New Video Editing System

[Steve Rhoden]

Sorry to burst your bubble Brad, but if you are building
a new computer with the latest high speed components etc, as you put
it, expecting to get far superior processing and speed, over what you
are getting now with your current system, using Vegas 11….
……..You are gonna be a bit disappointed.

Steve Rhoden
(Cow Leader)
Film Editor & Compositor.
Filmex Creative Media.
1-876-832-4956

[Kristoffer Hansen]

I recommend AMD FirePro V4900

Its DDR5 Ram and supports OpenCL, so your application will run very smooth.

I use the same card in my own S20 workstation, and im very happy with it.

There is no real “huge” benefit from GPU rendering yet, unless you only use the effects and transitions from the GPU accelerated category, but the application is still a lot faster.

On Sonys GPU page, they mention 2-3x render speed when using even the lowend supported cards, but I have yet to see those numbers in real life. I get a 15-20% increse in renderspeed at best.

The second and third generation I-series from intel have great numbers, when it comes to rendering, due to Intel Quick Sync on the chip.

I havent done a parallel test yet, but you might want to test the onboard graphics for rendering, before you spend money on a GPU

Best regards
Kristoffer W. Hansen – Chief technical officer
WebHorse.dk

Lenovo S20 | Xeon W3550 | Intel SSD 1+0 Raid + SAS | FirePRo V490

[Kristoffer Hansen]

No offence, but what kind of reply/comment is that? Judging from your replies and comments in other topics, I gather you really dont line SVP11 and have desided to stick with version 10… that is your choise based on your personal experiance.

but other (like myself) have experianced a significant speed increase in SVP11. The GUI is much nicer to work with, using a OpenCL supporting video card. Its lightning fast to navigate, compared to the older versions.

so saying he wont experiance a increased speed using the latest intel CPU is simply put; completely factually wrong

Best regards
Kristoffer W. Hansen – Chief technical officer
WebHorse.dk

Lenovo S20 | Xeon W3550 | Intel SSD 1+0 Raid + SAS | FirePRo V490

[Jeff Schroeder]

Brad,

I would recommend Nvidia, they have been my choice for years.

I have an i7 system at work I use to test out all the latest and greatest stuff that comes down the pipe. It has 24 GB of RAM, the i7 is 3.2 GHz (960, not a sandy bridge) I have 2 GTX-460’s by ASUS, It does very well (until I compare it to my main machine.)

One rule I live by is your MB and video card are by the same manufacturer. My test system has an Asus MB and and 2 Asus video cards. My main system has an EVGA MB that I put an EVGA video card in. I might be wrong about this, but I’m one of the few here who has not (so far) be put through the wringer over stability issues.

Just my 2 cents worth,

Jeff

2-Xeon X5680 @ 3.33, EVGA SR-2 Mobo, 48GB DDR3, GTX 580 3072MB, 16TB Attached Storage, Win7, Vegas 11 x64

[Jeff Schroeder]

Kristoffer,

No offence, but there are plenty of people who would say the AMD FirePro is not yet ready for prime-time on a video editing rig. How many systems have you built successfully using the AMD? I looked into them on my last build and found many red flags.

Jeff

2-Xeon X5680 @ 3.33, EVGA SR-2 Mobo, 48GB DDR3, GTX 580 3072MB, 16TB Attached Storage, Win7, Vegas 11 x64

[Dave Haynie]

[Brad White] “I’ve decided to bite-the-bullet and build a new computer system to support my Vegas Pro editing. I’m reasonably comfortable with building a system from scratch, having done so before. What I need is faster processing of HD and associated rendering.”

Since you haven’t posted your current system specs, despite Steve’s comment, there’s absolutely no way anyone can tell you just quite how much of an improvement you’ll see with the new system. But given my current AMD 1090T system (six core, 3.2GHz)… I would not be surprised to get close to twice the rendering performance moving to the latest i7-3K series.

With that said, it also follows that the faster your core CPU, the less of a relative boost the GPU will give you. And at the current state of the art, it’s actually possible the GPU will slow you down. Part of this is the classic “communications problem” inherent in any loosely coupled multiprocessing system (going a little Computer Engineer on you here…). Basically, as you go faster and faster with more processors, the bottleneck starts to become communications. This is made worse as the frequency of communications goes up.

So if Vegas could give your GPU 5 minutes of solid work, there’s no measurable communications overhead. But if it has to send something to and get it from the GPU once per frame, then of course that’s 48 to 120 messages per second, if you’re able to render in realtime. And if there are more than one per frame, it just shoots up.

Communications generally take place via interrupts.. the CPU sends something to the GPU, that work might be immediately started, or it make take a small bit of time for the GPU to see it… not to mention the time to take the OpenCL code and JIT compile it for that specific GPU. On the way back, the GPU definitely interrupts the CPU. That means a lag of some small number of microseconds in all likelihood (Windows isn’t hard realtime, so it doesn’t specify interrupt latencies, but chance it are it won’t be crazy long).

So look at that OpenCL compile and interrupt as dead time.. you’ll actually see that if you do performance monitoring. Your CPU won’t hit the 95-98% average that a well tuned system can with Vegas on render, and your GPU won’t be maxxed out either. If you have a really fast CPU, that missing time could actually be used for real work… maybe even resulting in a faster render than using the GPU. It’s not that the GPU isn’t faster — it is, on ideal benchmarks. But fitting the problem to the GPU and avoiding communications delays, your mileage may vary.

With that said, on my system, I see my AMD Radeon HD6970 is absolutely making things faster. On ideal previews (eg, where the GPU helps alot), I might see a factor-of-three boost. On simpler renders, it may not help at all… which is why, if you can afford it, you definitely spend first on CPU for this kind of work right now.

For the same money, nVidia offered less boost, and I the GTX570 I bought suffered from horrible video output quality issues (pretty amazing, given a digital interface… but that presumably could have been fixed with a card swap). But you may get a different story if you look at it as a performance for any price thing, rather than maximum bang for buck. nVidia is also better supported by other tools, since some use the nVidia proprietary CUDA computing interface rather than the multi-vendor OpenGL interface.

-Dave

[Kristoffer Hansen]

[Jeff Schroeder] “How many systems have you built successfully using the AMD”

3 sony vegas – including my own with that card. Two running Sony Vegas Pro 11, and one using Home Movie Studio 11.

I have been building editing rigs since 2001 where I worked for MCI Videotronics in denmark, where I designed and build Edit and Combustion systems, based on the old Matrox Boardsets

Since then I have moved over to Premier, Autodesk and Sony for editing systems, and been using only ATI/AMD for the last 3 years

It’s for hte openCL capabilities i recommend FirePro, and the brilliant support they give

Best regards
Kristoffer W. Hansen – Chief technical officer
WebHorse.dk

Lenovo S20 | Xeon W3550 | Intel SSD 1+0 Raid + SAS | FirePRo V490

[Steve Rhoden]

It isnt my choice based on my personal experience alone
Mr. Kristoffer Hansen and its not a matter of like.
I know what im speaking about and was specifically
addressing Brad and his proposed building specs.
So, make your comments and recommendations in assisting Brad,
not addressing me.

Steve Rhoden
(Cow Leader)
Film Editor & Compositor.
Filmex Creative Media.
1-876-832-4956

[Kristoffer Hansen]

I desided to do both, because I dident see you answer his question 🙂

[Steve Rhoden] “So, make your comments and recommendations in assisting Brad,
not addressing me.”

Best regards
Kristoffer W. Hansen – Chief technical officer
WebHorse.dk

Lenovo S20 | Xeon W3550 | Intel SSD 1+0 Raid + SAS | FirePRo V490

[Steve Rhoden]

Its good that you offered him some advice. I answer and assist
numerous Vegas users on a daily basis, how much do you answer.
Now, let the matter rest.

Steve Rhoden
(Cow Leader)
Film Editor & Compositor.
Filmex Creative Media.
1-876-832-4956