Suggestions for editing 1080p video

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jth182

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Dec 16, 2008
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I WILL NOT BE GAMING

Just wanted to make that clear. I'm looking for a card that will be good for editing 1080p video. What are the most important factors to look for? Core clock speed, # of cores, onboard RAM?

I'm looking at this, but wondering if there are better options for what I need.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130683

I'd like to stay around the same price (or lower). Even if this card is overkill, at least then it will last me for a while. Also, assume that nothing else in my system will be a bottleneck.

Oh, and I'd like to at least occasionally run dual monitors.
 
none, depends on your software in the end, if it doesn't support CUDA or ATI variation, then it is all going to be CPU based.
 
You don't "really" need a specific graphics card to edit 1080P video.
the main thing is what app are you planning on using to edit the video and what format is it in.
Premiere Pro CS5 will use an Nvidia card to accelerate effects for real-time playback. Effects would be color correction, brightness/contrast adjustments, as well as transitions.
 
Power Director 9 and 10 support gpu rendering :)

I use PD9 with a GTX460 and the performance is more than adequate.
 
Ah, well see that's why I asked... I had no idea. I may be using Premiere to take advantage then
 
Assuming I go with Premiere to take advantage of CUDA, then what card should I be looking at?
 
jth182 said:
Assuming I go with Premiere to take advantage of CUDA, then what card should I be looking at?
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The one you have listed should be more than enough, especially with 2GB of VRAM at your disposal.

Just make sure you have lots of system memory, as in 8GB+ for HD editing, you will be eating a lot of RAM with videos like that.

Also, make sure to use a RAID array with fairly recent HDDs or a SSD, it will help cut render times down greatly when you are disk bottlenecked.
 
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Red Falcon said:
The one you have listed should be more than enough, especially with 2GB of VRAM at your disposal.

Just make sure you have lots of system memory, as in 8GB+ for HD editing, you will be eating a lot of RAM with videos like that.

Also, make sure to use a RAID array with fairly recent HDDs or a SSD, it will help cut render times down greatly when you are not disk bottlenecked.
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I highly doubt you will ever be disk bottlenecked when you are rendering.
 
Zepher said:
I highly doubt you will ever be disk bottlenecked when you are rendering.
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It makes a big difference actually. Although a good alternative to a RAID array is just to use seperate source, scratch, and output disks rather than have one hard drive do all 3 tasks.
 
Zepher said:
I highly doubt you will ever be disk bottlenecked when you are rendering.
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Yeah, actually, there have been many times when the CPUs have outpaced the HDDs in RAID0 when I've done HD encoding and rendering.

Using a SSD or a RAID array with 4+ disks in RAID0 is almost a must if you are using a 2P or 4P system, otherwise the disks will bottleneck before the CPUs will.


I've seen this happen on Premiere Pro CS4 and CS5, as well as Final Cut Express/Pro.

All the more a single, high-end HDD can handle is 720p and below at most when rendering.

Unless of course a RAM drive is used, but I wouldn't recommend it for mission-critical rendering projects.
 
Blue Falcon said:
Agreed, never going to happen... not unless you're rendering using a 200 cpu farm or something...
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I've seen it happen though.
After upgrading the HDDs and adding more of them, it cut render times in half on our 2P, quad-core Opteron workstation.

Remember, this is just for larger resolution videos beyond 720p.
Anything lower than 720p and a single HDD will normally be fine.


The more processors and CPU cores you have rendering the video, the faster it is going to render and even more data will need to be written to disk, especially for 1080p videos.
This is encoding, which requires very high write speeds on the disk array or SSD.

btw, hey Blue Falcon. ;)
 
Red Falcon said:
Yeah, actually, there have been many times when the CPUs have outpaced the HDDs in RAID0 when I've done HD encoding and rendering.

Using a SSD or a RAID array with 4+ disks in RAID0 is almost a must if you are using a 2P or 4P system, otherwise the disks will bottleneck before the CPUs will.


I've seen this happen on Premiere Pro CS4 and CS5, as well as Final Cut Express/Pro.

All the more a single, high-end HDD can handle is 720p and below at most when rendering.

Unless of course a RAM drive is used, but I wouldn't recommend it for mission-critical rendering projects.
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What exactly were you rendering?
Lets say you are rendering a 20 minute HD video with a data rate of 20MB/s, you would have to be rendering at over 4x real-time with the same data rate to be disk bottlenecked.
In my experience, 1080P rendering and encoding happens at slower than real-time, usually 2x slower using CPU alone.

Let me know what the source footage was from and what compression ratio was used as well as the destination format so I can do a test on my system and see if I can bottleneck my drives.

I had some Canon 7D 1080P footage I was testing with but I deleted them so I currently have no 1080P footage on hand.
 
Lets say you are rendering a 20 minute HD video with a data rate of 20MB/s, you would have to be rendering at over 4x real-time with the same data rate to be disk bottlenecked.
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lol, the video was uncompressed and had a much higher data rate than 20MB/s.

Also, it was being rendered on a 2P quad-core Opteron system. A single drive was not enough, so we eventually upgraded to a RAID0 array with WD Black drives and the disk bottleneck disappeared.
 
Red Falcon said:
lol, the video was uncompressed and had a much higher data rate than 20MB/s.

Also, it was being rendered on a 2P quad-core Opteron system. A single drive was not enough, so we eventually upgraded to a RAID0 array with WD Black drives and the disk bottleneck disappeared.
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Well shit, you need a fast raid to just play back uncompressed 1080P.
99% of people won't even venture into uncompressed HD.
95-237MB/s is the data rates for uncompressed HD.
 
Zepher said:
Well shit, you need a fast raid to just play back uncompressed 1080P.
99% of people won't even venture into uncompressed HD.
95-237MB/s is the data rates for uncompressed HD.
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Exactly, and I know this kind of editing and hardware certainly isn't for everyone, but some situations call for it. ;)

A SSD will definitely be a cost-effective benefit to this kind of work production.
 
Red Falcon said:
Exactly, and I know this kind of editing and hardware certainly isn't for everyone, but some situations call for it. ;)

A SSD will definitely be a cost-effective benefit to this kind of work production.
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Only if you are working on short format projects.
330-830GB/hour for those data rates.
Let's say you are working on a 1 hour project with 2 hours of source footage, you would need at least 3.5 hours of storage.
What would that cost at the low end for the storage, $2K?

The stuff we have been doing ends up on Bluray, so the rendering/transcoding is slow which negates the need for a really fast disk subsystem.
 
Zepher said:
Only if you are working on short format projects.
330-830GB/hour for those data rates.
Let's say you are working on a 1 hour project with 2 hours of source footage, you would need at least 3.5 hours of storage.
What would that cost at the low end for the storage, $2K?
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All of the final products were stored on our SAN in the end.
We only stored temporary files on the RAID0 HDD array on the system itself.

If only I could personally own hardware like this. :D
 
Okay, so again, if I'm not gaming... what if I stuck with my old 8600GT on an i7 2600k rig? Would that totally bog me down, or be fine for what I need?

(it would be nice to be able to save some money if I don't need to upgrade)
 
jth182 said:
Okay, so again, if I'm not gaming... what if I stuck with my old 8600GT on an i7 2600k rig? Would that totally bog me down, or be fine for what I need?

(it would be nice to be able to save some money if I don't need to upgrade)
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I believe you still need over 896MB RAM to run CUDA acceleration in Premier, if that was what you were planning, so your card may not add anything to it at all. In that case, you could use the onboard graphics of the i7, and do without a graphics card at all
 
jth182 said:
Thanks.

Yeah, in this case I was talking about forgoing CUDA (at least for now).
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Yeah you should be good.

If you decide to go with CUDA-based encoding, make sure your GPU has at least 1GB or more to play with, just to be safe.

Otherwise, good luck with your projects.
 
If you're going to run CUDA with Premiere you'll want something with at least 100 CUDA cores (anything above 128 doesn't seem to get used by the Mercury Playback Engine) and at least 1 GB of RAM. GDDR5 is much faster than GDDR3 with Mercury too.
 
patric said:
If you're going to run CUDA with Premiere you'll want something with at least 100 CUDA cores (anything above 128 doesn't seem to get used by the Mercury Playback Engine) and at least 1 GB of RAM. GDDR5 is much faster than GDDR3 with Mercury too.
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Oh who needs CUDA fuda, a GeForce2 16MB will be able to take care of all your needs! :p :D
 
Red Falcon said:
Oh who needs CUDA fuda, a GeForce2 16MB will be able to take care of all your needs! :p :D
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I do have an old mobo he can use with that GeForce2. It may still even work!

It may not be the best for 1080p video though... :D
 
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