Hi, Can anyone please advise me what would be the minimum spec level of GPU for video editing with programs like Adobe Premiere Pro and Sony Vegas Pro? Also, would video encoding and streaming live video in flash format with Wirecast require a more powerful card than the video editing programs? I have a limited budget so prefer to get something that will do the job efficiently and not massive overkill. Itchy
Video encoding is more the realm of the CPU than the GPU. See snippet from article: "The common purpose of graphics cards it to produce immediately visible graphics, whether it is rendered 3D games, producing a visual graphical user interface, or more lately decoding video to be viewed on a monitor. If you are encoding 16 data streams to be sent to other machines to be rendered to screens by those machines then this is different to how the graphics cards you have are intended to be used but, with some extra software, is not beyond what they are capable of. A decent graphics card, with some extra software written to make use of it, can encode video faster than a CPU can but the encoding software has to be written to make use of the GPU or nothing special will happen." In other words, unless you're going to shell out a lot of money on task specific video cards and hope to god that the software has been written to make use of the GPU to encode your video, forget it and let the CPU do the encoding like most other people. Sentinel.
Go to www.Adobe.com/go/premiere_systemreqs for details of supported cards for GPU accelerated performance. For Vegas go to www.Sonycreativesoftware.com/vegaspro/gpuacceleration
Some programmes can make use of GPU's. From what I've seen Nvidia's encoding is the worst for quality AMD's Radeons are sharp but with muted colours Intel's Quicksync is a good balance between the 2, whilst it isn't as sharp as x86 or AMD, it retains the colours Standard CPU encoding is still the best if quality is what you are after.
Thx for the replies, I am using an i7 2600 CPU with 8gb of RAM for the work so hopefully I am sorted out with the encoding side of things then. I will check out the links re Adobe & Sony graphics requirements and make sure I am covered. Thx for the help. Itchy
I'm using CS5 for video editing and graphic design. My system is i7 and my video card is AMD hd 6950 2gb which is working fine for me. I had a Nvidia gtx 460 before, but it was lagging when I do editing. Probably because of the gtx 460 has only 1gb. HD 6950 pricing has come down to $220 in Canada and I paid $295 six months ago.
asye288, Thanks for the info, I am also using CS5.5. It seems as though a GPU of near top spec is required for editing. Out of interest what O/S and RAM do you have, I am using Win7 64 bit with 8gb or RAM. I had considered increasing the RAM from 8gb to 16gb, do you think I would get any benefit or would getting 2GB on the GPU card be the best way to go? Itchy
Correct me if I'm wrong, but is VRAM used primarily for loading graphical objects like textures onto prior to the GPU actually processing it? Therefore it's fairly irrelevant in video editing. However, actual system RAM is used by the software to dump the files you are editing onto, so they can quickly be accessed and modified. Running it off a HDD or SSD would be a nightmare. When I upgraded from 4GB of RAM to 12GB of RAM, Adobe After Effects went right ahead and ate ALL my RAM up during rendering automatically, so 12GB is by no means more than the applications you are working with can handle. So I'd be tempted to upgrade to 16GB of system RAM over a bump in VRAM. EDIT: Perhaps the user above altered something else at the time of upgrading GPU, that may have improved his system's performance. The little paragraph at the bottom of this (outdated, in terms of spec reccomendation) article explains it a little better. http://videoproductiontips.com/video-editing-why-lots-of-ram-is-important
I will upgrade the system RAM from 8gb to 16gb first before throwing money at GPU's. Thx for the feedback, most useful. Itchy
Kind of picking up on Deders post... Unless you're using additional plug-ins that support it, my understanding is that cuda is only used for a limited no of rendering/effects tasks with Premiere d.t. the issues of image quality if it's used for encoding/decoding... [see, for example, here & here for things that it can do.] Now, naturally it depends upon what you're doing in terms of rendering as to whether you'd see an improvement from using it, but... Well, similarly, there's only one codec in the (quite reknown & expensive) Mainconcept codec pack that uses cuda at all - as i don't need H.264/AVC atm (i still haven't gotten around to buying one of the BlackMagic cards & a HDFury widget) then i've not done any comparative testing... [my primary reason for using it is that i've never been happy with Premiere's mpeg2 output - whilst a bit better in CS5/5.5, it's always very soft imho - & need a decent DV codec for TMPGEnc Plus... ...whilst cheap, it's always done a vastly better job for the specific task... ...but lacks native DV support.] ...though, naturally, cheaper consumer orientated software where quality is of less concern appear to have embraced encoding/decoding acceleration far more broadly. Otherwise, the list of gfx cards in the Adobe link are, imho, overkill unless you're heavily using the cuda enabled features &/or (esp) if you were working heavily with long HD(+) resolution footage... Now, these are simply the ones which Adobe has enabled, whereas what you can do is to unlock the software to use a greater range of nVidia cards - this link providing a reasonable guide to stuff. Oh... & whilst the imho usefulness of cuda acceleration can a bit hit'n'miss depending upon what you're doing with CS5.5 overall, what's obviously not known is how better integrated it will be in CS6... ...though it would be reasonable to expect OpenCL support for the same features as cuda which would open up ATi cards.
