Tim Kolb
Forum Replies Created
-
Yes…it’s not easy to measure it without actually running a trial with each card in your system on an identical timeline.
The format matters to the CPU…AVCHD is tougher than uncompressed and RED 4K is a real load.
More layers of more complex video will start to max out your CPU…which will at some point reach it’s limit on what it can even spool out to the GPU, regardless of the number of effects you’re using.
Drive speed becomes an issue at some point…
What effects are on the timeline? Just CC? Do you have a bunch of Magic Bullet frames on clips? etc, etc.
Also keep in mind, this is preview. It’s being able to hit the spacebar and just play whatever you just created in RT…rendering isn’t really the task involved.
It sounds like you’ve got the rest of it in hand. I would think you’ll see benefits. For me, when there is a client sitting there, it doesn’t take a lot of feedback loop acceleration to make it worthwhile…
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions, -
This does depend somewhat on your CPU…
Since the video decoding is done on the CPU, a lesser CPU will decode fewer streams of video. The GPUs on the Quadro card kick in to preview effects. Big GFX card with a smaller CPU equals less layers of video with a ton of effects… Lesser CPU and the lower-end Quadro or the GTX285 card and you’re doing less of each… Massive CPU with no Mercury-compliant GFX card will get lots of decoded video streams…and will have to trade unaltered streams for effects to share that bandwidth on the CPU.
Mercury is still impressive in software mode on a big-iron CPU.
I suspect the leverage achieved by a massive CPU (Nehalem at this point), generous RAM allocation (16 GB for instance) and the beefiest Mercury-capable GFX card will be more than proportional to an alternate system where you start to diminish any of those individual components.
Once again, we’re at the point in the post industry where we can spend as much money as we have…it’s nice to know the technology keeps advancing.
🙂
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions, -
[Perry Cheng] “I guess I am asking, for not so serious users who want the least expensive yet somewhat reliable performance, which one is my best option.”
The GTX285 is what? 300? 400 USD?
How “not serious” do you need to be?
The hack mentioned in the link isn’t hard to do…at least not as hard as getting any sort of technical support after you do it of course…
Premiere Pro users have been squawking about dependability for how many versions? Now when Adobe has vigorously tested a group of display cards and ‘certified’ them…users look for a way to run something else.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions, -
The approved cards are the GTX 285, the Quadro 3800, 4800, 4800 for Mac, and the 5800.
The Quadro CX is also enabled I believe if you have one of those installed.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions, -
“Headlock” is provocative…
Not really true, but then the average discussion on this tends to be like this… It would help if Adobe was a touch less hype ad a bit more detail on this subject.
The Mercury playback engine is a real improvement over CS4 WITHOUT an approved GPU card.
The Mercury Playback Engine really flies WITH an approved GPU card.
It probably seems odd that the small group of professional graphics cards are approved since many gamer cards seem very similar in configuration to Quadro cards…but try to get someone on the phone who actually has a clue what you’re doing to support a gamer card in a professional post production environment. PNY (the NVIDIA distributor in North America) has actual tech support for Quadro, staffed by people who understand what we’re trying to do. Consumer gamer cards don’t have that kind of support…
The GTX285 is on the list…it’s a gamer card…they didn’t have 2 years to attempt to test every variation of every consumer card available, so…since so many seem to think that PPro is unstable, they decided this time not to try to be compatible with everything all the time…a smart move IMO.
Before you really go with the “headlock” story here, I’d urge you to try PPro CS5 on a 64 bit machine with Windows 7, and at least 8 GB of RAM and use the wimpiest display card you’ve got.
I think that for a student lab, you may decide that you’re good to go…
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions, -
[eric monroe] “the problem lies with the fact that the CS4 and the FCP studio are both 32 bit applications….which only recognize a maximum of 4 gigs of RAM. I believe that is where the bottle neck lies. You could have 128gb of RAM and it still will not use more than 4gb of it.”
Well…one clarification. While it’s true that a 32 bit application only recognizes 4 GB of RAM, a 32 bit OS also only recognizes 4 GB of RAM. A 64 bit OS recognizes a boatload of RAM. A 32 bit application running on a 32 bit OS will have to share 4 GB of RAM with the OS and any other stuff running (in Adobe’s case, there are about four executables that launch when you simply fire up PPro), which means that the app actually gets access to far less than 4 GBs of RAM, and I’d guess that PPro running on a 32 bit OS has access to less than a GB far too often…
A 32 bit app like PPro CS4 running in a 64 bit OS can access 4 full GBs of RAM…dynamic link to AE-which gets its own 4 GB of RAM…send the timeline to Media Encoder-which grabs another 4 GB of RAM…you get the idea.
Even though a 32 bit app has limitations, running on a 32 bit OS compounds those limitations considerably.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions, -
I would typically use Colorista for this…with an oval shaped mask.
Keep in mind the rest of the image probably needs some correction too if your face adjustment is going to look like it fits…
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions, -
Hi John,
We were shooting sound, and they did post as HD…
It’s been about 3 years since I’ve touched an F900, so I suppose it was there and I’ve just had it leak out of my memory (which seems to happen more and more these days.)
As much as the whole prime adapter thing isn’t my everyday mode of operation (I prefer something like a D21 which realizes much more of the image quality of the optics), the camera did a nice job with a reasonable set of Zeiss primes.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions, -
No problem…
I find the Adobe site to be so deep and wide that it can be a bit of a journey to find what you need.
The CX board was based on the 4800 when it came out, so the configuration actually has you ready to go forward.
It was a good marketing effort to get out the idea of how much a strong GPU display card can help your workflow, but I think it ended up being a confusing message for some with the obvious departure from the rest of the Quadro line designations.
Anyway…Mercury will happily lean into your QuadroCX for effects preview, so you’re ahead of the pack.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions, -
Yes, I’d agree with David.
I would not refer to 23.976 fps as a “pulldown” in the context that term is traditionally used-defining a system of duplicating frames. It’s a re-clock, or depending on how the frames are NUMBERED (I’ve spent some time trying to convince some people that “drop frame” is not actually dropping a physical frame), it could be referred to as drop-frame.
Transferring 23.976 to film would simply mean imaging the film at the clock of the video playback…and then projecting it at 24 fps. The difference is far smaller than 24 to 25 fps when film is transferred to PAL…and that’s how that is done with some audio pitch correction.
As far as an F900…I didn’t know that would do 24 fps. I shot on an independent feature some time ago on an F900 and don’t recall seeing a 24 fps setting. We shot at 23.976psf.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,