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Quad Core and Premiere Pro
At Videography Lab we were beta testers on the CS2 package and managed to cut a feature length film and DVD of same during the test. That would be “Cruiser Bob’s Tour da’Maui”. All this was done with souped up Pentium M 1.8 computers with internal 7200 rpm Hitachi drives. We have several of these old beasts and will still defend them to the point that we sat out the dual processor era and have now ordered a Quad Core notebook.
We are anxiously awaiting the ASUS G71G-Q2 17″ 2.0GHz Quad Core/6GB/640GB/Blu-Ray which has gone through interminable delays since we slapped down just under $2K for the machine. Just under $2K for such a powerhouse is a pretty good deal compared to comparable units.
So then the question arises in many an advanced report…what good are four processors when most apps don’t take advantage of the speed?
Does anybody already have Premiere Pro running on a Quad Core laptop? Is it a good thing or are there problems with the 64 bit OS? BTW the unit we purchased comes with auto upgrade to Windows 7. We are wondering whether to just load our XP Pro and avoid Vista altogether. Any opinions about this or any other aspect of this plan?
Thank you,
Bob Kiger – Videography Lab – where “vid” means more than just shooting videos.
Bob Kiger seminal author of “videography” [OCT1972-AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER]
http://www.videographyblog.com -
30 Replies
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Hi Bob,
I have a laptop with a Q6600, 4GB ram, nVidia 8800m gtx; I currently use Ppro CS4 and in my opinion, it runs pretty fast with both render and Encore DVD encoding and burn – 2hr movie takes about 40-50 minutes from timeline to DVD finish; that’s pretty fast to me, but maybe too slow for other faster, more capable rigs (hi-end desktops).I read that CS4 is written to utilize multi-threading for Quad chips. I am certain that Photoshop is multi, but not certain about Ppro or AE in CS4. Also not sure if CS2 use multi-thread in their software, another thread claims that CS3 is multi.
I’ve had only very minor problems with x64 — mostly with smaller applications. But the big ones – Adobe, Corel, etc – seem to be fine. I defer a more technical opinion to the seasoned experts.
Many say its not worth buying multi-cores until the software developers catch-up writing code for multi-threads. But I bought my notebook last year with Quad and x64 O/S — with the idea that eventually the software would catch up – even if before that, two or three cores sit at idle. That way, when the software accommodates, I don’t have to trade up to quads and x64 since I already have it. Just one opinion that worked for me.
There are several other related thread here you may want to check out.
Good luck,
MikeSager NP9262 Notebook, Intel Quad Q6600, 4GB DDR2, nVidia 8800m GTX Sli, 3x-Seagate 320GB, WUXGA, Vista Premium-64 – CS4 Prod Prem
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What are the problems with multi cores and “small programs” in 64 bit environment?
Bob Kiger seminal author of “videography” [OCT1972-AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER]
http://www.videographyblog.com -
Bob,
The issues people had with 64 Bit (Vista or XP) were because of hardware drivers. Most manufacturers of recent hardware now support 64 bits, they would get hell from their customer base if they didn’t.
CS4 fully supports and takes advantage of multi core processing, as well as RAM above 4 GB under Vista 64.
Programs can run in 32 or 64 bits under Vista 64, so compatibility issues to watch out for would be for Vista itself and not the 64 bits environment.
Cheers,
Vince Becquiot
Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area -
ill have to disagree, the only program in the CS4 package that supports full 64 bit operation is photoshop
the only other benefit to running under 64 bit is, as vince said support for larger amounts of ram
as far as premiere goes, ive been testing this week and didnt see a noticable difference between 4G and 8G in premiere, however adobe media encoder does perform faster with larger amounts of ram
ill say again though, ALL adobe software with the exception of photoshop are 32 bit applications, all they support is multithreading under a 64 bit OS
you will not see true benefits of a 64 bit environment in any package except photoshop 64
~Peter Berthet
Sydney, Australia -
Did a Bing search on Windows 7 64 vs. 32 bit and here’s what it said:
Pros and Cons of a 64 bit system:
* You can address much more than 4GB of memory, which is ideal for avid gamers, CAD, video editors and heavy multi-taskers. However, any 32 bit software you use will still be restricted to 4GB memory – you need a 64 bit CPU, OS and applications to take full advantage of the extra RAM.
* 16 bit applications will no longer run. Although this is unlikely to be a problem, if you use very old software (from the Windows 3.1 days!) then it will not work under a 64 bit OS.
* Existing 32 bit drivers no longer work.If you have older or poorly supported hardware you may find that it can no longer be used. Got a 7 year old scanner that just about works in Vista? You may not be able to get it working in 64 bit Windows 7.
* Unsigned kernel-mode drivers no longer work. Along with the issue above, the inability to run unsigned kernel mode drivers will cause problems for old hardware. (There is reportedly a way to bypass this check).
* Running some 32 bit applications on a 64 bit OS could actually be slower. The additional overheads in running 32 bit software in 64 bit mode could cause a slight degradation in performance. It will take some time for 64 bit software to become the norm.\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_
Sooooo [we have a difference of opinion about CS4/64bit]. it seems important that those of us buying computers that can use more than 4GB of RAM know whether to go with 64 bit OS or hang back with 32 bit? Could we get more opinions on the Adobe CS4 suite . . . like from Adobe?
Bob Kiger seminal author of “videography” [OCT1972-AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER]
http://www.videographyblog.com -
I’m not sure who disagrees with who, but it seems we all agree.
64 bit is needed for the extra RAM. In fact, our Core i7, also a quad core routinely goes over 5 GB with Premiere alone, so a 32 bit system could not take advantage of it.
And if you use After Effects, you’ll need even more RAM.
As for degradation in performance, I believe this is referring to older applications running Microsoft emulation layer, not the case for Premiere.
There is in the end more overhead in running a 64 bit system, but being limited to less than 4 Gigs of RAM is not an option for us any more.
Vince Becquiot
Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area -
essentially what vista 64 does, … cause its an evil resource whore
is it will take more and more RAM depending on how much you feed into it.. essentially dynamically increasing its background footprint based on the resources availableafter testing for a few hours last night i found that i could run multiple adobe packages at once, and 64 bit allowed me to give each of them up to 4Gb of RAM (same as 32 bit)
the exception was photoshop, which due to it being true 64 bit, managed to eat up to 7gb after i loaded a bunch of huge .psd files into it and started running multiple filters at once
the information you have bob, is correct.
the benefits will arise when your doing things like dynamically linking between multiple adobe apps, and each of them can take a piece of the pie
but premiere alone wont gain any extra performance from the excess ram (above 4Gb) because it cant address ALL of it on its own.the real benefit is that the other 4Gb of RAM is left aside for Vista to run background processes, also the other adobe aps such as processserver and the background loaders can address this 4Gb independantly, so loading premiere has less of a performance hit on your entire system.
As far as all the tests ive been doing, i strongly believe that RAM is not the magic solution to faster editing with premiere, although it does help to have 8gb running on a 64 bit system (especially quad cores. 4×2 =8Gb the magic number, 2Gb per core!)
A faster CPU and Quicker harddrives will make your programs and editing work faster in my opinion.The next purchase i make is going to be a solid state hard drive (for the OS and apps) and a newer core i7 system.
So essentially.. RAM helps to a point, but until CS4 is true 64 bit, your going to see more direct performances increases by having a super fast drive to load your apps from, and a big quick RAID for your media, backed up by a quad core CPU and THEN some ram to compliment your CPU.
The performance difference with that sort of gear is quite significant.
~Peter Berthet
Sydney, Australia -
thought id follow this up with some hard numbers for anyone thats interested.
currently doing a 10 minute render on premiere using 8gb of RAM on a core 2 machinepremiere is sitting on 1.4Gb
After FX 977Mb
Importerprocessserver 1.04Gbessentially its sitting just under 4Gb of RAM in use despite there being another 4 it can take advantage of.
The default settings under Vista 64 allow 32bit apps to address a maximum of 2Gb
They are however assigned 4Gb of Virtual Memory (paging) but 32 bit apps often dont know what to do with the extra space
so in theory i can fire up 4 heavy 32 bit apps and use all 8gb of RAMbut the performance gains for using one app at a time (premiere) are rather limited due to the fact that they are only 32 bit
~Peter Berthet
Sydney, Australia -
That sounds about right. The more core, the more RAM you’ll need. A Quad core with Premiere alone might hover at 4 Gigs.
Add dynamic link and After Effects and you will make good use of 8 Gigs, but you’ll need that 64 bit OS.
An i7 will need at least 6 for Premiere alone.
Vince Becquiot
Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area -
Bob, really, 32-bit Windows applications can only see 3G of system RAM and they have to be written specifically to even see that (many can only see 2G).
The default Windows XP Professional boot.ini file must be modified to handle memory usage with many applications and the hardware that they use. For this purpose, the boot.ini file must include the following text:
“Microsoft Windows XP Professional 3GB DS=2700” /fastdetect /3GB/USERVA=2700
Bill Gates said a few years ago, “You can do everything in 64K.”
He later said, “640K ought to be enough for anyone.”
In theory, a 32-bit application can see 4G of system RAM and 32-bit applications that run on Apple’s OS X can use close to all of that. But Microsoft mired itself into a RAM-addressing scheme that requires space in the computer’s memory for peripherals, like your monitor, keyboard, I/O systems (everything from Firewire to AJA cards) and so on. So 32-bit Windows applications (and, indeed 64-bit applications that run under Microsoft’s OS) suffer from a need to reserve RAM address space for hardware. I don’t suppose under 64-bit Vista and Windows 7 we’ll run into the upper limits of RAM all that soon, as the theoretical limit for 64-bit applications is 16.8 million terabytes. Though I’m sure that a version of Photoshop in your future will run into that upper limit.
What if there were no hypothetical questions?
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