V9 and 7D (Open GL card?)

U

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Panamaniac
I am trying to figure out which may be the best card to get for 7D editing. I guess if you edit the .mov's out of the camera directly you won't have a bad workflow in terms of quality loss, though it might be a little slow. Is that the case?

And if you wanted a fast card what would I have to look for? The best Open GL you can afford? Open GL 2.1? 3.0?
 
Vegas doesn't leverage the card, so it won't matter. And why are you worried about OpenGL? I am cutting some 5D footage currently. I suggest transcoding.
 
Barry mentioned that V9 takes advantage of Open GL cards for decoding the h.264 on the front end, freeing up the CPU for transitions CC and such.

Did I get that wrong?
 
Any modern nVidia card will do. Not because Vegas leverages them, but because:

1. They have more bandwidth memory speed than most ATi cards, and way more than Intel cards, and so decoding helps up to a 10% speed up on all apps (just because data go from the gfx card to the RAM faster, not because of special acceleration).

2. Flash 10.1 will feature nvidia hardware decoding support, so Vimeo/youtube will be smoother.

3. The fastest h.264 decoder today (with or without GPU acceleration), CoreAVC, supports nvidia cards and is able to playback full 1080/30p files even on 5 year old machines (Vegas won't support CoreAVC btw, it's just for playback on media players).

So ANY modern nVidia card will do. As long as it comes with PureVideo2 and has 128 MB of VRAM or more, you are in the clear. No need to spend over $60.
 
Thanks for the very thorough and clear post Eugenia!

What would you transcode the 7D's h.264 to for editing and grading on V9?
 
Yes, for most people Cineform is *THE* solution for Vegas users. I use Avid's DNxHD, for various reasons, but it is NOT nice to cut with on Vegas. Quality is about like Cineform and it's free. So if you want high quality and you want the speed, go Cineform. If you're cheap like me, or you have to use standards based file formats like I do, then you might want to give DNxHD a look. It's now VC-3 compliant, but I chose to archive to Jpeg2000 instead.
 
For some reason it stopped a little past half way through the files and I couldn't get it to finish without moving the remaining files. Is there a trick I need to know?

EDIT: Apparently it didn't happen on an other folder, which had fewer clips in it btw. Is there a limit?
 
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