Is this system fast enough for real time HDV?

[Dave Campbell]

I am building up a system for my editing. Want to know if this will be fast enough for real time.

Dual Xeon 3.6GHz, 800 fsb, 2M L2 Cache.
4 gig of ram

I could not seem to find anything faster to put together.

Thanks

Dave

[David Newman]

I think that system is fast enough for any HDV solution. The native NLEs require dual CPUs for dual stream 1080i HDV editing. The intermediate like ours (CineForm Aspect HD) and HQ from Canopus will get you 3 or 4 streams on that class of PC. I recommend a couple of SATA drives in RAID 0 for your video storage. 4 Gig is overkill useless you intend to do compositing. 1 Gig is fine for most NLEs, and 2 Gigs is plenty.

P.S. If you want the fastest dual proc system, go with a dual Opteron 250 system. The separate memory buses and Hyper-Transport still have the edge over the Xeons.

[Dave Campbell]

Cool.

I am running scsi ultra 320 drives in non raid mode.

Now, if Sony will just release the pro camera at 4999, I am all
ready to buy. :o)

Dave

[Kevin Shaw]

"If you want the fastest dual proc system, go with a dual Opteron 250 system. The separate memory buses and Hyper-Transport still have the edge over the Xeons."

David: can you give some practical examples of performance differences between Opterons and Xeons when used with Cineform for video editing and encoding? Over on Tom's Hardware, the latest 3.6 GHz Xeon outperformed the Opteron 250 on six out of nine video-related tests, although it appears that was in a single-processor configuration.

http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/20040927/opteron_vs_xeon-33.html

[David Newman]

The performance difference comes in the multiple CPU configurations. Two Xeons share one 800Mhz memory bus, whereas two Opterons can have independent memory, effectively doubling the potential memory bandwidth. If the application is suitably threaded you will get higher performance with AMD for operations that are memory bound. There is nothing much more memory hungary than HD. Real tests need to be on dual proc systems doing HD encoding and editing.

Practical example : Dual Opteron systems can real-time encode in high quality 1920x1080 24p at 10bit, with plenty of headroom, a dual Xeon system will occasionally drop frames.

[Kevin Shaw]

Thanks David. Are you referring to capturing to the Cineform codec from HDV source, or encoding from a Cineform timeline to final output? Also, what sort of output rendering times are you getting on Opterons vs. Xeons for encoding to WMV HD at 720p?

[David Newman]

There are no 1920x1080 10bit 24p HDV sources. :) I'm talking about real-time HD-SDI feeds from HDCAM or D5 -- i.e. a Prospect HD setup. I haven't done dual proc testing for WMV encoding or the other performance situations you mentioned.