[Erik Lindahl]

Is ProRes even supposed to scale all the way to 4K?

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Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Post Production Services
http://www.freecloud.se

[Erik Lindahl]

Terrific response! I don’t have time to comment all if it but I think DaVinci uses the dual GPU approach for better bandwidth and use of system resources. I also think DaVinci was built with realtime out over the video-card in mind as any serious color correction work is done this way normally.

Will look more at your post later tonight. I reackon Adobes move is awesome. A lot of people however are dependent on editing over a video-card output.

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Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Post Production Services
http://www.freecloud.se

[Erik Lindahl]

Yes, you have TWO GPU’s: one for GUI and one for CUDA-acceleration. This means the GPU that handles CUDA isn’t bogged down with work for redrawing the screen and thus, according to the DaVinci techs, gain about 20% processing speed.

So you’d have something like:

1x Radeon GPU connected to displays
1x nVidia GPU with CUDA-support just sitting in a PCIe slot

The only thing the nVidia GPU does is CUDA-acceleration. It doesn’t have to deal with anything else. The Radeon-card is your GUI-card and is you main “graphics card”. In the above situation you basically use a GPU as a DSP or similar. The above scales even more but I don’t want to confuse this thread even more.

So my question remains, can you use a GPU that isn’t you display GPU for CUDA processing in CS5? This is very interesing for people building online editing systems with DaVinci as it does make us have to choose GPU’s with care. If CS5 can’t use GPU’s like DaVinci can one is for instance forced to get two Quadro 4000’s GPU’s instead of just 1 and another cheaper card for the displays.

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Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Post Production Services
http://www.freecloud.se

[Erik Lindahl]

Also, how crippled is the Mercury Engine when it comes to output over a video-card like a Kona 3 or similar? I heard there was quite a severe overhead going that route.

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Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Post Production Services
http://www.freecloud.se

[Erik Lindahl]

Oh, I’ve found DaVinci’s support-documents outstanding. What they do is that they have TWO GPU’s in the system, for example:

1x Radeon 5770
1x Quadro 4000

You connect displays to the Radeon-card and is your “GUI” card, the Quadro is left unconnected to external displays and is only used for processing. How does Premier work in this regard? Can it use any GPU in the system to offload processing or is it always the primary GPU / GPU connected to the computers display?

According to DaVinci they gain 10-20% performance by doing the above.

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Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Post Production Services
http://www.freecloud.se

[Erik Lindahl]

Interesting.. I thought one of the obvious pro’s was to have full CUDA support for heavy formats such as RED RAW and h264 (5D / 7D / AVC). But i guess a CUDA-system (MacPro / Quadro 4000) will still see a nice improvement in RT even with out this.

Does Premier support a RedRocket card for R3D decode and then use CUDA on top of that for processing? Also if you look at a DaVinci setup, they use a GUI and a PROCESSING GPU, how does this work in Premier CS5?

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Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Post Production Services
http://www.freecloud.se

[Erik Lindahl]

ATI 5770 will be WAY faster in other apps, in DaVinci someone else would have to say if it even matters as it only drives the GUI there.

I’ve asked in other threads if adding a second Quadro 4000 helps in DaVinci but haven’t gotten a straight answer (i.e having a dedicated Quadro 4000 for rendering as well as one for the GUI and rendering, if possible). That said the 2008 MacPro’s have other limitations in their i/o so it might not do anything there.

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Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Post Production Services
http://www.freecloud.se

[Erik Lindahl]

This would be a 2006-2007 machine. 2008’s have 800 Mhz, the former have 667 Mhz.

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Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Post Production Services
http://www.freecloud.se

[Erik Lindahl]

Interesting. Well even if we only get 4-nodel real-time it’s better than using color as long as the tool is solid which it seems. The investment isnt that high then either and we get into the new environment.

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Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Post Production Services
http://www.freecloud.se

[Erik Lindahl]

It’s my understanding internal i/o is the issue with these system yes. CPU speeds are decent but over-all throughput become a bottleneck.

So is there any gain in Da Vinci with 2x Quadro 4000 cards? We’d probably go this route anyway to get acceleration in CS5 and Squeeze.

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Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Post Production Services
http://www.freecloud.se