Quadro CX is it worth it?

[Vince Becquiot]

You will likely see very little or no improvement from the card alone in editing. Editing uses the CPU(s) but very little in the graphics department.

With After Effects or a 3D application, it would be worth looking into. Still, I would spend on RAM before graphics.

The other reason to purchase a Quadro would be to use side by side with an AJA card if you plan on editing HD and need HD SDI / component out.

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Eric Hite]

Well I have no need for that type output that I know of in the near future. What I need to do is make high quality SD and Blueray DVDs quickly and efficeintly, and whatever my local stations will require footage on for broadcast, one of them likes a mini dv tape. Is there any advantage in useing an input/capture card for the footage vs using the firewire HDV. I dont mind spending a bit if I will see a significant quality or speed gain, but like most of us do not want to waste money on an un-necessary purchase. What is your opinion on edit monitors in the low budget range?

Eric D. Hite
Lubbock, Texas USA.
Maxworx Events, TLP, OPRTV

[Jon Barrie]

take a look at Cineform solutions if you are using HDV. It upscales the color space to 4:2:2 from HDV native 4:2:0 for better color correction. It has a realtime engine plugin for smoother editing in PPro. CS4 is not supported just yet, but that’s coming.

http://www.cineform.com

– Jon 😉

Jon Barrie
aJBprods
http://www.jonbarrie.net

[Dennis Radeke]

For this reason, you should consider the Quadro CX. I have one and the GPU efficiencies to Premiere Pro are only the three GPU enabled effects. Not that big of a deal. However, it also adds a very fast, very efficient H.264 encoder into the Adobe Media Encoder which makes encoding several orders faster. This is the secret sauce in the product for my money. In addition, I’ll mention that it offers GPU acceleration wherever Adobe adds it in CS4, so in particular After Effects and Photoshop both have some benefits to having a card like a Quadro CX.

[Tim Kolb]

I actually do use big Open GL cards in my desktop (actually I have a QuadroFX in a laptop as well), and there are several advantages, but as all to this point have said, they aren’t specifically editing related.

A large open GL card speeds up the response of Photoshop CS4 and AE CS4 in very obvious ways once you work with it on or off. It also speeds up the interface of the entire computer. If you’ve ever popped back and forth between applications and had a window that needs to redraw, that’s exactly what won’t happen with a serious Open GL card in the box.

These end up being small things…until you’re used to them and jump on some other system and realize how much slower things are in the interface mechanics…the card companies call each window a ‘clipping plane’ the more clipping planes the card supports, the more windows that can all be open and instantly accessible on the desktop.

The H.264 encoder is definitely an advantage of the card, but I’d also say that the fact that the card is reasonably priced is nice too. B&H has it for less than the Quadro 4800 (which is the non-Adobe specific model) and you get the H.264 encoder.

Future-wise, I’d suspect that the CUDA technology involved in these cards is going to become more and more useful as more applications are found that can be coded (like the H.264 encoder) to run on all those processing cores (CX has 192 parallel cores).

I’ve got a QFX 4500 and a QFX 560 in my desktop machine (4 displays) and I really appreciate the extra reponsiveness. (but i don’t have CUDA technology on mine…the 4500 goes back farther than that.)

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,