Hi,

I currently have a Dual Opteron 246 machine for my editing suite. I bought the MB with the intent to upgrade to Dual Dual Core in the future.

I'm thinking about doing that now, but want to know how much difference will I experience running Premiere Pro 1.5.1 (upgrading to 2.0) and Cineform HD?

Right now, capture is NOT realtime. I still have to wait a bit after each clip for it to finish. I figured that would be realtime on my machine, but I guess not.

Thanks,

Jim

I'm running a dual core AMD 3800+ configuration. I don't currently use the Cineform Aspect in my PPro 2.0, but when I had the trial version, there was still a lag between capture shut down of capture, and the actual render of the file. I did not even try to "log and capture" to see what the results would be there, and I would be interested to know what others are experiencing.

It sounds like with the new version of Aspect out, that Cineform is allowing a new 15 day trial, so I may take advantage of the trial again with the new configurations it provides.

I will say that the real time editing promised when using their filters and transitions was there when I used the Aspect trial in the past.

Hi James,

CineForm software is multi-threaded, so you should see performance increases by upgrading to dual-core. The general caveat about this is that the memory buses also need to feed more data. And dual Opterons do that pretty well with the hyper-transport bus. This compares to the older original Xeon architecture which had a shared bus. Although you got two Xeon CPUs you didn't get more memory bandwidth, so our algorithms "starved" waiting for data. But you don't have that problem with the Opteron dual cores. Your conversion times should definitely increase.

Regarding the X2 family, it seems to have a shared memory bus feeding both procs, so we don't see as much performance increase with the dual-core X2's.

The new single-chip dual-core CPUs we're seeing from Intel are awesome (955D-Extreme Edition for instance). It seems the previous memory bottleneck problems from the Intel architecture are soon to be a thing of the past, at least as they relate to our algorithms.

David, will there be a very noticeable speed difference between a Pentium D 950 vs. a Pentium D 965 running Premiere Pro 2.0 and Aspect HD? There is a large price difference of about $735 between the two and I'm wondering if it's worth it for the hyperthreading and slight increase in clock speed. Also, does low latency RAM make much of a difference? I'm getting ready to upgrade my editing computer and want the best components within a reasonable price range. I would also consider an AMD CPU if there would be any advantages. Do you have a recommended mother board as I've heard Asus had problems with firewire? I currently have a two year old Asus P4C-800E Deluxe, P4 3.2 Northwood, 2Gig Ram, and 2TB+ of raided drives, which run reasonably well. I need to upgrade to PCI express for the Matrox APVe to get HD out, any recommendations there? Thanks.

Daniel,

I've included the URL for the CPU selection chart for Dell's Precision 380 machine as a reference for my comments: http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?c=us&cs=555&l=en&oc=WS380MTPAD&s=biz.

The Pentium D 950 will be a fine processor - you'll have excellent performance with Aspect HD. It has an 800MHz FSB, and each of the dual cores is single threaded. You should see 4 1080i streams simultaneously in many situations.

If you move up to a Pentium D 955-EE (Extreme Edition) you upgrade FSB memory speed up to 1066MHz, and each of the dual cores is also hyperthreaded. Our algorithms like fast memory, and this CPU is awesome. We have a couple machines with these CPUs at CineForm. In fact this CPU is great for Prospect HD, and with its 10-bit arithmetic engine and full-raster 1920 support is more demanding that Aspect HD.

So...it's a judgment call by you whether to move up to the 955-EE over the 950. The 950 is excellent - the 955EE is awesome.

Always get the fastest memory available that is compatible with the FSB speed of your CPU.

Re motherboard manufacturers, I'd open that Q up to the community here. We haven't seen any problems with any specific motherboard.

Re drives (although you didn't ask about this), our highest performance recommendation is to have a separate system drive from your video store. Your best performance video store is to use a two-drive 7200 rpm RAID0 configuration. This will easily sustain 4 1080i streams simultaneously. You could choose to move down to a single drive for video store which will easily sustain two 1080i streams.

Hope this helps.

Based on the benchmarks slowing coming out, it may be prudent to wait for the Conroe Intel CPUs to come out. They run cooler than the Pentium Ds and much faster at lower clock speeds. However, whether those astounding benchmarks equate to better CineForm performance, I don't know.

For what it's worth I ran a non-HT 3.2GHz Pentium D 840 system, before moving over to an AMD Athlon X2 4400 on an Nforce4 board. I generally find performance on the AMD system (particularly with regards the multithreaded encoder) to be around 10% to 15% better.

OK, I did a little research. The 955EE is only for a single socket mobo, right?

So, David, are you saying that I might be happy editing with Aspect HD using a single dual core processor if I went with the 955EE?

I can get that and 4GB of RAM with various additions for under the magic $5K limit, even at Dell.

I thought I needed to go with 2 dual core processors.

There was never a need for 2 dual core processors -- although that is nice for Prospect HD Ingest. Aspect HD on 955EE (yes single socket) is an excellent editing experience.

You're the man. That's the way I will go then.

I'm thinking a 955EE with a 160GB boot drive and a couple of 500GB SATA drives in a RAID0 configuration. Then one more internal drive for a scratch disk.

4GB of fast RAM ought to be enough. Although, getting more RAM would be sweet if I can get use out of it running Premiere Pro and After Effects and Audition all at the same time?