Graphics Card for HD
 

Any suggestions for a good graphics card that's not over the top for HDV editing on Vegas 7/8. I'm assuming it's the graphics card as the playback is rather jerky & everthing else seems OK and I don't want to change the system yet.
At present I'm running an NVIDEA Ge Force 7900 GS card with XP, Intel core 2, 2.1g, 2g RAM. Asus P5N32 SLI SE Deluxe Mbd.

Vegas video stuttering
 

I've got smooth playback on a Gforce 7800 @ 1920x1200 and second LCD TV @1366x768, AMD 4600 (939) CPU and same RAM in both Vegas 7 & 8. When I turned on 32-bit floating point it deteriorated, so maybe this switch is enabled?
Also I usually leave the display res to "good/auto" I see a some performance degredation with "best," though not as bad as I would have expected.

Try this: Can you play an M2T's using Videolan player or WMP 6.4 w/ no stutter? If not, it's likely your PC (or some application running in the background), If it only is impacting Vegas, then there's something afoot in Vegas. If you have add-ins running like Boris, that too can kill performance.

I've had horrible performance with Vegas V8. Stuttering all over the place, especially with 32 bit. I've got the same mobo with a Core2 duo extreme(2.9 Ghz), Geforce 7800GT videocard. I "upgraded" to a Quadro FX1500 and the playback still stutters within Vegas. Outside of vegas, it plays smoothly. Something's amiss in vegas since I only see 50% CPU utilization during playback.

Finally gave up on Vegas and moved to Edius. I don't know why I waited so long to switch. Edius works well, even on my laptop. Transitions play realtime, no stutters.

It's unclear whether you are talking about the rendered product or the preview. If it's the preview, you might wanna turn switch the preview option down to 'Preview/Auto', because at best and maybe even good (on a computer with your specs) Vegas may drop frames to keep up, hence the choppiness.

I run Sony Vegas 8, and it is very unstable compared to Vegas 7. Personally, I don't think it's your graphics card. Sony Vegas is very memory and CPU heavy, and HDV is very resource consuming too. You never mentioned whether it was Core 2 Duo or Core 2 Quad, so I'm assuming you are using Core 2 Duo.

Was wondering how much the graphics card helps for HD video editing. I have a system with the following specs: AMD Athlon64 X2 dual-core processor 4200+, 3GB memory, 2x500GB IDE HDs (one for XP, one for video), PCI-Express ×16 Radeon X1300 256MB graphics card. I use Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 for editing. Editing HDV is fine, just sometimes the preview screen is slow. But the HD files from my Sanyo HD1000 (mp4) don't play well. So would there be an advantage to upgrade the graphics card? I am thinking the new Radeon HD3650 w/1GB memory.

I wouldn't expect much more speed with a video card upgrade, as the weakest link in the chain is the streaming data from the hard drives. Instead of spending cash on a new video card, I would recommend adding a THIRD hard drive to your system.

I have my system set up with three hard drives:
HD1: Windows XP
HD2: Programs (including my video editing program)
HD3: Video files
This allows data to be sent from all three drive simultaneously without causing slow-downs due to hard drive access.

The difference when scrubbing or previewing video is night-and-day compared to a two-drive setup. Forget even trying HDV on a single drive.

So far, I've had good performance with it even though my system specs out below yours. I use:

P4 3.4GHz (single core)
3GB RAM
GeForce 6800 GT 256 MB (AGP)

I imagine you'll see a big boost by adding another drive. Of course, if you can add TWO more drives for video and RAID them....

Ken, I tried doing three internal drives but ended up having trouble. My motherboard is IDE based, but does have two SATA ports (not documented anywhere on Gateway's specs) and when I tried it with an internal SATA drive I had trouble. For now I use the SATA ports with two external drives for backups and they work ok.

Does Premiere Pro use the graphic card or computer's CPU more for previews and such?

The GPUs incorporated in these boards handle transform & lighting, triangles, quadrilaterals, shading, etc... The only place these cards will greatly improve video editing is if your program is using OpenGL or Direct3D special FX such as 3D wipes or transitions. All the 2D crunching that video editing utilizes is still done by the computers' CPU.

Any stand-alone video card with its own dedicated memory - as opposed to integrated graphics which share system memory - will provide close to the same performance as the next competitor. Newer models will certainly be faster, but were probably talking an increase in the 1 to 5 percent range.

What I experienced: Editing HDV on my PC with only two drives caused the video to freeze a LOT. I had vertical white lines in the preview when I would scrub the timeline. If I got too far ahead, the program (MediaStudio Pro 8) would simply crash after a lockup of about a minute or so. It was really unusable for HDV, but SD worked fine.

What sort of issues were you having with multiple drive setup? I'm not sure of your geek quotient, so forgive me if my post seems a bit basic. I don't mean to insult anyone, but I also don't want to talk above anyone.

You know I hate when
 

I reply to these threads, yet I still feel compelled to, I feel like I'm a whinger, I love the way Vegas works, but just can't fathom how come you play a file beautifully in VLC full screen, but it stutters even on a small preview screen in Vegas.
In answer to the original question on this thread, Vegas is CPU bound, and doesn't use GPU for your preview, and really I can't see how it can be harddrive bound is the data rate is only 19.7 to 25mbps for HDV, and it still plays perfectly either straight from my firestore or system drive in VLC.
Is it a case of once it's in the NLE that it transcodes it to another codec for editing purpose? And that the data requirements are much higher??
I must admit Edius is looking good , but I've invested so much into Sony (for me anyway), but maybe I just have to bite the bullet....

Adam

ps: Q6600 QuadCore and 2Gb RAM and X800 Graphics 256MB

My EVGA 8600GTS with 512MB works fine with Vegas. I think it and better/newer cards are available on newegg for around $100.

The problem is the overhead with the HDV format and its MPEG2 compression. The hard drive is more than fast enough to play HDV, as evidenced by the ability for VLC to play the files with no problem. Once you begin to edit, the hard drive has to access the NLE data as well as the video data AND be able to decompress the HDV. The hard drive head cannot access all this data at the same time. SD works pretty well in this setup because of the less aggressive compression method. The hard drives have to work harder utilizing virtual memory to perform the decompression and re-compression of the HDV format on the fly.

Proxy editing - if your NLE supports it - would make operations smoother.

I'm so bad at trying to explain these things. I probably just confuse more people than I help.

Thats good Ken
 

you explained right, and I know systems bog down because of HDV decompressing, but surely then also VLC is decompressing HDV as well, and since the problem exists before applying filters then I would think the data type and quantity being used would be very similar.
Steve Mullens if your cruising past this thread could you throw some insight our way?
Thanks guys, I still think if Vegas offloaded more to the gpu then it would be smoother, but I'm certainly no expert

regards

Adam

Adam,
Are you telling me that Vegas is even stuttering preview on your Quad 6600 system??? please say it isn't so. I am about to upgrade.

Yes Anthony
 

You can't play things on best quality, if you are familiar with Vegas there's 4 quality settings for preview, and each setting has like 3 or 4 levels including auto, half and full.
I find I have to run it on Good Auto at best, sometimes draft full with Vegas 8, I think I recall using it on Best Full on Vegas 7, but I'm not sure I remember right.
But the Q6600 is base level quad core, I could overclock it, but I'm don't like pushing hardware which is mission critical. But the fact also is that Vegas only uses the cpu fully when rendering, and not previewing, usually only using 50%, so maybe if 8.0c optimises multicores more this problem will go away?
I too upgraded to quad core thinking the running things less than full days will be gone, but was unhappy that this wasn't the case. Definitely makes a vast difference rendering though.
But then you get people who run it on 512mb RAM and have no problems, and this seems to be the nature of Vegas, some just lope along, others not.
Well here's hoping for 8.0c, well definitely be happy with the new DVDA. At last Blueray authoring to some degree.
Regards
Adam

As noted above, I don't think the graphics card does much for ANY editing/software playback speed- it's more CPU, software, and maybe HDD related- with some very limited exceptions:
- HD enabled PowerDVD and WinDVD use gfx card HD acceleration on playback, eg GeForce8600 and ATI 2600... I've played back AVCHD/H.264 w/ near 0% cpu, very smooth.
- I think some Adobe and an other editing suite use the GPU, for render assistance, not playback.

VLC is the fastest HD (HDV M2T etc) playback on my Quadcore Q6600, except for PowerDVD, but it's not perfect. Even on multi-disk SATA quad-core.