Why is premiere unable to utilize my processor?

[Shawn Miller]

“By multi-processor I assume you mean a dual socket motherboard such as SR-2 running two Intel Xeon processors”

Yeah… that seems pretty steep at first blush. But you can’t really look at the intial price of hardware or software to determine it’s value. You have to look at what you would have to spend to rent, lease or pay someone else, in order to do the work you need to do. In other words, you have to understand if your product has more value than how much you spend to produce it (is your over worth more than the cookies you bake).

Many of us produce work (per project, or over the life of the equipment we use) that’s valued in the hundreds of thousands and in the millions of dollars, or Euros, or whatever… that’s why a lot of us don’t flinch at the prospect of spending 5k, 10k or 15k on a workstation.

Thanks,

Shawn

[Tim Kolb]

[Gaven Eogan] “By multi-processor I assume you mean a dual socket motherboard such as SR-2 running two Intel Xeon processors… ie. a server configuration”

I missed the “server configuration” piece the first time…

I honestly would have to sit and think a while to come up with someone I know who is a post production professional who has run anything but muulti-processor workstations since DV…and even then I think everyone I knew was running multiprocessor (even before there was multiple cores of course…)

It’s not a server configuration…it’s a workstation. If you saw those cores light up when you start doing anything with multiple layers in HD of any kind…you’d see what it takes to run a decode on DSLR or AVCHD H264…or RED 4K…just brute CPU force.

Our computing equipment keeps getting faster…but our workload seems to stay out ahead of us.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Gaven Eogan]

I know well the kind of hardware that would be needed to do anything more than 1 layer of HD video (eg AVCHD) without being a dog-slow choppy pig to work with.
The reason I was commenting about the price of a dual-Xeon setup was because I got the impression from the posts I read that people here that were asking about their CS4 experience being not usable with HD footage with using extremely old, cheap, computer hardware, pentiums, DDR2 and the like, and I thought you were advising them to get dual-Xeon setup. From what I could see these people wouldn’t even dream of buying a single Core i7 machine because of cost never mind a dual-Xeon setup which is at least 3x the cost again…
My machine is fairly high end for consumer setup and I can edit AVCHD footage natively fairly well (there is slight lag and occasionaly chugging on the previews/monitor windows), but i have never tried multiple layers etc. or any fancy stuff. Years ago I previously edited DV footage from Canon XL1S on an old Dell Pentium 4 machine and that was just capable of doing that. Now my current machine could process DV in it’s sleep! But AVCHD and othe MPEG4 formats are another story. As you say the CODECS seems to be always pushing current generation hardware at near their full capacity – and rightly so, if they weren’t then the codec designers didn’t do their job! But anyway it is only a matter of time before the GPU takes over from the CPU (it should do – it is way more capable to do this kind of work) it is just politics holding it up right now…. and anyone with relatively cheap gamer graphic card will have powerful video editing capabilities using right software…

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