Xeon Dual core vs Xeon Quad for HDV editing

[Stephen Knapp]

Originally Posted by Eric Shepherd

Will these programs actually benefit from that much ram? It's been my experience that most programs have an amount of ram, whatever it may be, that they need to work with, and beyond that is just there for whatever. Maybe these projects are way larger than I've ever worked on, or the apps are poorly written, but 16 gigs of ram seems silly. :)

I'll tell you what the project was that compelled me to look at a SERIOUS upgrade. We did a 5 camera shoot of a 1.5 hour anniversary worship service, and all cameras ran continuously. On top of that, two of the cameras were shooting analog, two were shooting HDV (one at 1080i and one at 720p) and one was shooting DV. And if that wasn't enough, the service was conducted and shot twice.

Even with breaking the services into segments, we still had four-stream 10-30 minute sequences. With color correction the render times were through the roof. Realtime timelines? - forget it. AE 6.5 was able to bring some consistency to the clips, but Premiere Pro 1.5 w/Aspect 4 kept choking.

That nightmare was too much for the system I have. A bigger production house down the road inherited the project, but nothing ever came out.

Multicam event videography can be pretty ponderous.

[Stephen Knapp]

Originally Posted by Mark Morreau

I have a dual Clovertown E5355 workstation with the Tyan S2696 Board and 4GB of RAM, ATI Radeo x1950Pro. I will be installing a RT.X2 as well.

Mark,

What kind of drives are you using with that - both for system and for edit space?

I've been looking at something similar, but a bit scaled down - dual 5345 procs, same board, same ram. For GPU I have a Radeon X1900XT 512MB, but have been toying with going to the nVidia Quadro 1500. But lately I too have been looking at the RT.X2 and may keep the Radeon both for compatibility and to save the cost.

However, since I am also running Avid Liquid on the system, I need to consider the use of the AJA Xena LHe card, which I see as an either/or with the RT.X2 even though they don't do all the same things. While I don't have any gear that downloads HD-SDI directly, my understanding is that this card will let you capture hi res analog and convert it to uncompressed HD-SDI. I have a cam that shoots 720 lines analog, which will give a pretty nice image when digitized - I think.

But I really don't know what I'm getting into with these cards. Do you, or anybody, have some thoughts on that? [Maybe that should move to another thread.]

-Stephen

[Eric Shepherd]

I guess I'm confused as to what it would need more RAM for. I mean, the individual frame it's working on won't get larger. More RAM doesn't make it capable of doing more work. If the CPU is running at 100% already, throwing all the RAM you want at it won't make it process any faster. There has to be a certain point at which more RAM doesn't help, no?

I see more posts were on the following page, sorry this is out of sequence. :)

[Salah Baker]

Originally Posted by Eric Shepherd

The 3 gig limitation is an XP problem, not a 32 bit limit. The 32 bit limit is 4 gigs.
Eric

3 gb userva max, in 32 bit xp, with /3gb switch
even folks running HIGH MEM ADDRESS apps only see 3.6g in xp 64

[Kyle Self]

Originally Posted by Eric Shepherd

I guess I'm confused as to what it would need more RAM for. I mean, the individual frame it's working on won't get larger. More RAM doesn't make it capable of doing more work. If the CPU is running at 100% already, throwing all the RAM you want at it won't make it process any faster. There has to be a certain point at which more RAM doesn't help, no?

I see more posts were on the following page, sorry this is out of sequence. :)

Think of it this way, Your not just throwing ram at a processor your giving each processor its own ram. Say you have 1 gig of ram and 2 dual processors. Each core is trying to work within that gig. You add to your ram and have 4 gig, now giving each core 1 gig of ram to use. Now they all have their own space to work in rather than sharing. That is where the speed increase comes in.

K

[Peter Moretti]

Originally Posted by Eric Shepherd

I guess I'm confused as to what it would need more RAM for. I mean, the individual frame it's working on won't get larger. More RAM doesn't make it capable of doing more work. If the CPU is running at 100% already, throwing all the RAM you want at it won't make it process any faster. There has to be a certain point at which more RAM doesn't help, no?

I see more posts were on the following page, sorry this is out of sequence. :)

If XP is paging to the HD, that will tax your CPU and increase CPU %. However, if XP isn't paging, then you've already loaded everything into memory and adding more RAM isn't going to help.

An "easy" way to check is to open the Windows Task Manager... choose the Performance tab... and look in the bottom left at Peak Commit Charge. That's the maximum amount of memory you've used since starting Windows.

Now look at the the value for Total Physical Memory. That's how much RAM you have. Beneath that is Available Physical Memory, which is total RAM minus memory currently being using.

As long as Available Physical Memory is significant and Peak Commit Charge is reasonably less than Total Physical Memory, you have enough RAM. And adding more isn't going to help, FWIU.

-Peter

P.S. Don't confuse the PF Usage box with acutal disk paging, it isn't. It just shows how much memory is currently being used (less memory used for the OS I believe).

P.P.S. I'm writing this from the perspective of a single processor machine. So it does not include Kyle's point above.