RAM in this process.

Conclusion:

The R9-290X drastically improved performance and is far more stable than the GTX or the Quadro cards. I am very happy with the upgrade!

Current System: Intel i7 4930K OC’d to 4.6 GHz| Asus P9X79 Deluxe | 32GB RAM | AMD R9-290X w/8GB RAM | OCZ Revo 480 GB PCI Express SSD | Windows 7 64 bit | Vegas Pro 12 (64)

[John Rofrano]

[Kell Hymer] “The R9-290X drastically improved performance and is far more stable than the GTX or the Quadro cards. I am very happy with the upgrade!”

Thanks for providing definitive data to back up what we all suspected. This makes sense since AMD and Sony where working closely together on the GPU acceleration in Vegas Pro.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Sonic 67]

My experience is not that good. Just replaced my nVidia Quadro 6000 (actually was modded from a GTX480) card with an ATI HD 7970 one (equal to R9 280X).

Encoding times of my test file @ 1080-60p on a PC with CPU Xeon X5650, 15GB of memory:
1:25 min. GPU Quadro 2000 @50% MainConcept using CUDA
1:18 min. GPU Quadro 6000 @34% MainConcept using CUDA
1:16 min. GPU HD 7970 (GHz edition) @39% Sony Encoder
4:18 min. GPU HD 7970 (GHz edition) @0% MainConcept OpenCL (didn’t make use of GPU)

[John Rofrano]

[Sorin Nicu] “4:18 min. GPU HD 7970 (GHz edition) @0% MainConcept OpenCL (didn’t make use of GPU)”

That’s correct. The MainConcept encoder stops at the 6000 series of GPU so it won’t use your 7970. This is why I’ve stayed with the Radeon HD 5870. I already said that in this post when I said to use, “the Radeon R9 290x. If you can’t afford that get the R9 280. They won’t accelerate MainConcept AVC but they will accelerate everything else…”

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Sonic 67]

Yes John, I was aware, I just wanted the HD 7970 for other things too and reported my findings in Vegas…

I have one more x16 slot available, I might use another HD 6950-6970 just to use it for MainConcept…Even if Sony encoder seems to do a decent job.
I wonder when Sony will push DivX to update their encoder software or… drop it all together form Vegas.

However I am baffled why the utilization of GPU cannot go higher (CPU wasn’t used at max either).
Wonder if Windows 8.1 can use more efficient the video card (WDDM 1.3 versus WDDM 1.1 in Windows 7)?

[John Rofrano]

[Sorin Nicu] “However I am baffled why the utilization of GPU cannot go higher (CPU wasn’t used at max either). “

I agree. I’ve seen renders where my drives were hardly being accessed, CPU is at 13% and GPU is at 40% and I’m sitting there wondering why I wasted my money on all this compute power when obviously none of it is being taken advantage of by Vegas Pro. 🙁

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com