Best Workstation for Boris Continuim Complete 8

[Peter Mcauley]

Hi Rick,

Glad to hear that you are enjoying the VFX filters in BCC. BCC 8 includes a mix of hardware accelerated filters, which do all of the processing on the GPU, and filters that do all of the image processing on the CPU.

Some of the filters in the BCC 8 will render very close to real time, while others might take a little while longer to process the image. The BCC 8 Film Glow, for instance, should be performing at approximately 2X real time in Adobe After Effects (CS 6) on your system. What I mean by this is that if your system takes 1 second to render a frame with no filter effects, then the same frame will render in 2 seconds with the BCC Film Glow. Is this along the lines of what you are seeing?

Thanks,

Peter.

[Rick Sullivan]

Hi Peter- Thank you for responding. I use Premiere Pro mostly and not After Effects.

No I am not seeing render time results anywhere near what you describe. When I add the “Film Glow” effect to a 4-second clip in the timeline my system seizes up for about 10-seconds before even recognizing the effect in the program window. Then I begin a tedious process of tweaking. Every tweak brings another “seizure”. My Premiere Pro doesn’t actually crash, it just freezes up for a short time. Since I prefer the look of “Color Push”, it’s necessary for me to click through a couple of other options to get what I want. Altogether a four second clip with “Film Glow” can take several minutes of tweak and wait, tweak and wait and this is all before I even render.

I’m afraid my once powerful edit suite (5-years ago) is due for replacement but I don’t want to buy a new one and have this still happening. What are your suggestions? And if you use BCCC8, what kind of machine? I want to stay with PC, and with Adobe Premiere Pro mostly.

Rick Sullivan
http://www.ricksullivanmedia.com

[Peter Mcauley]

Hi Rick,

So the render times that I quoted to you were from a system that I use in my office. The system specs are as follows:

ZT Systems box
Intel Core i7 CPU 950 @ 3.07 Ghz
12 Gb of RAM
Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit
500 Gb internal system / apps drive
1.5 Tb internal storage drive
Nvidia Quadro 4000 graphics card

This machine is really fast yet not that expensive. And this system is a few years old now so I imagine that if you were to get the latest version of a system like this then you would be very happy with the performance. When speccing out your new system, you might want to get as much RAM as you can afford or as much as the box can take – more memory makes everything run faster.

In addition to that, you might want to consider using the L button to select the preset that you want instead of using the up / down arrows to sift through all of the presets. I find that in Premiere Pro, this yields a more immediate result – there is a pause when you click on the up / down arrow. I’ll ask engineering to see if there is anything that can be done to reduce or eliminate the pause but in the meantime, I suggest using the L button.

I hope this helps!

Peter.