Video Card Specific
 

Hello!

The time has come for me to upgrade my editing machine. At this point, my biggest dilemma is the graphics card.

I've been looking at some of the Quadro's, but all the reviews I see are geared towards gamers. Does anyone have any experience with these cards in the realm of video editing and video compression?

In particular, I was looking at this one:

FRYS.com*|*PNY

There's also a ton of other ones with CUDA technology that are less expensive and running 1gb of DDR3.

My current upgrades include:

Windows 7 64 bit
6gb of ram
512+ Graphics Card

That's pretty much it for the moment. I'm running a Quad Core (2.4) so I don't see a need to upgrade my processor just yet.

My current editor is Sony Vegas with a touch of After Effects. Are there any particular models that would be beneficial to Vegas or will the same ones that are made with Adobe in mind do just as well with Vegas?

I believe that Adobe is announcing CS5 next week at NAB. They'll likely have information about video cards in the announcement -- the new Premier Pro will take advantages of certain cards' on-board graphics processors. Those cards are the ones you might want for your new NLE machine.

As said wait a week and see what cards are supported in CS5.

GTX 480 should be a good buy

Given the price range indicated by Roger, none of the currently supported video cards for CS5 are in range. Add to that his mediocre system (I call it mediocre because his system is around 3 times slower than top performing PC's, no insult intended) and I wonder whether a simple ATI HD5770 would not be more attractive. Quadro cards are usually much slower than GTX cards. For example the Quadro 4800 is slower than the GTX-285 but is triple the cost. The Quadro from PNY is a really slow card. Recent testing showed the Quadro 1700 is slower than an old 6200.

For CS5 you need at least a GTX-285, which is way over the intended budget and one wonders whether that will help with the current CPU.

Why the move?
 

Not quite sure why my thread was moved to the Adobe Creative Suite forum...it is not specific to any platform. my question is about GPU's lending themselves to video editing in general...not just Premiere and After Effects. As I stated in my original post, I edit on VEGAS with a touch of AE...I would appreciate it if the Moderator of this forum please move it back to NON-LINEAR EDITING ON THE PC where I can get not only Premiere Pro users advice, but also editors of ANY editing software.

With that said, thank you to those who replied!

The main reason i'm not too excited about CS5 is because of rumors of its ridiculous ram requirements and past experiences with all of the PRO or CS releases. Past experiences are BAD for the most part. Bulky software (resource hog, hence huge minimum requirements), slow rendering, quirky user interface (I know, some might consider Vegas a quirky interface....I did at first!), etc.

As powerful as it may be, I've never ran a stable Premiere software like I have with Vegas.

Harm, thanks for dropping some names. My budget actually is $300, the PNY Quadro I linked to in my original post looks like a good deal at a reasonable price.

The one thing I don't want to do is upgrade for a short term gain. So if shelling out a full $300 (maybe a little more) will give me a good foundation for any editing program or whether it'll just speed up encoding times would be great. The 285 looks like a great choice! Thanks for pointing me in the right direction. As always, more suggestions or 2 cents are welcome!

I'm sorry Roger. For some reason when I read your post I read Premier Pro and not Vegas. I don't know why. Must have been late. So I'm the one who mistakenly brought up Premier -- but I'm a long way from a moderator here so moving the thread isn't my fault! ;)

HHmm....you sure you're not just trying to subtly sway me towards Premiere Bruce? lol, j/k

Good info nonetheless. It gives me a direction to look in, even though they are geared towards Adobe products. And it's not like I'm not interested in seeing what CS5 has to offer. They're making a big deal out of it, keeping things closely guarded so I'm hoping they deliver once they break their silence.

Roger,

I don't know about Vegas and the degree to which it can use the GPU, like CS5 can with a limited number of nVidia cards only. Hopefully, someone with Vegas experience can share his thoughts on that.

I mentioned the HD5770, thinking that would be around the price tag you had in mind, based on your PNY link. If your budget is around $ 300, you could up the models to look at to include the ATI HD5850 or the nVidia GTX-275.

I have once used a trial of Vegas but could not get used to the interface. That's just me.
But if I hear and interpret the signals around various fora correctly, I would put - in photography terms - Vegas in the "point-and-shoot" category. Hardly anything can go wrong. PR on the other hand I would put in the DSLR category, meaning it requires much more experience to use it correctly with the inherent risk of doing something wrong. Now, with both types of cameras one can shoot beautiful pictures (edit great videos) but each has it's own learning curve and user interface. I only mention this, because you have had some bad experiences with PR in the past.

If you ever decide to switch over to PR and need help, contact me either here or on the Adobe forums.

Good luck with choosing the right video card.

Roger,

I'm sorry to say this, but you don't get the Quadro FX 580 for performance. In fact, it is no faster than a vanilla GeForce 9400GT, which uses the exact same GPU as the Quadro FX 580. Even a newer and cheaper GeForce GT 240 will beat it at half the price.

If you do insist on a Quadro, be advised that the only models worth considering in that series cost at least $1000.

Harm,

While do agree with your view on the differences between Vegas and Premiere, I wouldn't go far as to say that Vegas is inferior because of its simplicity and ease of use. I use to edit on Premiere 5.0 and 6.0 until I discovered Vegas. THe things I can easily do on Vegas are much more intricate and complicated in Premiere, however, the same results are being achieved.

Yes, it's true, using Premiere takes a great deal of knowledge and experience with the program, but it shouldn't have to be that way.

My 2 cents.

Now, as far as the video cards, I'm leaning towards the ATI with the dual DVI and HDMI inputs. Thanks Harm!

I quoted this because the FX 580 would not have been able to take anywhere near full advantage of even the software mode in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5, let alone the CUDA acceleration features of that program. This is because the PNY Quattro FX 580 has only 512MB of local RAM - and the use of the GPU acceleration feature of the CS5's Mercury Playback Engine requires a minimum of 765MB of free graphics RAM in order to even use it. And even the software playback feature of CS5 works much better on cards that have 1GB of local RAM than on cards with only 512MB. (My current ATi HD 4850 has only 512MB of RAM - and from my testing it barely took any advantage of CS5's software playback compared to what I had achieved on CS4.)