Spec'ing out a laptop: Is Nvidia Mercury support a real difference maker?

Elton

Elton

Veteran
I'm considering making a jump from FCP to CS5 PPro (on Win) and wondered if anyone has any advice about what to look for in laptop specs to truly be happy with performance.

I know about Sandy Bridge processors and plenty of ram, but I wondered about Mercury playback engine and whether or not to make an NVIDIA GPU a must in the system.

There are a lot of seemingly great deals in the pc laptop world, but most seem to go with ATI GPU's.

I'm wondering if a system with NVIDIA CUDA support would make a difference in true time killing tasks like h264 encoding, Blu-ray authoring, etc.


Sincere thanks for any advice.
 
I agree with Ann. For video editing, a powerful, Windows 7 desktop with CS5.5 can't be beat. Especially if you build it yourself.
 
Seriously, I appreciate the input, even if it's a little off target. I'm just wondering if anyone has any experience on a higher-end pc laptop (i7 etc) with CS5, and in particular if an NVIDIA graphics chip would make a big difference overall due to Mercury Playback engine acceleration.

I know desktop machines are faster, but portability is a must, so I'm looking to get a laptop with as much grunt as possible. I'm not really worried about things like native MTS editing, etc, as I will get a CineForm license, which should make the editing experience quite a bit faster. I'm not a big fan of editing long GOP natively--there's always a penalty somewhere down the line. On FCP, ProRes has been the staple.

Thanks again in advance.
 
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I have an i7-720QM with a 330M Nvidia chipset. It works great, though I rarely ever edit H.264 natively. The Sandy Bridge i7s (2.2GHz or 2.3) coupled with the Quadro 5000M will give you the absolute best performance on CS5 that you can get on a mobile platform. I don't know if such a combination exists yet, so you may have to adjust accordingly.
 
Elton said:
[...] I'm just wondering if anyone has any experience on a higher-end pc laptop (i7 etc) with CS5, and in particular if an NVIDIA graphics chip would make a big difference overall due to Mercury Playback engine acceleration.[...]
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I just ordered a refurbished Asus G51Jx-X5. You can read about it here. I won't have it in my hands until May 6. I'll try to post to report back.
 
Elton said:
I'm considering making a jump from FCP to CS5 PPro (on Win) and wondered if anyone has any advice about what to look for in laptop specs to truly be happy with performance.

I know about Sandy Bridge processors and plenty of ram, but I wondered about Mercury playback engine and whether or not to make an NVIDIA GPU a must in the system.

There are a lot of seemingly great deals in the pc laptop world, but most seem to go with ATI GPU's.

I'm wondering if a system with NVIDIA CUDA support would make a difference in true time killing tasks like h264 encoding, Blu-ray authoring, etc.


Sincere thanks for any advice.
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My understanding is that a CS5 system without NVIDIA CUDA support is going to choke significantly if you have more than 1 layer and want to play anything back in rt without a render step. Want to find out what it looks like? Just find someone with a CS5 system with NVIDIA CUDA and have them disable the CUDA drivers and see how you like it (most people that have built a system have experienced this before they read the documentation about enabling the CUDA drivers).
 
I would imagine that's true with native h264 editing, but not necessarily true with a fast system and the CineForm codec.

With FCP, I'm very accustomed to render steps so anything like CUDA/Mercury engine acceleration is simply gravy to me.
 
Elton said:
I would imagine that's true with native h264 editing, but not necessarily true with a fast system and the CineForm codec.

With FCP, I'm very accustomed to render steps so anything like CUDA/Mercury engine acceleration is simply gravy to me.
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Like I said, try it on someone's proper CS5 system without MPE enabled. FWIW, in my experience Cineform files (at least at the resolutions I was given) are very big. If you are indeed fixed on using Cineform you should also take into consideration the workflow for transcoding which some people find time-consuming.
 
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So far so good. Mercury Engine playback works on the GeForce GTX 460m (1.5 GB) that comes with the Toshiba. Native MTS editing works and is relatively smooth, but CineForm is much snappier. Very enjoyable so far.
 
To answer the question directly:

Yes. Hardware support of the MPE does make a significant difference.

(But no, it won't "choke" if it doesn't have it. Well, not with current hardware specs.)
 
aguia said:
My understanding is that a CS5 system without NVIDIA CUDA support is going to choke significantly if you have more than 1 layer and want to play anything back in rt without a render step. Want to find out what it looks like? Just find someone with a CS5 system with NVIDIA CUDA and have them disable the CUDA drivers and see how you like it (most people that have built a system have experienced this before they read the documentation about enabling the CUDA drivers).
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I've got a HP laptop (i7 720 1.6ghz, 8GB RAM), and I can edit HD (with a couple layers) just fine without CUDA support. If I start stacking effects, then I do notice a slowdown, but overall I get pretty good performance.
 
David Jimerson said:
To answer the question directly:

Yes. Hardware support of the MPE does make a significant difference.

(But no, it won't "choke" if it doesn't have it. Well, not with current hardware specs.)
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to clarify: by "choke" I meant red in the timeline. In my experience with the systems that I have built and work with on a regular basis that meet all of Adobe's CS5 specs and score respectably on the benchmark tests, no MPE means you will experience red on transitions, or even scaling and speed when working with native material. Sometimes you can work in reduced playback resolution, but forget about smooth playback with any effects or even a transparent layer with a TC burn window. There are always workarounds, transcoding is one tactic. But for me (and others) the whole point of CS5 is no more transcoding and, evidently no more editing in offline resolutions and doing a mastering/conform step at the end.

If I had to do everything as cheaply as possible, and for some people (including large sections of the U.S. Government) Win 7/64 is also a hurdle, I would work in transcoded or offline resolutions on an older generation machine with CS4. The point being that if you don't have the hardware to support MPE, I'm not sure what the benefit of running CS5 would be?

It sounds like the OP found a laptop that will support MPE which is a positive development.
 
I am working with AF100 AVCHD alot now, and while I like the idea of no transcoding--I still say there's no free lunch. Native MTS editing is just ok--functional at a rudimentary level, but fairly limiting still. I was looking for a good intermediate that was equivalent to ProRes workflow on FCP, and CineForm seems to do the trick.

Now, could someone explain to me why NeoScene software doesn't allow thumbnail views and trimming before transcoding? Great codec but man, talk about bare bones functionality with a drab interface.
 
aguia said:
...but forget about smooth playback with any effects or even a transparent layer with a TC burn window.
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I have to say that's not been my experience at all. I was on set one day shooting greenscreen. We shot a short test clip (30 seconds or so), and I pulled the SxS card from camera and put it in my laptop, brought the clip over into PPro CS5 from the card (didn't copy it onto my hard drive), and I was able to key the clip with Ultra, put in a background, and play it back in realtime for the client. I've even done some editing on set straight from the card (w/transitions) and still have smooth playback.

And this is on a laptop without one of the approved cards - red render line over the clip.
 
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