video card that could handle 4 multicam - cinform files in Premiere?
 

I'm looking for a video card I could use to edit 4 HD 1080p cineform files encoded with neo scene, in Premiere cs5 using the multi-cam monitor.

my system is i7 920 8 gig of ram, win7 64bit nvidia gts 240

my system now cant play keep up with doing 4 hd clips. Is that what i would need a better video card?

or would my current video card work if i had more ram?

if i need a video card, what could I get that could handle 4 hd multicamera editing?

I would suggest that your hard drive where your files are can't keep up.
Do you have a RAID setup?

no raid. I have 650gb main C drive. and 1.5tb for video files. What drive would i raid? system or video drive?

Hi Dave, I'm no expert, but I know enough that a single hard disk drive can't offer the data transfer speeds you're asking it to do by playing back 4 HD cineform files at once. Harm Millard over on the Adobe forums has some good info-

Adobe Forums: To RAID or not to RAID, that is the...

As I said, I'm no expert, but I'd suggest you're looking at 4 drives configured in RAID 0 to do what you want, preferably off a hardware RAID card.

Oh goodness... you don't need a RAID to work with 4 cineform files.

A decent drive should more than fast enough. It is quite possible you are running into other issues like your video card. I would STRONGLY suggest you bring your machine (video card an all) up to the suggested specs for the Mercury playback engine. And if you intend to continue cutting 4+ camera shows, you might want to look at buying something mid to high end on that list instead of buying on the bottom of that list.

I think CS5 also asks for more RAM than you currently have so that might need to be addressed also.

Lastly, how is that external drive connected to your system? If it's over USB or firewire, you might want to look into a more robust connection like Firewire 800 or even better eSATA.

Not Cineform related or system related, but there's a strangeness with some Premiere users (including me), in where if you've got the "audio follows video" checkmark on the flyout of the multicam, then the system gets bogged down..

A quick test to verify this, is to mute the audio button on the main track. Video playback should be back to normal.

On the other hand, as mentioned before, if you're doing any sort of serious work with Premiere Pro, you definately need step up to the plate and look into having separate drives...

I use 4 different drives to work with PPro.....

In my case when I use Vegas 10 Pro with 4 AVCHD Video files in Multicam I have no problems whatsoever with slow downs while editing regardless if their converted with Neo or not....My Dell Studio 17 i7Core 720QM also handles 4 Multicam projects as well...
My PC and Laptop specs are as follows..
Desktop
MSI X58Pro
i7Core 920 2.67GHz
12Gig DDR3
EVGA GTX295 Video
3- 1TB 32Mb cache 7200 SATA Hard Drives
2-LG Bluray Burners

Laptop
Dell Studio 17
i7Core 720QM
8Gig DDR3
1Gig ATI 4650 Video
2-500Gig 7200 Hard Drives SATA

Just another vote of confidence in the hard drive here,
I do 6 Cineform 1080p tracks on one Seagate 1TB 7200rpm drive, the only prob I had was a couple of PC lock ups due to Overclock heat, dropped the clock speed back and all was good.
i7 920 @ 3.4GHZ 12gb ram

Dave:

Although my preference is for using Cineform NeoHD, I have been able to edit 6 tracks of native AVCHD and HDV under PPro CS5. I've done 7 Cineform tracks with no problem. I'm running Win 7 Pro with CS 5.0.3 on a system with an I7/920, nVidia GTX260, 12g of RAM, and a Matrox MXO2 MIni. My thoughts on the questions you asked:

1. You do not "raid" either the system drive or the "video" drive. If you want a raid (I'm using two in my system), keep what you've got and add a raid in addition to what you are using now. Put the video source files on the RAID. Search on Premiere, Millaard, and Raid to get more detailed info about RAIDS.

If your 1.5 tb drive is an external USB, try using eSATA or Firewire connections.

2. Have you cleaned out PPro's media cache database recently? The default location is in your user director on your system drive. If you've done much editing and rendering, it can eat up a lot of your system disk capacity and really slow down PPro. How much free capacity do you have on your system drive?

3. Have you defragged recently and run disk cleanup? (Since you are using a GTS240, I'm assuming that you are running on a pc.)

4. You probably want to increase your RAM to 12 gigs. I'm drawing a blank on the specific reasons for this at the moment but I recall reading very cogent explanations from Russell Leong and Harm Millaard about why you want to use 12 g or 24 g for triple channel memory (DDR3) rather than 8g or 16g. It has to do with system memory management where 8g or 16g can actually cause computationally intensive things to slow down into double channel mode.

5. Not sure about your video card or if it is the bottleneck. My recollection is that the GTX240 had 1 gig of RAM and can be added to the list of Cuda cards to enable hardware MPE. I thought the GTS240 could come with either 512 mb of RAM or 1 gig and only that the latter would be added to your computer's Adobe cuda file list. Which version do you have? I assume that you've been through the thread:

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/adobe-cr...-200-gpus.html

I remember Russell Leong tested and discussed using GT240 cards here on DVinfo, and it may have been in that long thread that I just cited. If you are looking to upgrade, do a search on the GTX470 because there has been a lot of discussion about it.

6. In the meantime, have you tried reducing playback resolution? (Your source and program monitor windows in PPro each have a tiny, square icon in the upper right hand corner. Clicking on it gives you a pop-up menu. About 2/3 of the way down are settings for "paused" and "playback" resolution. If they are set on "full" try changing to ½. ) This can greatly ease playback bottlenecks during editing.

Dave:

Although my preference is for using Cineform NeoHD, I have been able to edit 6 tracks of native AVCHD and HDV under PPro CS5. I've done 7 Cineform tracks with no problem. I'm running Win 7 Pro with CS 5.0.3 on a system with an I7/920, nVidia GTX260, 12g of RAM, and a Matrox MXO2 MIni. My thoughts on the questions you asked:

1. You do not "raid" either the system drive or the "video" drive. If you want a raid (I'm using two in my system), keep what you've got and add a raid in addition to what you are using now. Put the video source files on the RAID. Search on Premiere, Millaard, and Raid to get more detailed info about RAIDS. 3. If your 1.5 tb drive is an external USB, try using eSATA or Firewire connections.

2. Have you cleaned out PPro's media cache database recently? The default location is in your user director on your system drive. If you've done much editing and rendering, it can eat up a lot of your system disk capacity and really slow down PPro. How much free capacity do you have on your system drive?

3. Have you defragged recently and run disk cleanup? (Since you are using a GTS240, I'm assuming that you are running on a pc.)

4. You probably want to increase your RAM to 12 gigs. I'm drawing a blank on the specific reasons for this at the moment but I recall reading very cogent explanations from Russell Leong and Harm Millaard about why you want to use 12 g or 24 g for triple channel memory (DDR3) rather than 8g or 16g. It has to do with system memory management where 8g or 16g can actually cause computationally intensive things to slow down into double channel mode.

5. Not sure about your video card or if it is the bottleneck. My recollection is that the GTX240 had 1 gig of RAM and can be added to the list of Cuda cards to enable hardware MPE. I thought the GTS240 could come with either 512 mb of RAM or 1 gig and only that the latter would be added to your computer's Adobe cuda file list. Which version do you have? I assume that you've been through the thread:

How to make Premiere CS5 work with GTX 295 and possibly all 200 GPUs

I remember Russell Leong tested and discussed using GT240 cards here on DVinfo, and it may have been in that long thread that I just cited. If you are looking to upgrade, do a search on the GTX470 because there has been a lot of discussion about it.

6. In the meantime, have you tried reducing playback resolution? (Your source and program monitor windows in PPro each have a tiny, square icon in the upper right hand corner. Clicking on it gives you a pop-up menu. About 2/3 of the way down are settings for "paused" and "playback" resolution. If they are set on "full" try changing to ½. ) This can greatly ease playback bottlenecks during editing.