software/hardware essentials for gh2
- Thread starter kurt1111
- Start date
Everything depends on your budget but some good base line recommendations would be:
Hardware
- Quad core cpu with turbo boost (not as important as the next two)...
- RAM (4GB min, 6 to 12GB is better).
- Video Card (512mb min, 1-2gb is better). Get a dedicated video card vs. integrated...
Go with more RAM or a better video card vs. a higher end CPU.
Software
- Windows 7 64-bit (home is fine or pro)
- CS5 for video (Premiere Pro, After Effects)
- CS5 for images (Photoshop)
- Adobe Lightroom for processing RAW files. If you shoot in JPG, then Photoshop will do.
Again, it depends on your budget...
Take a look here...Sandy Bridge integrated video performance...
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/...core-i7-2600k-i5-2500k-core-i3-2100-tested/10
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/...core-i7-2600k-i5-2500k-core-i3-2100-tested/11
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/...core-i7-2600k-i5-2500k-core-i3-2100-tested/22
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Intel/Core_i5_2500K_GPU/
Looks like the next gen internal graphics are a good improvement...They compete well with the low to lower mid-range dedicated cards in terms of performance. Again, depends on your budget...
ATL Media Group
Veteran
While true, if you are using CS5 you will want a dedicated CUDA supported Nvidia card for the Mercury playback engine in CS5 to edit those GH2 files natively.
" Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 requires a 64-bit operating system and works hand-in-hand with NVIDIA® CUDA™ technology. The Mercury Playback Engine uses NVIDIA GPU cards to provide a GPU-accelerated 32-bit color pipeline, and most popular effects have been rewritten to run on it — for example, effects like color correction, the Ultra keyer, and motion control all run in real time."
http://www.adobe.com/products/premiere/performance/
Honestly, I'd be real surprised if Adobe and NVIDIA allowed this to be whored out to a software adaptation.
http://www.adobe.com/products/premiere/performance/
Honestly, I'd be real surprised if Adobe and NVIDIA allowed this to be whored out to a software adaptation.
Keep in mind a few things when looking at the benchmarks for the integrated video...if you notice, most of them are at lower resolutions, 1024x768...The problem is that as you scale up with integrated video, you will see a quicker drop in performance vs. a dedicated video card. I would dig around and see if you can find benchmarks at more normal resolutions you would probably be using...1680x1050, 1920x1200, etc.
If your intent is mainly video, graphics stuff, again, dedicated is the way to go. If it's only going to be a part of it, integrated will probably do fine. If you plan on playing any current games or future games at your monitors native resolution, with detail settings set high, dedicated is the way to go.
I'm actually running a quad core i-7 with a GTX460 at 1920x1200 resolution and even with the improvements in the sandy bridge GPU, I wouldn't give up the GTX460 for it from what I've seen but again, it's your budget
I'm not adverse to getting a NVIDIA card. What would be the cheapest solution if I were to go that route? But my system is first and foremost going to be a DAW secondly I'm looking for decent to good HD video editing. The onboard gpu is tempting because its easier to get a quiet pc which is important in a studio plus I save a nice chunk of money.
What you could do if your budget is limited is start with the integrated video...After a month or two, you will know if you need to upgrade, once you have settled in and had a chance to work with the system for a little while. If you think you need to upgrade, one thing you could do is download one of the benchmarks that the review websites use to benchmark video cards. Run the benchmark and see what kind of score you get. Then you have a baseline number so when you start researching cards, you can judge performance against what you have...
Phil Rhodes
Well-known member
Sigh.
Why do people say this sort of thing?
Unless you're going to buy an Nvidia GTX470, which is the cheapest officially supported card for Mercury CUDA acceleration in CS5, the type of graphics board you have is unlikely to make the slightest difference. The only time this might not be the case is if you tried using something incredibly feeble or ancient, or something very limited and unusual, such as the onboard graphics on an embedded industrial motherboard, which can have strange glitches in their video overlay drivers. Even then, many of those use Intel chipsets which are perfectly fine. To be honest, I'm really having to look hard for reasons that you might have trouble here, just to make this paragraph longer.
There seems to be a general impression that video editing is somehow "hard", and therefore all of the components in your computer system must have the largest possible numbers written on them. This impression is often thrown about with very little understanding attached to it as to what parts of a computer system are actually stressed when you run an NLE. For the record, nonlinear video editing is often hard on the CPU, can be hard on the disks depending on what codecs you're using, and really doesn't work anything else all that hard at all. While it uses a lot of RAM, even quite average modern memory is so immensely fast that speed really isn't an issue there either.
One of the whole purposes of CUDA is to take repetitive tasks away from the CPU, decentralising that enormously-centralised load. It's a very good idea and a genuinely helpful innovation built on real, sound technological underpinnings. Buy an Nvidia GTX470, but don't buy it because of some vague belief that "a good graphics card" is necessary for editing. Unless you are using the Mercury playback engine in Premiere CS5 with the hardware acceleration turned on, the memory and processing potential of your graphics card is involved in editing work only inasmuch as it's displaying your computer desktop with some video overlays, and it does that every time you open a media player.
In fact, even if you take the the CUDA workload into account, by Premiere, by my estimation, represents barely 15-20% of the computation load a 470 capable of shouldering. People have had success hacking Premiere to run on far less capable silicon, cards three old and available on ebay for pocket money.
You do not need an expensive graphics card to edit, unless you particularly want one from the CS5 Mercury GPU compatibility list. If you are aiming for that, the lower limit is not 512MB - it's actually nearer 1GB, given the need to hold one or more complete HD frames in the graphics card's memory at high bit depth, so get at least a 1GB card.
Why do people say this sort of thing?
Unless you're going to buy an Nvidia GTX470, which is the cheapest officially supported card for Mercury CUDA acceleration in CS5, the type of graphics board you have is unlikely to make the slightest difference. The only time this might not be the case is if you tried using something incredibly feeble or ancient, or something very limited and unusual, such as the onboard graphics on an embedded industrial motherboard, which can have strange glitches in their video overlay drivers. Even then, many of those use Intel chipsets which are perfectly fine. To be honest, I'm really having to look hard for reasons that you might have trouble here, just to make this paragraph longer.
There seems to be a general impression that video editing is somehow "hard", and therefore all of the components in your computer system must have the largest possible numbers written on them. This impression is often thrown about with very little understanding attached to it as to what parts of a computer system are actually stressed when you run an NLE. For the record, nonlinear video editing is often hard on the CPU, can be hard on the disks depending on what codecs you're using, and really doesn't work anything else all that hard at all. While it uses a lot of RAM, even quite average modern memory is so immensely fast that speed really isn't an issue there either.
One of the whole purposes of CUDA is to take repetitive tasks away from the CPU, decentralising that enormously-centralised load. It's a very good idea and a genuinely helpful innovation built on real, sound technological underpinnings. Buy an Nvidia GTX470, but don't buy it because of some vague belief that "a good graphics card" is necessary for editing. Unless you are using the Mercury playback engine in Premiere CS5 with the hardware acceleration turned on, the memory and processing potential of your graphics card is involved in editing work only inasmuch as it's displaying your computer desktop with some video overlays, and it does that every time you open a media player.
In fact, even if you take the the CUDA workload into account, by Premiere, by my estimation, represents barely 15-20% of the computation load a 470 capable of shouldering. People have had success hacking Premiere to run on far less capable silicon, cards three old and available on ebay for pocket money.
You do not need an expensive graphics card to edit, unless you particularly want one from the CS5 Mercury GPU compatibility list. If you are aiming for that, the lower limit is not 512MB - it's actually nearer 1GB, given the need to hold one or more complete HD frames in the graphics card's memory at high bit depth, so get at least a 1GB card.
Sorry, but having programmed and used video drivers for many different configurations of PC's over the years, I'll have to disagree with you. PC's with integrated video chipsets have always required performance compromises as a penalty for their reduced cost. The inherent multiprocessing capabilities of the hundreds of GPU cores in modern CUDA cards are especially well-suited to the needs of CS5's Mercury Playback Engine. I have an inexpensive nVidia GTX260 card in my workstation, and for video encoding it matches the performance of my six-core 3Ghz Intel i7 system (using MainConcept's Codec Suite 5.1 plugin for Premiere CS5). What I've observed is that given enough RAM, video encoding and playback speed is primarily limited by CPU/GPU horsepower. In a computer with a lower-grade CPU than mine, a fast CUDA card would clearly offer a significant performance improvement.
My interpretation of Adobe's "officially supported" list of CUDA cards for the Mercury Playback Engine is that they haven't yet completed compatibility testing of nVidia's extensive range of video cards. In my case, simply adding the name of my OEM-installed nVidia card to CS5's "cuda_supported_cards.txt" file was all it took to enable CUDA acceleration in Premiere and After Effects CS5. In my view, this is not even a "hack", it's an installation configuration setting. Detailed information on how to evaluate your video card's capabilities and update the CS5 configuration settings can be found here:
http://www.studio1productions.com/Articles/PremiereCS5.htm
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Phil Rhodes
Well-known member
What was the test environment in which you established this? CPU, yes, absolutely. GPU, no.
Even in CS5 with hardware-based acceleration switched on, which I will repeat is the only NLE ever to support that sort of thing, encoding and playback are done solely on the CPU. No graphics card can ever make things encode faster unless you're using a standalone app specifically advertised as doing work on the GPU. Some graphics boards do have h.264 handling built into the silicon, but CS5 does not use it and no other NLE uses the graphics board for anything other than displaying the UI and a video overlay. It's even quite hard to make media players like VLC use the hardware h.264 decoders, and they're actually supposed to do it!
And yes, the lower end Nvidia cards seem to be perfectly adequate for CS5 and CUDA. I've seen writeups that suggest that anything more than 100 CUDA cores is largely a waste of time (for comparison, higher end cards have up to 500), although with any luck they'll expand what's accelerated to make better use of the hardware. I'm sure your 260 is far more than it needs.
My point here is to avoid people deciding that they need "a good GPU" for video editing and going out and spending hundreds and hundreds on a high end gamer's card when that's really not necessary.
P
I tested this on the workstation I described above using MainConcept's Codec Suite 5.1 plugin for Premiere CS5. It has a CUDA-optimized H.264 encoder as well as a CPU-optimized codec. While this is admittedly a professional encoder with features that CS5's bundled encoders don't provide, I think its results are a good comparison of GPU and CPU performance in real-world production. From my experience, I'd also agree with your assessment that the more expensive CUDA cards are not really essential for high-speed workflow in CS5.
rambooc1
Well-known member
Magic Bullets Looks is impossible to use in Vegas unless you have a decent video card (min 1Gb). A simple GPU upgrade from 512M to 1Gb now allows me to render Mb Looks, whereas before it was so slow it was painfull. A 10 min render with MBL now takes 30mins before it was 120mins. Nothing else was upgraded. Vegas render without MBL however remained the same.
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