Hi All - Time for me to go HDV and finally upgrade from my Matrox RT.X100 and Premiere Pro 1.5. What I love about the Matrox is the realtime aspect and would hate to loose that.

I was thinking of a new rig with a CUDA graphics card (maybe the GeForce GTX 580) and Matrox MXO

What's the realtime capability of CS5.5 with the supported GPU cards like - it's going to be a pricey upgrade in all (about £3K) so I want to get it right

Cheers everyone

Pete

I managed to saturate GTX460 GPU with 15 color correction filters on a single clip, but it was in CS5.

I don't think you'll be missing Matrox much, and there are so many nice features added to PPro since version 1.5, that you'll be glad to have switched. However, expect some learning curve as well. Perhaps downloading a trail version would be a good move.

BTW, you might want to skip Matrox MXO and connect your monitor straight to the graphic card. CS5 allows for correct monitoring without the need for any external solution.

Once it is installed correctly in certified hardware, Premiere Pro/Encore CS5 works like a dream and I can recommend it.

I had a few problems, hardware or software glitch or my incompetence, I have not yet sorted out. Its working now so that's all that matters.

I think the lesson for me was to take extra care to install the software correctly into an Adobe certified computer system.

Correctly means, buy, then download, instead of downloading the trial version first. Or if you have installed the trial version and decide to buy, make sure you have a fresh operating system installed to a clean hard drive, download the purchased version an install it to that clean system.

Peter, if you have a reasonably fast i7 system with 12GB or more of RAM, good hard drive throughput, and a CUDA capable card, you'll be able to smoothly edit multiple streams of dissimilar native HD footage footage.

DVi put together a 3-part webinar discussing CS5.5, each about 14-15 minutes long. Here are the direct links to these videos on the DVi home page:

Video Workshop: An Introduction to Adobe CS5.5, Part One at DVInfo.net (http://www.dvinfo.net/article/post/video-workshop-an-introduction-to-adobe-cs5-5-part-one.html)
Video Workshop: An Introduction to Adobe CS5.5, Part Two at DVInfo.net (http://www.dvinfo.net/article/post/video-workshop-an-introduction-to-adobe-cs5-5-part-two.html)
Video Workshop: An Introduction to Adobe CS5.5, Part Three at DVInfo.net (http://www.dvinfo.net/article/post/video-workshop-an-introduction-to-adobe-cs5-5-part-three.html)

My interview is in the third part and I discuss editing multiple streams of HD material. I don't use any add-in hardware. Just a slightly overclocked 980X and Master Collection.

Thanks folks - one thing that points me in the direction of the MXO2 is the faster than realtime encoding for Blu-Ray - this is the one thing that currently is bottleneck for me - My timelines are rarely under an hour and are pretty slow to render (SD) even with the RT.X100. I have a lot of work on and speed - especially not waiting for render times and live preview, are really important for me

Pete

I should mention that previewing in HD on a HD monitor from the timeline would be a plus also

OK guys - here is the spec I'm looking at - seems like it might do the job with an added 4GB RAM

Thermaltake Element 'V' Gaming Chassis + 950W X-Power Desktop Power Supply
ASUS P8P67 Pro (SLI/CF) Mainboard - Intel 2nd Generation Core™ i - LGA 1155 / ATX
4x USB 3.0 Ports + 12x USB 2.0 Ports + 2x FireWire- P8H67 Pro
Intel® 2nd Generation Core™ i7-2600K Processor (8M Cache, 3.40 GHz) - LGA1155
Professional Overclock Configuration + Akasa Freedom Tower Quiet Heat Pipe CPU Fan
8GB DDR3 1600MHz Memory (2x4GB )
1536MB NVIDIA Geforce GTX580 Graphics Accelerator
1TB SATA3 6Gb/s 7200rpm 64MB Cache
Blu-Ray Re-Writer Super Format (10x BD-R Writer 16x DVD Writer)
7.1 High Definition onboard sound card - for 8 Channel Cinema sound
Genuine Windows® 7 SP1 Home Premium 64bit , English

that is the config i planned to buy too.
you are right 16gi of ram would be ok instead 4 (ram is cheap)
and you are a bit short with disks.
I planned to take 2 small fast SDD and mount them in a strip (Raid 0) for OS and 2 big HDD (2gig) mounted in mirror (raid 1) for video (mirror is also faster on read).
cost would be around 1300 uk pounds

Add the following to this system spec:

1. Up the memory to 16 GB

2. Add at least 2 disks but preferably 4 for two 2 x raid0 arrays.

If you don't the system will be severely handicapped from the start.

You can spec down your GPU to GTX 570, I doubt there will be any serious difference in performance.

You will be able to preview HD timeline without additional hardware if you can live with editing on a single monitor. If not, then you need an additional card for this.

OK guys - here is the spec I'm looking at - seems like it might do the job with an added 4GB RAM

Thermaltake Element 'V' Gaming Chassis + 950W X-Power Desktop Power Supply
ASUS P8P67 Pro (SLI/CF) Mainboard - Intel 2nd Generation Core™ i - LGA 1155 / ATX
4x USB 3.0 Ports + 12x USB 2.0 Ports + 2x FireWire- P8H67 Pro
Intel® 2nd Generation Core™ i7-2600K Processor (8M Cache, 3.40 GHz) - LGA1155
Professional Overclock Configuration + Akasa Freedom Tower Quiet Heat Pipe CPU Fan
8GB DDR3 1600MHz Memory (2x4GB )
1536MB NVIDIA Geforce GTX580 Graphics Accelerator
1TB SATA3 6Gb/s 7200rpm 64MB Cache
Blu-Ray Re-Writer Super Format (10x BD-R Writer 16x DVD Writer)
7.1 High Definition onboard sound card - for 8 Channel Cinema sound
Genuine Windows® 7 SP1 Home Premium 64bit , English

I'd follow Harm's advice, especially on the hard drives: A system with just a single hard drive will always fall short of Adobe's stated minimum system requirements regardless of what the rest of the system's components are. Adobe requires a minimum of two separate hard drives (one for the OS, one for media) - but more hard drives and/or RAID's outside of the OS drive are better. This is because the SATA interface that's used for hard drives is still capable of only half-duplex operations (data can only travel in one direction at a time), but Premiere Pro requires simultaneous reads and writes (which a single SATA channel cannot do).

Brilliant help guys - I'm going with that spec but get an extra 2TB drive as well - I have a rendering question however - currently rendering an hour from the timeline to Matrox AVI (SD) before going into encore takes anywhere from between 1 1/2 - 2 hours. What sort of time am I looking at for an hour of 1080 HDV?

Also to preview on a HD monitor I'm assuming a DVI-HDMI adapter?

Thanks again - this forum always comes up trumps!

Pete

What sort of time am I looking at for an hour of 1080 HDV?

With this system to HDV (mpeg-2) probably about 15-20 minutes, depending on the amount and kind of effects that you are using.


Also to preview on a HD monitor I'm assuming a DVI-HDMI adapter?


Or straight DVI-DVI if you have this input in your monitor.

You can spec down your GPU to GTX 570, I doubt there will be any serious difference in performance.

You will be able to preview HD timeline without additional hardware if you can live with editing on a single monitor. If not, then you need an additional card for this.

Just to clarify, I think Bart means that you will not need additional hardware for timeline playback to a second monitor (or a tv) but that this means everything else has to go on a single editing screen. My personal preference is three screens -- a main edit screen directly in front of of me, a multi-cam monitor to me right and an HDTV (fed by an MXO-2 Mini) to my left. This reflects that I mainly work with multi-cam projects but it is purely a matter of personal preference.

. . . Also to preview on a HD monitor I'm assuming a DVI-HDMI adapter?

Pete

Not necessarily. Almost all (if not all) of the GTX5xx cards have two DVI ports plus an HDMI port plus a Display Port plus and an HDMI port. On all the cards I've researched, you can use any two ports simultaneously. You could feed DVI to the main monitor and send your playback monitor via HDMI to an HDTV. You could do the same thing with two DVI monitors or a DVI and Display-Port monitor.

There are several recent threads on this. In one of them, a poster said that one or more of the GTX580 cards will run three devices simultaneously. She did not identify the specific card and I have not been able to find one myself, however.

If you have not already done so, you might look at this thread which discussed MXO users looking to upgrade to CS5/5.5 (in which the MXO is no longer supported) looking for similar second screen playback capability.

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/adobe-creative-suite/495403-previewing-hd-second-monitor.html