Premiere Pro dedicated PC card

[Blast1]

As of this time only certain video effects/transitions are GPU enabled, if your machine has enough horsepower(cpu) most of the rest of the transitions/effects are realtime anyway, for AFX a good open GL card will help, a 8600gt/8600gts is a fairly resonably priced card and will suffice with Premiere/AFX, a more higher priced card wouldn’t be worth the money unless you are a gamer.

[Harm Millaard]

Instead consider upgrading to Elements, which is better geared to editing material not suitable for editing in the first place.
DVD’s are for watching, not editing.

[Scot Sheely]

The best solutions you are going to find that are dedicated towards the Adobe video editing family, especially PPRO, After Effects and Encore, are made by Matrox.

Current solutions are the RT.X2, the Axio LE and the Axio, each of which are progressively more expernsive, although the prices have come down by a small amount in the last couple of months.

The RT.X2 sells for around $1200 without the Adobe CS3 bundle, and around $1695 with it.

The Axio LE retails for $3995.00, where it was $4495.00 until just recently (big OUCH factor!).

The full Axio has two flavors, SD and HD, and will allow true HD and HDV editing in a 4:4:4 colorspace, and the same acceleration of the Axio LE (real time almost everything: color correction, multiple HD and SD video layers in the same timeline, HD downscaling to SD, a whole suite of transitions and FX, etc., all real-time).

It sells for around $12,000.00-$13,000.00 or so for a turnkey system, which is the only way that Matrox allows those full Axio cards to be sold. When it first came out around 2 years ago, only IBM and HP systems were certified for the Axio card (ick!). If you know a computer retailer locally, they might possibly be able to obtain that card from a wholesaler, but you will need to check with a PC shop on the specifics if that.

For most of us, these are all expensive solutions, but as a computer technician who has built and repaired many, many, MANY Matrox solution PC’s (and also own two Matrox card systems I built for myself as well), I have to say that it is well worth the price of admission.

Imagine never having to render a preview, ever, even with lots of graphics, effects and video layers. Your entire workflow will change.

It is also noteworthy to mention that you will still need to buy a display card in conjunction with any of these video accelerators. IMHO and experience, both Matrox and nVidia make the best solutions that work the very best along side of the RT.X2 or Axio LE. I recommend the Parhelia, so you can have 3 monitors and spread your desktop out over those displays. It is a blessing to have monitor 1 with the video preview, monitor 2 with just the timeline, and monitor 3 with just the Project bin, Effects and Effects controls windows docked together (you will never need more than one of those 3 in the forefront view at any time).

All of these may or may not be a valid solution for you, and you will still need to have an Intel Duo or Quad (preferably TWO Intel Quads for the Axio series) with at least 2 to 4 GB of RAM MINIMUM, but at least you can have something to chew on for a while.

Here is a link to Videoguys’ website with very good descriptions of all the various features of the RT.X2 card:
https://www.videoguys.com/rtx2.html

If you navigate around their site, you will also find the Axio LE listed there as well.

Hope that gives you a bit of food for thought.

Good luck!

Scot Sheely

[Scot Sheely]

I meant to add the following:

The RT.X2 comes with a 10-12′ dongle cable, at the end of which are your firewire, S-Video, RCA composite video and RCA audio jacks, and the Axio systems come with a full B.O.B. (break out box), which is a rack-mount proposition.

Other than that, you really aren’t going to find any other viable solutions for what you are asking at this time.

Of course, you could just build a monster server with dual quad-core Xeon CPU’s and a whopping 8 GB’s of RAM, and a display card that has a full GB of VRAM (video RAM).

That would certainly chew through render times, but you will still be a slave to rendering previews, especially with lots of filters (effects) applied and multiple layers of video on your timeline.