Randy, this is exactly the question I had. If this is true, then it's good news indeed. Can anyone else confirm this, i.e. a four-track multicam sequence doesn't count against the 3-layer limit? I mean, while doing the multicam edit you are playing back all four layers of HD, albeit at reduced resolutions...

Okay so I'm going to try pick up a GTX 285 second hand but is the MPE that good?

I've got a slowish AMD quad core 2.1 CPU and 8GB of ram with a Nvidia Quadro 3700. Since there is no support for this card is it worth as a stop gap to improve my rendering/exporting times?

I'd also need a new PSU but is it worth spending £200/$300 for the use of MPE?

David,

My experience with CS5 has shown performance increases around 40% across the board without hardware supported MPE. That is nice!!!.

I suggest you first get CS5 and try it. You may be pleasantly surprised by the speed increase and the stability.

In Q3 support for the GTX-480 Fermi card is expected and that may be a better investment than an end of the line GTX-285.

I would wait for the first benchmarks to appear, that show the performance gains from MPE.

Harm I think you are right. I'm also using Cineform NeoHD v4 and of course there isnt a GPU support for that so I might as well upgrade to Cineform V5 and save up for a decent i7 machine.

I'm exporting a 20 min Cineform file with some effects and what no and its took 2hours 40 mins and still 2 hours left.

If CS5 can knock of 40% of that I'd be happy!

David,

On my system a 26 second time line with four tracks, AVCHD 29.97i, HDV 1080 25i, XDCAM-EX 1920 25i and titles, heavily loaded with 3-way CC, Gaussian blur, fast CC, echo, motion/scale/position, opacity all keyframed with bezier curves, BW, blends and similar effects, exporting to H.264 took 28 seconds without hardware MPE. That is nearly RT.

Definitely good news Harm.

Anyone have any experience using MPE on a Mac? Would have to be GTX 285 or Quadro 4800 as those are the only two supported...