Very mad at Magic Bullet! NVIDIA not ATi acceleration
 

Well, I'm a fool.

I recently tried out the demos of Colorista and LooKs in Premiere CS3, with a Quadcore PC and a modest Nvidia 7600GS card. Really liked both plugins, so thought I would get a better card to speed up their accelerated rendering.

Went to the MB Support website and looked up video card compatibility for these two programs specifically. Here's what it says: "Magic Bullet Looks supports a wide range of cards from both ATI or NVIDIA. For ATI cards, we require a 9600 XT or greater, or an X series card starting with the X700 series.... blah blah .... NVIDIA cards are generally faster than ATI cards of the same level for HD or HDV projects."

Well... I was wanting to swop to an ATi card because Nvidia has colorshift issues in it's overlay when I use Cineform, plus glitchy black pauses etc. So I figured a FAST ATi card should improve at least a little on a puny 7600GS. Just ordered and installed a Radeon HD4850 and ... what the heck ... an HDV clip that took less than a minute to color-correct using my 7600GS now takes 35 freakin' minutes in Colorista!

So I googled around and found on a forum (unaffiliated with MB) that "MB products are only accelerated by NVidia cards, not by ATi ones".

Bah humbug!!! - how hard would it have been for MB to state that basic fact more plainly on their video card page???

Perhaps most of you (somehow) knew this already, but I hope this post alerts a few others.

Successfully swopped the ATi card with a cheaper GIGABYTE GV-NX96T512HP GeForce 9600 GT (fanless, $80 after rebate). Here's a brief benchmark comparison - thought it might be of interest I couldn't find many of these comparisons online: Premiere CS3 on a Quad6600, XP 64bit, 4GB RAM, with 7200rpm SATA video drive:

Color correct and export a 1:00min clip from a Cineform 1440x1080i avi project:
Geforce 7600GS, No color correction: 1:04min
Geforce 7600GS, Adobe Fast Color Corrector: 5:33
Geforce 7600GS, Colorista: 9:20
GeForce 9600GT, Colorista: 7:36

What is this problem with NVidia cards and Cineform? I have not heard about this. Are there specific models that are causing this problem?

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/cineform-...g-preview.html

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/cineform-...ack-pause.html

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/cineform-...level-bug.html

The Magic Bullet ATI issue may have been resolved. Their site states that they now support ATI cards. Anyone confirm this?

Their site always did claim that, in a not-very-specific kind of way.

But maybe they have a new statement - could you supply the link (as I looked just now and didn't find it)?

Red Giant Software: Magic Bullet Colorista 1.0 - Plugin Compatibility

That's it.

Also check your ATI drivers. Could be a driver problem.

I bought the mb looks...only to find it doesnt even work with a matrox apve
(I should have tried the demo, oops).

A pity that such a useful plugin doesnt work on one of the most popular video cards for editing. Still, theres nothing in mb that you cant do in ae with a bit of thought.

Y'know I'd feel bad slamming MB if it was perhaps just a driver issue on my particular system. And things have probably changed since my Sept '08 post.

So ... to make amends can a few folks please post success stories regarding getting hardware acceleration on MB looks or Colorista, with ATi cards (supply card model and driver revision please).

On my HD4830 1gb, 8 Core Opteron Workstation running Windows 7 x64 it still takes about 10X longer then real time to render out an 8bit MB Looks layer in After Effects in 16:9 DV Resolution. For final versions in 16bit and 32bit color I simply just set it up on my server (it has a HD4350 512mb, 4 Core Opteron) and let it render away for days depending on the length of composition.

It is sad with all that power it still doesn't perform like a $50 nVidia card would because of the way MB is written. Does anyone know if they are using Cuda? That could explain the lack of ATI/AMD acceleration. Coming from a professional software development background, it's crazy that they are cutting off such a big market. Heck Photoshop CS4 is accelerated very nicely with ATI's 4xxx series of cards without the need to purchase the expensive FireGL line.

about the acceleration for photoshop, can you confirm that the ATI can accelerate premiere h.624 clips from avchd or the canon 5d mark ii !!
if you have any idea !
thanks,
amr

Sorry for the delay, I do not know off the top of my head. I know certain ATI cards have built in encoding/decoding abilities.

I've just given up over the last couple months, through a bunch of trial and error. I ended up with a Dual Core 3.8ghz Phenom II (Overclocked from 3ghz), Radeon 4830 1gb still, 8gb of DDR3, my 4x1.5TB RAID 5 for video storage and 2x64gb SSDs in RAID 0 for my apps and OS. I will be swapping out the 4830 for a 5xxx series card soon, just waiting for the prices to come down a bit. It's actually faster in After Effects with the Magic Bullet suite then my 8 Core Opteron with 16gb of ram.

Hopefully the move to 64bit with CS5 will make developers think about also adding in ATI acceleration.