Jay Turberville
Forum Replies Created
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Sounds to me like you are still going on smoke and mirrors explanations regarding the GTX vs. Quadro question. Clearly you have the wrong chipset in the motherboard. Frankly, I think you should be looking at Sandy Bridge 2 and the new six core Intel CPU. Sandy Bridge-2 has 40 PCIe lanes as I recall.
Anyway, back to the Quadro/GTX thing. Your system integrator seems to be chastising you based on zero evidence. I’m not saying he’s wrong. I’m just saying that you are back to square one with assertions and no evidence. I’ve been doing the same search you did and find zero compelling evidence as to why a Quadro is better, just a lot of vague commentary that smacks more of marketing than anything else. Makes me think that Adobe and Nvidia struck a deal to cross promote each other.
The whole gaming card vs. “Pro” card has a long history with me as a Lightwave 3D guy. Many years ago folks I knew at a mid-level CGI studio talked about how they dumped their “Pro” OGL cards in favor of gaming cards because the “Pro” card were horrible with Photoshop and no better with the OGL with Lightwave 3D. Also, if the GTX series cards were inherently unstable, then why does that flight simulation company use them? Hmmmm….
And finally, why the heck would you update drivers on a stable editing system? You can’t gig a component much based on a driver update. My understanding is that the rule of thumb is to update drivers for stable editing systems only for very specific reasons when there is a known benefit or problem being solved. Oh yeah – I forgot. Your system was never stable because you went with the wrong system chipset. Not trying to beat you up here, but you’ve got too many variables in play (based on what you’ve posted at least) to have any conclusion about the Quadro/GTX question.
BTW, I was just fiddling with a system instability problem. The cause? The cooling fan going out on the BlackMagic card. Probably the only “Pro” device in this particular system. BTW, I”m also the purchaser some time ago of a Medea RAID system. At the time, it wasn’t an approved AVID drive system. But hey – I wanted reliability and the affordable approved arrays weren’t redundant. So I went against the official recommendation. A few years later, Avid buys Medea and starts selling the drive arrays themselves (I guess the were approved then?)- before eventually killing the line. Go figure.
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If you are building your own box, then sure, why not include a motherboard that is overclocking friendly. Also, do a bit of online research and find out what to expect from your CPU of choice. Pick out the CPU that will work for you without overclocking first. And if it turns out to be an OK overclocker, then that’s just a nice bonus.
Overclocking these days is much easier than it was in the past. Heck, ASUS includes an autotune utility that tries to find a good setting for you that runs from windows. You don’t even have to mess with the BIOS. Just run the utility and sit back and wait. The main thing is to not get carried away with it. Consider a 10-15% boost as a reasonable goal. Avoid going for results like a 25% or more overclock. Don’t get a fancy and expensive water cooling system. Just get a big standard CPU cooler. You don’t want the overclock to be much of a side project. You don’t want to spend hardly any extra money to support it. The risk to hardware and so forth is virtually nonexistent these days. I think most CPUs have built-in protection from thermal overheating – which really isn’t much of a problem if you put a good cooling fan on and are conservative in your overclock.
Will your system become unstable? Probably not if you are conservative in the overclock. You can download some programs that will really stress the overclocked CPU. If the system passes these tests you are almost surely going to be fine.
Now, is it worth it? Sure. Why not? The overclocked system will either be stable or it won’t be. If it isn’t, set it back and don’t worry about it. If it is stable, what’s not to like about 10-15% more processing power? My 3.0Ghz system is humming along at about 3.5Ghz. It is more stable than our Avid MC system. We thought it was unstable and causing errors, but that turned out to be CS4 bugs. That’s probably the biggest risk of overclocking. You might be inclined to erroneously blame a problem or instability on the overclock.
Of course, enabling CUDA processing is more important than any overclock. But CUDA does not benefit everthing. The CPU is still doing a lot of heavy lifting. So even with CUDA, overclocking can be a nice bonus. BTW, you can also overclock you CUDA cores on many graphics cards.
What does 10-15% get you? Well nothing earthshaking. But perhaps a timeline that was marginal in playback sans previewswill not play back smoothly. In other words, the system just runs a little bit smoother/faster. It is no replacement for simply adding more CPU cores and/or more RAM. It is something to consider doing in addition to doing those things. No magic. Just a little faster.
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Yes. It uses the six cores fairly effectively from what my little monitoring gadget shows. You will want some kind of nvidia card with CUDA cores assuming you are going to be editing HD.
The AMD x6 will not give you the best editing platform, but it is certainly a decent and workable platform. You can see how it stacks up here.
https://www.ppbm5.com/Benchmark5.html
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That CS5 handles 1080p50 is not a demonstration that it will handle it with any CODEC/Format.
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The hardware assist (Cuda) in the Mercury playback engine should give excellent results with scaling the video down to SD.
https://blogs.adobe.com/premiereprotraining/2010/10/scaling-in-premiere-pro-cs5.html
I have no idea how good the MPEG2 encoding is compared to other encoders. But on a recent project it seemed to do fine with material encoded at 7Mbs – some of which originated as 720p footage from a GH1.
I’d be a little curious about how well PPro handles the fields going from 1080i to interlaced on the DVD.
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1080p50 is not a standard AVCHD format. I see no sequence presets in Premiere for that format either. Perhaps CS5 will support that format in the future, but being nonstandard, probably not now. You might want to contact Adobe directly to confirm that this format is not supported. If so, in the meantime you will have to convert to another format where p50 is supported or convert to a i50 or p25.
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Actually, if you edit the cuda_supported_cards.txt appropriately you can use many other Nvidia cards that have CUDA Cores. My inexpensive GT 240 card has 96 CUDA cores and 1GB of DDR5 memory and seems to work perfectly fine with CS5. Previews are generated about four times faster than without on a six core AMD machine.
If you are going to try an inexpensive card, do make sure that you get a card with DDR5 memory and more than 786MB of RAM (just get a 1GB or better card) if you want to see a performance improvement.
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It is basically a dropping frames. But this has nothing to do with the capture format being used since it drops the frames when simply monitoring the deck output in “camera” mode.
We hooked up a Beta-SP deck this afternoon and it did not have the problem. All capturing and monitoring was flawless. So we ran the DSR-45 component outputs through the Beta deck and were able to capture from the DSR-45 flawlessly that way.
So it seems to me that there’s something in the DSR-45 component output that the Decklink Studio card is not happy with. The Avid Adrenaline is OK with the DSR-45, but the Decklink Studio is not. It’s anybody’s guess at this point as to which or either component is actually misbehaving. Maybe both components are in spec but marginally so and that the combination creates the problem? Either way, the Beta deck cleans things up – probably via the internal TBC (which the DSR-45 also has). So that tells me that we probably don’t have a fundamental configuration or compatibility problem with the computer, software and Decklink card and if we want to capture from the DSR-45 via analog component, we certainly can if we want. We just need to patch through the Beta deck.