Processor Comparison...

ROne

Well-known member
On the back of my bottleneck thread last week I mentioned I would be getting a new laptop to try and improve my edius performance. This was also taking consideration of the fact that I'm using the internal drive and USB2 external drives.

Previous to this, I'd used the original laptop for cutting 720/25p together without much issue - last week I tried some 720/50p and EDIUS began halting on some sequences. I did make changes to the buffer - but rendering was still needed.

My timeline consisted of a combination of 576p25 and 720/50p

Laptop 1:
ACER 8202 - CoreDuo 1.66ghz 1GB Ram, 100GB 5400rpm internal drive

Laptop 2
ACER 8215 - Core2Duo 2.00ghz 2GB Ram,160GB 5400rpm internal drive - Bluray player

http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/Acer_TravelMate_8215WLMi_Br_Laptop_LX.TEG06.034/version.asp


Both are really the same models, with an upgraded spec. They both share the travel mate chassis with carbon lid, PCMCIA slot, express slot, 4xUSB, 1xmini firewire. 1680x1050 rez. The 8215 features a Bluray player.

I've used the 8202 comprehensively for mobile editing and it's been fantastic.

The project I'm working on now features a single layer of DVCPRO HD 720/50p with NLE generated slow-mo,region colour correction and a graphic layer.

Stats:

On the 8202 the processor was maxing out at 99% and EDIUS was stumbling - I basically needed to render this segment.

On the 8215 core2duo machine running the same 720/50p sequence the processor maxes out at 53% - now bear in mind the machine is both a core2duo and 25% or so clock speed faster.

The most staggering number is in the rendering to MPEG2 for DVD.

For the 8202 coreduo the 4min 40 sequence took 6mins 20 to render.

The 8215 core2duo took 2mins 47s to render the sequence. Nearly double realtime.

Remember this is all on the internal drive (160GB sata) - but a much bigger jump than I anticipated.

It's almost moot now as the coreduo chip has been superceded, but I thought it made an interesting comparision to help eleminate the bottleneck issue I was having.
 
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I'm editing off of a core duo 2.16. I have put multiple streams of 1080 on the timeline and it is always realtime.

You need 2 gigs of ram, and you need a different external HDD editing setup. Either a FW800 expresscard to FW raid, or eSATA expresscard to eSATA enclosure. I use the latter.

Truthfully either one of those processor specs should be able to handle dvcpro hd fairly well. The first one needs more ram....

Editing off the the internal 5400 rpm drives would also cause a bottleneck, as would editing off of the same drive that EDIUS is installed in.

There is a thread in this section somewhere from a while back of Barry's mentioning that he was getting real-time off of a p4 1.somethingGHZ, if I remember correctly...

Anyways, hope that helps a little.

Jason
 
Yeah. Will do something about the drives, maybe based on that raid system you have.

But what I've discovered (aside from the ram) is that the new system is not bottlenecked at all with exactly the same project running on the internal drive, which in the present "need to do things mobile" circumstances is great.
 
Yeah. That's good. And if you really want to be mobile and have maximum performance, you can always just edit straight off the cards and render to your internal drive. Keep the data on your cards for a secure backup of the raw footage until you can get back to somewhere you can do a proper offload and back up.

P2 cards support something like 4 streams of 1080p in real time.

Jason
 
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