Will I benefit from a 2-CPU System?
 

I was thinking of buying a new computer with a Dual CPU system, either AMD Opteron or Intel Xeon. Does anyone know if I'll benefit from this for video editing with Vegas, Pro Coder, or anything similar? Even if I could have one chip dong MPEG-2 encoding while another was doing video rendering, it would be worth it I guess.

I could also go to G5 but I don't want to give up all my PC apps. :)

well encoding and rendering are pretty much a similar thing, the difference being rendering is off a timeline and encoding is we... encoding a clean file...

personally, id save my moola for a ton of ram and go with a Hyperthreading CPU...

see, what your saying you want to do is feasible, however, the strain on your HD (ie, rendering one file while encoding another) is gonna overheat your patter to no end as one drive head will be doing twice the amount of work as it tried to keep up with all this stuff.. not to mention yoru render will be bogged down something fierce as CPU is swapped between apps...

if you have 2 different HD's then its a different story...

Again, persoanlyl, id go for a high end HT CPU, and with the moola you save, grab a couple of gig of DDR ram

but...

the only thing i would use a mac for is metasynth... and thats about it...

One of the great things about Vegas is that you can run multiple instances of the program. So, you could have one instance open and rendering (or encoding) while continuing to edit in a second instance. Similarly, you could have two instances rendering/encoding as well. In either of these cases, dual processors will help. When running a single instance, you will not see that big of a gain.

Interesting idea. I do have multiple hard drives so that's not an issue.

Now, if I have two CPUs and Windows XP Pro, will Windows know to assign the second CPU to the second instance of Vegas?

What is a hyperthreading CPU? As in, what model CPUs are hyperthreading?

Thanks a lot.

Peter I have a Hyperthreading CPU. They are the Intel P4's with the C (Canterwood) definitions. Anything with has the 800MHZ FSB will have Hyperthreading.

I just bought one of these and must say I'm pretty impressed. Having been an AMD man for most of my PC life I went Intel this time round. When I render in Vegas, I can still use my computer for other things if I need to as even though Vegas is going flat out I still have about 30% CPU time spare (From looking at CPU monitor in XP) . I could then, I guess fire up another Vegas and do some other stuff if I wanted to.

Cheers
Aaron

I think one other thing you should concider is weather or not the program is written to take advantage of the dual processors. Sounds as if the Vegas program may be. That could a good question for the people you bought your editing program from. I "too" believe that your money is better spent in memory.

Just my 2 cents.

Well I already have a gig so I don't think more memory's gonna help there. :)

I've been very frustrated with my PC's speed lately. I recently tried Pro Coder and it took 8 hours to render one hour of master-quality MPEG-2 video. Now that's fine, if I could use the computer for other things, but to have it tied up, that's annoying. So I was thinking maybe dual CPU is the answer.

Peter what are your system stats. I used Procoder to encode an hour long program and it only took me an hour.
I'm getting ready to build a new machine- after some insite from the board and a couple of articles at Tom's Hardware.com I'm convinced Intel is the way to go. I've been an AMD man for many years.
I'm going with the 3.0 w/800fsb, I'd opt for the 3.2 but beings it's the top processor you pay premium for it ($300 more than the 3.0!) That...a set of paired 512 sticks from Corsair, a 240 gig SATA raid0 and I'll be good to go. Scrounging money as we speak!

Good luck on your new machine Peter- save some money and go single processor but fast, like 2.8 and up, at least that way you'll get HT which is like dual processing.

Glen, that is precisely what I did. TwinX Corsair PC3700 with Abit Ic7. I have my machine overclocked to 3.2GHZ rock steady. Anything higher and it's no go, but my friend got such a good combo that he's running 3.4Ghz steady as.

I definately like Hyperthreading and would go with that Peter if you can.

Cheers
Aaron

First point, xeons with a 533MHz FSB also support HT, so with a dual system you effectively have 4 processors (2 real, 2 virtual). Whether or not that makes any difference IRL is something to which I cannot attest...until my new CPUs and mobo arrive.

Second point:I agree with the first statement, but I've read nothing in this thread that tells me that Vegas is tuned to dual processors per se. You can run multiple instances, but you can do that with AfterEffects version 5 to boost rendering, although it's not terribly SMP-savvy. To determine whether or not Vegas was SMP-aware, you would have to look at the CPU usage balance in a dual system.

Vegas DOES support dual processors...

My stats are P4 1.9 GHz, with the 400 MHz FSB and 800 Mhz memory (1 GB). The hard drives are regular UDMA 133, not RAID (I can only afford so much!)

So Pro Coder only took one hour to encode one hour at MASTER quality? The software warned that it could take 10 to 20 times longer at master quality. I'm doing Master, 2-pass 5.5 Mbps VBR (the only way to go - the footage is indistinguishable from native DV) and 1:15 takes 10 hours.

I would love to get two Xeons. People always seem to assume Xeons are only for servers. Is there any disadvantage to Xeon versus P4, or G5?

Disadvantages of xeons:

Compared to P4 - cost, slower FSB & therefore slower memory

Compared to G5 - they're not in the world's fastest computer™ (according to Apple hype)

Ahh you did 2-pass variable bit-rate, see I was only doing CBR. That's why it took so long- plus mastering quality does take quite a bit longer though not even close to the 10 to 20x more like they warn.

Speaking of Xenons, if you go that route you my as well go with AMD Opturons, they run circles around Xenons. Check Tom's Hardware benchmarks.

<<<-- Originally posted by Glen Elliott : Speaking of Xenons, if you go that route you my as well go with AMD Opturons, they run circles around Xenons. Check Tom's Hardware benchmarks. -->>>

If you mean this I don't see the Opteron "running circles" around the Xeon. At least not in media applications on XP. But there you go.