What graphics acceleration hardware for PPro/AE?

[Tim Kolb]

Are you referring to Open GL display cards or editing accelerators that have video I/O, etc…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Chris Davis]

[Tim Kolb]”Are you referring to Open GL display cards or editing accelerators that have video I/O, etc…”

I’d have to say I’m not sure. I read a while back about some hardware people used for PPro on PC which dramatically sped up RT playback on effects, and I think included additional effects as well.

I thought I read about something like this for Mac as well, for around $2K.

[Tim Kolb]

If it was for Mac as well, it was probably an Open GL card…which helps to speed up graphic previews…though far more inside of After Effects than Ppro.

Matrox makes some PC hardware products that add proprietary codecs and effects as well as video interface for VCRs, etc that deal primarily with the PPro timeline as far as the added speed is concerned…

Then you have AJA and BlackMagic Design, which create hardware interface cards for PC and Mac that are basically video signal I/O (in/out) cards that have no speed acceleration besides custom designed project settings to optimize the interface with the card…

I’m still not clear which one you might have seen or read about…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Alex Udell]

Hi…

For the PC…

Photoshop and AE can benefit from Nvidia Display Cards.
Photoshop with their 3d layer support some nice smooth navigation in image rotation when working close up.

AE can benefit with 3d Comps and speeding up previews a bit. But it’s only really for preview.

I’d check Adobe’s site for what recommendations, as I recall a table that lists what’s been tested and what features work on what cards.

Matrox RT.X2 LE and Axio LE provide superior performance in Premiere Pro and WYSIWIG to a broadcast monitor in AE and snapshotting to a broadcast monitor in Photoshop.

In Premiere, they provide signal input and output with various devices and acceleration of a variety of effects plug ins they have written. In both cases, some of the work is done by the Matrox card, and some is tasked to a qualified display card. In the case of Matrox, ATI cards generally outperform Nvidia. Matrox offers a table as to cards that have been tested on their site as well.

hope that helps….

Alex

[Chris Davis]

[Tim Kolb]
If it was for Mac as well, it was probably an Open GL card…which helps to speed up graphic previews…though far more inside of After Effects than Ppro.

Not sure what an Open GL card is… just a really fast graphics card?

Matrox makes some PC hardware products that add proprietary codecs and effects as well as video interface for VCRs, etc that deal primarily with the PPro timeline as far as the added speed is concerned…

Pretty sure this is what I’m thinking about. On another post you said, “I run CS4 on my Dell laptop (M90 Precision) with WXP…” Is this a graphics acceleration device?

Then you have AJA and BlackMagic Design, which create hardware interface cards for PC and Mac that are basically video signal I/O (in/out) cards that have no speed acceleration besides custom designed project settings to optimize the interface with the card…

This would be like a BlackMagic Designs Intensity card, right?

Thanks,
Chris

[Alex Udell]
Photoshop and AE can benefit from Nvidia Display Cards.

Is a Display Card another word for a video card, such as the NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 512MB that comes on a Mac Pro?

Matrox RT.X2 LE and Axio LE provide superior performance in Premiere Pro and WYSIWIG to a broadcast monitor in AE and snapshotting to a broadcast monitor in Photoshop.

I think this is what I am looking for. Thanks.
PS – nothing like this available for Mac, right?

-Chris

[Arc Nevada]

CS3 had an option of GPU Accleration that made use of Direct 3D hardware acceleration. It also would out put the video overlay of the program monitor out the S-Video or even the HDMI out put of the graphics card when selected. In CS4 you can still do it by selecting the monitor (S-Video port, HDMI) as an external monitor. I have less RT but the Macs did not make us of Direct 3D and the CS3 manual stated this was not an option on the Mac. With the new way the Mac can indeed out put to an NTSC monitor using just about any ATI or Nvidia graphics card. I think that is what you are talking about. The realtime looks good but it is not true realtime. It is better than the VGA preview.

[John Mulligan]

I believe that what you are looking for is an NVidia Quadro card. This is currently the high-end solution for graphics acceleration in CS4 Premiere Pro. A company called Elemental Technologies is providing a PP Plugin module that is being packaged with certain Quadro card bundles. This plugin takes advantage of the GPU capabiliities of the Quadro cards and offloads many of the rendering tasks to the GPU. Here is a link with more information:

https://www.elementaltechnologies.com/products.php?id=5

[Tim Kolb]

[John Mulligan] “A company called Elemental Technologies is providing a PP Plugin module that is being packaged with certain Quadro card bundles. This plugin takes advantage of the GPU capabiliities of the Quadro cards and offloads many of the rendering tasks to the GPU. Here is a link with more information:”

This technology only accelerates encoding to H.264 in the media encoder. No PPro timeline functions are affected.

RapiHD doesn’t affect editing functionality.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Chris Davis]

[Tim Kolb]
Matrox makes some PC hardware products that add proprietary codecs and effects as well as video interface for VCRs, etc that deal primarily with the PPro timeline as far as the added speed is concerned…

I looked into the Matrox RT.X2 LE that Alex mentioned, and this was indeed what I had seen before. It looks like a quad core PC plus one of these would give me more RT on PPro and AE than a duel quad core (8 core) Mac, for about the same total price. Would you suspect this to be the case?

I realize this kind of hardware is not available for Mac. Is there any way to get this kind of RT on PPro and AE on a Mac, perhaps with a really fast graphics card? I read that the Open GL thing was not working well yet on Mac and CS4.

Perhaps PC’s with the appropriate hardware will always give better/more RT for PPro and AE than Mac?

Thank for your time,
Chris

[Alex Udell]

FYI…

Using an AJA Kona card on a Mac in combination with FCP will somewhat enhance the performance you will get out of FCP depending on the editing footage format.

The AJA hardware will take over (under the hood) pixel scaling and some other functions normally handled by the CPU. In this way you can eek a bit more RT out of FCP if you are working in formats like DVCProHD or HDV.

To my knowledge, this does not help with AE on or PPro on the Mac.

Alex