ATI or Quadro for Prospect (the facts)
 

ATI or Quadro for Prospect (the facts)

Just one of many factors: do you want to use Magic Bullet Looks, Colorista, or other software that makes use of Nvidia GPU acceleration ?

If so, definitely Quadro (or GeForce if you want to save money).

Quadro CX
 

That's an open end question....
I won't even bother trying to decrypt it.........

But if it's of any interest. The Quadro CX is having a promotion, in where they offer their card and Premiere CS4 as package deal...The biggest selling point is its' H.264 on board encoder.
It's an accelerator card..

Looks great, but pretty pricey.

If you want to use a second monitor for full-screen playback with Cineform products (not just a stretched workspace) then there's no question. ATI. No Nvidia card will do this anymore.

That's just plain misleading, Adam.

How so? I've printed -- as a direct quote from their explanation to me, not a paraphrase -- nVidia's position in the other threads on this issue, and they flatly state that none of their current drivers support this, they have no plans to change it, and there are no Vista drivers at all that ever did or will support this. So in what way is it misleading?

If you've found a workaround there are a lot of us that would like to hear it.

You can of course continue to use your older drivers if you don't plan to upgrade to Vista at any point. But for someone building a new system this is somewhat academic.

If you can't find the other threads, here's NVidia's unedited official position on this issue again:

Thank you for contacting NVIDIA Customer Care

NVIDIA has discontinued Full Screen Video Mirror support from drivers after 162.65

XP Driver version 162.65 can be found at the following site:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_162.65.html

This feature is no longer available in the NVIDIA Control Panel with current NVIDIA Drivers and will need to be implemented by the application developer.

The reasons for this are as follows:

1) Newer GPU’s support dual hardware overlays making software overlays redundant and difficult to maintain.
Application Developers would have to redevelop their software to support this function in their movie player.

2) Copy protection issues and potential liability from copyright holders. Not allowed by Protected Video Path Output Content Protection (PVP-OPM)

3) WinXP is being deprecated in favor of WinVista which is no longer supported due to the new Protected Video Path Output Content Protection (PVP-OPM) in Windows Vista

If you plan on upgrading to Vista, this feature is not available


Best regards
NVIDIA Customer Care

Ended up going with the Asus Radeon HD 4870 1G

Hello.
I dont know if this is the same, but I have a Geforce 8600GT with driver 163.75 (november 2007) in WinXP 64, and I can to use my second monitor for video preview fullscreen with Premiere Pro CS3. In Nvidia control panel I use nView Dualview and in PremierePro I set monitor 2 output in custom tab (Playback Settings) when I create a new proyect.

I've used the Quadro 1500 and am now using the ATI Raedon 4870. I'm, so far, very happy with the ATI and have seen no downside to it. (WinXP, Intel Quad, Premiere CS3)
I do use Magic Bullet Looks occasionally, and it seems to work as well as it did with the Quadro. Someone had implied that you need the nVidea to get GPU acceleration with MBL, but according to Red Giant:
"Blazing Speeds:
GPU acceleration (using your ATI or NVIDIA card) delivers real-time playback
with many Looks"

Interesting. When I tried a Radeon HD2600XT and HD4850 with MB Looks and Coloista (with XP32 and XP64) a few months ago, neither provided noticeable acceleration and in fact both were ridiculously slow compared with my GeForce cards.

At the time, The Red Giant website said that while both ATi and Nvidia cards were 'supported', Nvidia was 'recommended'.

So .... either this was a peculiarity of my system, or else something has changed with the newer cards and/or software.

Graham
I have to say that my use of MBL is occasional, and usually for treatment of a single clip or two. It sounds like you have more regular experience with MBL than I do.
I am using the Jan, 2009 ATI drivers, but I don't recall any mention of MBL in the ATI update notes.

I'm using a Quadro 1500 and it works for the most part. The only problems I encounter are glitches during playback startup and scrubbing--which everyone tells me is because of the whole enable overlay issue. Once the timeline starts playing, the video looks fine.

If I 'roll-back' my driver to the link that Adam posted, will the 'enable overlay' thing work on this card?

I've been editing in Premieres Native HD modes and exporting clips to CIneform at the end for a while. I recently updated to PRospect for better color depth and found that when using the Cineform accelerated mode in Premiere I have all kinds of liitle quirks with previews and overlays to second monitor with an NVIDIA 7950 card. None of these are gamekillers but they are annoying as heck. When I am on the timline and can see my clip displayed on external HD monitor, and I apply a Cineform effect to the clip, the diplay on the external monitor goes away. Then I grab the cursor and drag iton the timeline and it reappears again.

This seems like a little thing, and I know it is, but.....when I have 30 or 40 clips on the timeline and I am having to constantly do this over and over to get the display to reappear on the external monitor it becomes a serious slowdown. I know Cineform is a professional codec but how it behaves with regards to overlay makes it seem cheap. Hopefully this behavior is not present when using a Decklink card with HDMI out on it which I cannot move into at this time anyway.

Still, if Adobe can show me a realtime rock solid preview on second monitor without using hardware overlay, why not Cineform? I get practically realtime playback in a HDV preset using Cineform filters anyway and render time for preview is flat out fast too. When in Prospect preset the preview build only use 1 core of my quad processor, making it about 4 times slower than HDV.

I love the Codec but I am questioning the editing mode a bit. Oh well....rant over.

Does any one know which ATI or nVidia cards support multiple hardware-accelerated overlays? It's mentioned earlier in this thread that some nVidia cards support two overlays, which would be fine, but the more the merrier!

They would be used for realtime preview of five incoming HD sources. We've got CPU-driven alternatives that barely affect performance, but the more CPU time I have for CineForm encoding, the better.

ATI 4000 and 3000 series acceleration for Adobe products
 

Photoshop CS4 acceleration works on ATI - Graphic Cards - TechEnclave

Not sure about magic bullet, but Adobe products are accelerated by ATI's consumer line. 4000 and 3000 series only.