Vista/Gates promises faster video editing:
 

http://blogs.usatoday.com/maney/2006...on_v.html#more

what could change so drastically?

Well, perhaps file transfers from disk based systems could be faster, but there is no way to speed up the camera during capture.

Even if they were thinking of flash-memory based cameras, firewire and eSATA connections are far faster than the cards themselves.

i think he's referring to how one edits. and most of that is done via software.

Sure, you just push the fast foward button. Yep, lame joke.


Oh Bill might be referring to Vista being able to handle more robust ram systems, take advantage of the core chip technology etc. Who know, since I'm still doing updates on XP, I hold little hope Bill can deliver what he says.

Vista has a completely rewritten video display management (the Windows Display Driver Model). The rendering of video (even in preview windows) is much faster because the operating system reads/writes directly to the D3D processing pipeline and memory of the graphics card. That saves a tremendous amount of copying to and from system memory. Indeed, everything about the GUI in Vista is much more responsive because of the tight integration between the OS and the graphics hardware.

I've noticed that video playback in full-frame resolution windows is MUCH smoother than XP on a dual-boot system (so the hardware is the same). Whereas on XP, sometimes the system would struggle to render the video and audio, Vista has no problems (and that was with the beta version).

Interesting... I hope software companies (Adobe, Avid, Sony, etc.) can get their editing suites up to spec on Vista.

A lot of the performance benefit comes free - no need to update the software.

I've noticed this with one of our programs. When the program is really pushing the OS to its limit under XP (and the video starts jerking etc), the very same challenge under Vista (on the same computer) runs effortlessly. I have to tip my hat to Microsoft. Though they have come under attack about Vista, behind the scenes they have really improved a lot of things - the kind of things that most end users wouldn't know about. As a someone writing video-related software for Windows, I get to tinker about under the hood. There's some good stuff.

Vista - my two cents
 

Just be prepared to buy more RAM if you have less than one gig. I believe Vista's baseline RAM consumption is about double XP's.
Baseline is with just the OS booted up, nothing else.

Does it boot any faster? Five minutes before I need to go to a meeting I turn on my XP laptop to get a file from a USB hard drive. I had to leave without the file, as the computer was still sniveling around with networking before I could open Explorer and copy a local (removable disc) file.

I would believe it, it has been nearly 20 YEARS overdue. MS has been doing major improvements on it's embedded OS range in the last 5 years (needed improvements). But what software are they claiming ten times (windows movie) and how much a speedup do you get by running Windows XP on the same spec (lottss of RAM and processor, and honking big video card). By optimising XP for realtime video processing and changing the odd woeful driver for a better third party one, you should also get good performance. Wherever you can touch the new Vista in performance is another thing, but it would be interesting to see how very close you could go. There is most likely a lot of improvement left in Windows, it probably would be a lot better a hundredth the size.

I notice that playback at full screen is faster to, it might well be Windows, but it is probably also hardware acceleration being optimised for full screen.

practically speaking,

does this mean we can "relax" hardware requirements to edit HDV .m2t's?

currently, i still have to utilize vaast to swap out .m2t's for downrez to edit, then swap .m2t's back for final render. mine's a dual MP2800, 4GB of RAM, x850xt pe.

does this mean that if i installed XPP, i won't need need to swap .m2t's out because the whole architecture has changed so that i can edit smoother because GPU's are fully utilized to help edit .m2t's?

this would be one thing that accelerate video editors to upgrade to Vista.

http://crave.cnet.co.uk/software/0,3...9286229,00.htm

Audio - Vista's Achilles' Heel?
 

I've been testing Vista (Ultimate RTM) for a little while, specifically with one of our apps under development.

The video side of things is greatly improved (i.e., rendering video to a window or full screen) but...

...Vista's audio leaves a lot to be desired.

Playing back DV AVI files (or a live DV feed) leads to very choppy audio - on the same PC under XP, the audio is perfect.

After digging, I found out why: Vista uses a completely new audio subsystem. DirectSound is now emulated with software and no longers provides direct access to the audio hardware as it does in pre-Vista Windows.

The fundamental problem with this is that any video processing applications that rely on DirectShow will, by default, use a DirectSound-based audio renderer. Such applications have to be rewritten to get around this.

I have done this with our app and can confirm that, when a non-DirectSound renderer is used, the audio problems go away (same audio hardware, different driver model).

Many modern motherboards have integrated audio, such as SigmaTel High Definition Audio Codec. This is available to applications via DirectSound, WaveOut and the new Vista audio layer.

And there seems to be a bug, too. Using DirectSound, multiple applications can use the same piece of audio hardware - the OS mixes the different audio streams. Using the non-DirectSound way with a DirectShow application removes this mixing problem and, instead of just rendering a single audio stream, the apps lock up/misbehave. (Something else to 'program around'.)

Though Microsoft have their reasons for changing the audio layer with Vista (mainly too many badly-written third party audio drivers causing BSODs), doing away with the hardware-accelerated DirectSound capability is, IMHO, a major oversight.

Many existing applications may not perform as well on Vista, creating a bad user experience. Also, many legacy sound cards won't work - the manufacturers must provide new Vista drivers.

My advice - be cautious about switching to Vista if you have apps that use DirectSound for audio (which includes DirectShow-based multimedia apps).

Consider 64-bit XP Pro if you need a boost. Our 32-bit app definitely benefits from running on the 64-bit OS (since it is so DirectShow intensive).

so, asio still uses d3d or does it bypass that?

this is for 5.1 surround editing.