I'm looking for either an Nvidia or an Ati graphics card, one that is not overkill for HDV editing, can anyone please point me in the right direction, thanks.

Depends on your NLE. Premiere, for example, doesn't really use the card so any card around $100 or less will work. The only thing Adobe says is to avoid onboard graphics.

Check the website for your NLE and see what they recommend.

Depends, of course, on Mac or PC, etc. If you get a recent nVidia board, Premier and Photoshop will make use of OpenGL to speed certain rendering features... fwiw I have an nVidia 9800 GTX+, which I think cost less than $200, seems completely satisfactory.../ Battle Vaughan

Video editing has very little to do with your video card. A modest GPU will do so long that it isn't integrated. It's best to spend more on the CPU and RAM as opposed to a $1000 graphics card.

To my knowledge, Avid and Apple favor Nvidia. It seems that Adobe is indifferent to graphics card brand.

Depends, of course, on Mac or PC, etc. If you get a recent nVidia board, Premier and Photoshop will make use of OpenGL to speed certain rendering features... fwiw I have an nVidia 9800 GTX+, which I think cost less than $200, seems completely satisfactory.../ Battle Vaughan

Just for accuracy, Premiere does not use OpenGL, AE does. The only moment Premiere uses OpenGL is when using AE effects.

BTW I completely agree with Devin, better get a sub-$ 200 video card and spend the rest on faster CPU, more RAM and disks, extra cooling, better PSU, etc. and you will end up with a much faster system.

Thanks everyone for your advise, Sorry for not being spacific, I use Avid, Premiere and After Effects. Also how do I know the card is openGL.

Avid is totally different since they have a list of compatible harware (included video card).

And particularly Avid recommend the Quadro serie for their product.
unfortunately the Nvidia quadro is a professional serie of card , very expensive , unless you limit your choice to the lower end.

OpenGL is hardly a feature used for video editing, DirectX being more powerful for this purpose. OpenGL is great for CAD, or for some special effect using features from OPenGL that probably exist also under DirectX. The Multiple buffering (dual, triple, quad) is a pretty interesting feature for video editing, allowing to display a picture while calculating the next ones. but it require huge amount of memory, that is why quadro card can come with 1.5gig onboard.

Avid may require another card, but for PR and AE I would look at ATI HD4870, HD4890 or HD5850. An alternative might be the nVidia GTX 275.

I would look at any of the newer NVIDIA cards that support Cuda. We're going to be seeing a lot of next generation NLEs that will use the GPU via Cuda. There's already some add-on programs.

The GT9800 and up should work. I just picked up a GTX260 for about $150 from Newegg.

Avid recommends a Quadro FX, like was mentioned above ;). That said, a lot people have had good luck running GeForce cards.

I'd give Videoguys a call and ask them which card gives the best bang for your buck for MC. They are quite knowledgeable when it comes to computer equipment working well with Avid.

HTH.

It's been a while since I checked, but nVidia does make some Quadro cards that have After Effects support built in. I think they were in the 500 dollar range. So probably not anything you are interested in, but just throwing that out there for others. So far everything has ran smoothly on my 8800GTS, I just need to get a couple more gigs of RAM in my machine.

If you use a quadro card with the Elemental software add on, the h.264 rendering will speed up 11 times. I am taking 4 hours to render 2 hours of video with 30% CPU load.

For a $ 1700+ card that is very slow. On my machine with a $ 200 card it takes less than 2 hours, faster than RT, to achieve that, but then I spent my money on the computer (CPU, memory and disks), not on a questionable video card that only helps with H.264 encoding. Everything in my case is faster, so I doubt the value of a Quadro card, when you can better spend the same amount on better components and profit with every application.

Must be a pretty amazing machine to render full 1920 files into h.264 faster than real time, seems like most are seeing a 5-10 times ratio.

Average HD render time ratio - Canon HV20, HV30 & HV40 User Forum (http://www.hv20.com/showthread.php?t=29459)

Are you doing much color grading? Is it a single pass encode? What are your specs?

Mine is an Core i7 940 with 6g DDR3, Vista 64 bit, two drive Raid. I can encode while running, Premiere, Encore, Photoshop and After Affects at the same time. What upgrade would give me a 1:1 or better render time?

David,

Single pass without color grading. Color grading is a killer for rendering times. And not to forget, not using maximum render quality, which also doubles or triples the rendering time.

I run an i7 @ 3.6 GHz with 12 GB RAM and a 12 TB raid30 (average sequential read 850+ MB/s), plus some other disks. Sometimes even running @ 3.8 GHz. See below:

Glad the "apples and oranges" differences are being acknowledged here. Render time comparisons really don't mean anything when two different people are working on totally different projects with different amounts of processing and different render settings, using systems that have more differences than similarities. Meaningful comparisons can only be made when there is ONE variable; all else must be equal. And to begin with, the goal must be stated, as timeline editing performance may be optimized in very different ways than h.264 final renders, for example.

My answer to Dave's original question is that from a performance standpoint, there is no such thing in the desktop market as "overkill" for doing HD work -- you won't edit and say, gee I've got TOO MUCH performance. We could always use faster. How much money you're willing to part with is the main factor. If you're debating with yourself over how much to spend on a video card, start with a cheap one that is certified for use with your editing software, and then see how it goes on your system for your projects.

That's quite a system! You are running all those drives + video card, ram, cpu, etc off of the one power supply ? Even for a 1000w PS, that's got to be a load - especially when overclocking. Do you overclock when rendering?
If I looked at it correctly it looks like a total of 17 Internal Hard Drives
Do all of those drives fit in your case?
What is raid 30?
I have 6 drives, 4 of them set up as a raid 10, or some call it 1+0. "I'm jealous of your system :) Thanks - PK

Paul,

Indeed, I have 17 internal hard disk and it it quite a load on the PSU, so for that reason I use 1 s staggered spin-up. If I use different disk cages, I can go to 21 disks internally, I mean if I run out of disk space...

I usually start with a 3.4 GHz clock speed, when I need to render I increase that to 3.6 GHz or depending on my hurry to even higher.

Raid 3 is somewhat comparable to raid 5, in the sense that there is parity. With raid 3 there is a dedicated parity drive. In my setup I have 6 disks in raid 3. I have two of those raid arrays and these 2 arrays are striped (similar to raid0) to give a raid30. Each array can have one disk failure without data loss and upon replacement will automatically rebuild in the background.

Here is some more info: AC&NC | RAID.edu - RAID Levels - RAID Level 3 - RAID 3 (http://www.acnc.com/04_01_03.html)

Hello Friends. I debated starting a new thread but since this conversation was already in a similar vein, I was wondering if you could help me out. I was running 2x GeForce 9500 Gt video cards each with 1Gb memory. One card was an XFX brand and the other was a BFG brand card. The BFG had a faulty cooler that died while the card was under load and fried the card so I am looking at replacement cards. While looking at the replacement card, XFX GeForce 9500 GT (http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=4179200&CatId=3669), I came across the XFX GeForce GT220 (http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=5286095) and am wondering about the difference in switching to a 200 series card. Both cards are 1GB DDR2 cards and I edit in Vegas (primarily) and Premiere(occasionally) so I know GPU's have little to do with these editors. If I go the 220GT route, I will have to order 2 but I am ok with that if it is a better card. I run 1x 21.5" Acer 1080p monitor, 2 Samsung monitors run in a span at 2560x1024, and 1 1080p HDTV from my computer. I don't have slot room for cards that have a 2-slot profile and while I like the heat dissipation bonuses of low profile cards the on-board HDMI with audio seems like it might be a nice option too. Do you guys have any thoughts on this?

Thanks!