graphics card

[Terje A. bergesen]

For Video editing, the graphics card is almost irrelevant (to exaggerate somewhat). There are some graphics cards, like the X.100 from Matrox, that has hardware assist for video editing. This is not supported by Vegas. This means that, by far, the most important thing for your video editing box is the CPU.

There are a few features that are good to have for video editing though. Multiple monitors is nice, the ability to do TV out is either nice or crucial, depending.

I use a Matrox Millennium card with two video outs. Very nice card. I am looking at building a new system and I am now considering getting one of the ATI cards, perhaps an All-in-Wonder version so that I can hook it up to my cable box and grab TV stuff…

If you want to play games, buy a card that gamers recommend. It will work fine for your video editing. I would not buy one that doesn’t support multiple monitors though. That is just too nice a feature.

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Terje A. Bergesen

[Stephen Sobel]

I was under the impression that some high end graphics cards ptovided the means to do some special effects. Is that not true?

[Terje A. bergesen]

That is partly true. Some high-end graphics cards, coupled with the video editing software you are using, will use the graphics card to speed up the display and rendering of some transitions and effects. This requires that your video editor has drivers for this functionality for the particular graphics card.

I think the most popular cards of this kind right now are the Matrox products, the X.10, X.100 and the Axio. They only ship with drivers for Adobe though, so you will have to use Premiere Pro to have any use for the card.

I do not think there are any hardware solutions out there for Vegas at the moment. For SD video, the hardware acceleartion is also of questionable value unless you need to do stuff in real time. There is nothing that these cards do that can’t be done in software, so the “only” thing you gain is the ability to do this in full quality, real time.

With people moving into HD editing, it seems reasonable to assume that hardware acceleration will again be more useful since the main CPU will have problems (to put it carefully) doing that stuff in real time full resolution.

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Terje A. Bergesen

[Edward Troxel]

[Stephen Sobel] “I was under the impression that some high end graphics cards ptovided the means to do some special effects. Is that not true?”

This is true if the program is written to use what is provided on the card. Vegas does not use the “special abilities” added to graphics cards at this time so, in the case of Vegas, it is NOT true. For some other apps (like Boris Red for example), it IS true.

Edward Troxel

[Terje A. bergesen]

Yes. Boris Red is another application that would probably benefit, at least preview wise, from the new breed of high-end graphics cards. New graphics cards have special processing capabilities for drawing polygons etc fast on your screen. This is great for any work in 3D and of course for 3D games. Most of them have few (if any) capabilities that are related to video editing though, which essentially consists of manipulating (a LOT of) relatively small, flat (2D) images.

Some cards have hardware support for MPEG encoding and decoding, but today this is relatively easy to do with the main CPU, so it is not needed. I expect that cards coming out in 2006 and on may have hardware support for H.264, which would be useful.

Other than this there is very little your card has that can improve your editing experience, except for one little thing. Support for multiple monitors and output to TV.

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Terje A. Bergesen