Mercury render engine question on timeline

[lt-cartman]

hi toolman here.

Im thinking of upgrading my 8800 gtx to a zotac gt550ti =1gb model gddr5 (due to the 8800gtx not being able to support the mercury engine in premiere pro 5.5)

my question is I know that the mercury engine will accelerate certain effects and saving from say avi to mp4. but will it provide any boost in just playback of say a 3 layer time line
(usually my projects are quiet large and around 90minutes long and over and i find that after about the first 45 to 60 minutes are edited premiere seems to grind to a halt requiring me to render out a lo res 1/4 resolution video preview of the time line in order to finish it off.

Once i hack premier pro 5.5 to accept the 450 amp card, will the mercury engine enabled gt450 help in the playback (in real time) of the 1080p time line in question.

thanks in advance for your help.

win 7 64 bit
8gb ram

[gundar]

I run the following and have no issues with avchd or any rendering.

windows 7 - 64 bit
16 gb of ram (upgradable to 32)
Intel I7 on an intel board
geforce 2gb card

I think your first issue may be ram, but if you can build a pc out, your best option may be a new i7 with as much ram as you can cram into it and a nice vid card. Smooth sailing my friend.

800 - 1000 can get you this spec, less if you have some of the hardware now.

Good luck!

[lt-cartman]

hi gundar

thanks for the reply unfortunately i cant upgrade the ram mother board maxed out and to get new core i7 motherboard & ram is not an option (money wise) atm.

do you have the mercury render engine enabled?

[Geoff Gilson]

Mercury Playback Engine GPU mode doesn't accelerate your actual encoding/decoding stages, that depends on CPU / RAM / storage speed.
MPE is best for real-time transforms and effects. For instance, it is great for speeding up clips with movement, anything that is resized/rotated, etc. Exporting with "Maximum Render quality" is greatly accelerated too.
If you have a timeline containing clips that use GPU-enabled effects, playback should be smoother, but there's no guarantee there won't be any stuttering. The overall performance depends on the mix of what you've got in your timeline against your machine's overall spec.
Likewise, you won't see an appreciable difference in export speed unless you're dealing with transforms and effects.
A 450 should be fine, MPE doesn't need loads of CUDA cores to operate optimally. I don't know about what the next generation will need, though.

[lt-cartman]

hi geoff

thanks for your informative reply. so to understand it. because im playing back highly compressed avchd footage on the time line the MPE does not have an effect. - its more the cpu q6600 @ 3hgz and the memory 8gb that counts

if i was to encode the .mts footage to say avi using the Lagarith codec and then place these on a time line. would the MPE provide better playback in general or is it only a boost with MPE enabled effects ?

thanks again for the replys

toolman

[lt-cartman]

further to the questions above which would give me a potentially less play back stuttering while using avchd mts files on the time-line. - but also taking into account rendering these mts files to say Lagarith and using these larger files in the time-line.

going from 8 to 16 gb of ram (checked my mother board manual and i can put 16 gb in it)

Or

getting the zotac gt550ti =1gb model gddr5 and enabling the Mercury Engine

thanks again in advance for your replies

Toolman

[Geoff Gilson]

If you don't plan on using transforms and MPE enabled effects, you're better off with more conventional upgrades like CPU & HDD.

Upgrading to a fast i7 CPU (2600K for instance) would really help the most for straight encoding and decoding. Although you would have to change your motherboard too.
8GB memory is usually enough for Premiere. 16GB is certainly good, but not so critical. While editing, check your memory usage in Task Manager to get a better feel of how much is being used by Premiere.

If you are transcoding the MTS files to bigger editing intermediates (Lagarith, ProRes, DNxHD, etc.) and having multiple layers of full HD playing back at once, storage speed becomes ever more critical. At the least use a separate video-dedicated hard disk (other than windows system) if you don't already.
An SSD is a great drop-in upgrade for storage speed. RAID 0 and 5 arrays are also widely used, but ideally need a dedicated controller.

Exporting the final video to a different drive than your project's footage source drive may also speed up the process.

[lt-cartman]

hi geoff thanks for the reply.

i took the plunge and ordered the gtx5500ti card - ill see how it goes for me.

re the memory - i usually check out the memory usage and it very rarely goes over 85 to 90% - usually y stays around 50 to 60 % - in premier usage (after effects can tip it to 90 - 95% regularly though

lost out on an ebay auction to get 16 gb ram though - but plenty more of those out there

unfortunately atm the core i7 upgrade is a pipe dream...

re the hdd i have 6 hdds on my system so space wont be a problem. all 7200 spin samsung spinpoint drives with at least 32mb cache. - my os drive is a ssd though

I will let you know how the new card effects things (if any) later next week.

Thanks for reply

Toolman

[averan]

it's not about how many hdds you have, it's about having them in a raid 0 or 5 array. in raid 0 you get a bigger combined disk that also is MUCH faster to read/write. if you don't have a raid disk setup, you should DEFINITELY do this now. it will make a much bigger improvement on performance than anything else you can do.