64 bit and the NLE

Gints Klimanis · July 28th, 2004, 03:41 PM

>64-bit does have another advantage that I did not mention in >that you can address more RAM

Yeah, Glenn, you were always posting the speedup with your RAM disk. With the 64-bit Windows and a lot of money, you can make a monster RAM disk. While this may not help for the usual DV.avi to MPEG2, it would help immensely for operations involving uncompressed video.

Glenn Chan · July 29th, 2004, 08:05 PM

How much do you think a RAM disk for uncompressed video would cost? :D

Quick and dirty calculation:
Assume a 1GB DIMM (Registered) costs $430. Non-registered RAM will not work since they are limited to 4 DIMMs (technical reasons).
Assume uncompressed video is 65GB/hour. (this is probably wrong)
You have an imaginary motherboard with 65 RAM slots (yeah right.... it'd run out of space). I'm also assuming it's free (yeah right... such a motherboard would likely be ridiculously expensive).

So that's $27950 ***before the motherboard***. In two years, maybe the price of RAM will drop in half as long as the manufacturers don't start price fixing again. The motherboard will likely not have 64 DIMM slots... which means you have to use higher capacity DIMMs instead. This would raise the price a lot.

Why not just get an Avid with hardware acceleration?

Fred Finn · January 15th, 2005, 09:15 AM

I'm sure this same discussion ocurred on the change from 16 bit as well. And look at us now.

Rhett Allen · January 15th, 2005, 01:26 PM

It's been a while since this discussions was active but I thought I would make note that Cinelerra is supported in 64bit environments, in fact it's recommended setup is a Dual Opteron system.

" Cinelerra is more stable in a 64 bit operating system than a 32 bit operating system. The reason is intermediate address calculations start screwing up at around 512MB on a 32 bit system. Multiplying and adding small registers can wrap around even 512MB numbers and that's what we're especially seeing with memory intensive floating point images.

Fortunately Cinelerra and Linux are now fully functional on the dew-opp. The dual Opteron, that is. This is improvement you can feel. Floating point image calculations finish in a snap. Never cower in fear over 2 gig virtual set sizes again. Cinelerra's floating point imaging is the application your dew-opp has been looking for." -from Cinelerra website

Recommended setup:
Dual 2.4Ghz Opteron
4GB RAM.
200 GB storage for movie files.
Gigabit ethernet

...of course the new Mac OSX (Tiger) is going to be 64bit as well so it can take advantage of those big 64bit G5 processors.
Too bad it's taking Windoze so long to get their 64bit OS produced. I've been hearing "Longhorn is coming in the next few months" since 2001! I'm over it!

Kevin Shaw · January 16th, 2005, 05:31 PM

<<<...of course the new Mac OSX (Tiger) is going to be 64bit as well so it can take advantage of those big 64bit G5 processors.
Too bad it's taking Windoze so long to get their 64bit OS produced. I've been hearing "Longhorn is coming in the next few months" since 2001! I'm over it! -->>>

As I understand it, the Mac OS is turning out to have a lot less 64-bit features than Apple would like people to believe, at least so far. Meanwhile, Windows has had a full 64-bit version for several years now (for Itanium processors), and the new "extended" 32/64 bit OS will easily outsell and outperform Mac OSX. I'm sure Apple will do everything they can to take advantage of 64-bit computing, but as usual it won't give them any advantage in the long run. Most computer users are so over Apple, it's a miracle the company is still in business. :-)

Rhett Allen · January 16th, 2005, 06:30 PM

Which version of Windows is 64bit? 2003 Server? The only non-enterprise version I have seen is WinXP Pro X64 but it's not official yet (only as pre-release) but specifically does not support Itanium Processors. (not that I was looking at Itaniums anyway, too expensive for mortals)

There really isn't much 64bit software (for consumers) on Mac or Windows yet but it will come soon enough (since neither OS is native 64bit). Cinelerra is the only "video" software I've seen but it only runs on Linux, (which is fine by me) the only drawback is it's steep minimum hardware requirements.
I fully expect Apple will port FCP and Shake to 64bit (if they haven't already) very soon after Tiger is released. They are the only consumer computer company shipping an almost exclusively 64bit processor product line and the OS is expected to be 64bit native in the next few months so it would make since they at the very least have their own Pro Apps run 64bit to help boost sales. (but I'm not holding my breath)

The history of Apple really has been a miracle but I'm glad they have held on and NOT gone out of business, not that I really believed they ever would especially now with such a great product line and their stock trading almost 3 times what Microsoft's is. MSFT$26->AAPL$70

I think the next year or two is going to be pretty amazing with the push of 64bit computing coming into fruition for the masses. I always remember drooling and dreaming of this day when I used SGI's but could never afford to buy one. I'd still like to have an SGI Tezro Quad though! That's my new dream machine! DRRRROOOOOOOLLLL!

Kevin Shaw · January 16th, 2005, 07:40 PM

Yeah, I was referring to the 64-bit enterprise version of Windows, to make the point that it has at least been done. If anyone can make a relatively quick transtion to 64-bit computing for "consumer" applications I suppose Apple can, but so far it appears they've been exaggerating their progress in this regard. And even if they do manage to recompile their code to 64-bit, it remains to be seen how much benefit that offers for video editing purposes. All the editing tools I need seem to be working pretty well in their 32-bit incarnations, so I don't see the switch to 64-bit being all that big a deal. This applies to both what Apple is doing and what's happening on the PC platform.

Regarding stock prices, it's meaningless to compare the cost per share of any two stocks. What you can compare usefully is the total market capitalization: for Apple that's currently $28.4 billion while Microsoft is ten times higher at $284 billion, Intel is $145 billion, Dell is $100 billion, HP is $60.6 billion, and so on. It's impressive that Apple can still deliver products which give them the value they do have, and their stock is definitely up recently. Gotta give 'em credit for that.

Rhett Allen · January 16th, 2005, 08:44 PM

Have you ever seen what is available from SGI in respect to video? Play around with some of their equipment for a few minutes and you'll immediately see what a 64bit OS and application can do. It'll blow you away! Really, the power is mind-numbing. Now, is it really something that most of us need? No. Not unless you have a couple hundred thousand dollars burning a hole in your pocket. For DV it would be about as much overkill as having a Formula 1 car for a daily driver. Fun and fast but way more than necessary.

Current stock prices are really of no long term importance but I was just listing Apple's because they seem to be making a very good recovery (in the business worlds eyes). (I just hope they don't stop making computers in favor of MP3 players, hahaha)
AMD is really being the leader in X86 64bit inroads but we still have to wait for software to be optimized for it. The challenge is that most companies focus on the P4 architecture because of it's enormous install base. I'm a little disappointed that Intel hasn't moved faster to develop, or at least move towards more 64bit processors at this level but I guess they make enough money keeping Itanium at a server level and P4 at consumer/workstation level.

Kevin Shaw · January 16th, 2005, 09:04 PM

<<<I'm a little disappointed that Intel hasn't moved faster to develop, or at least move towards more 64bit processors at this level but I guess they make enough money keeping Itanium at a server level and P4 at consumer/workstation level. -->>>

Have you been reading the news lately? Intel is shipping "EM64T" processors now and I think is expected to have most of their Pentium/Xeon chips include this feature by the end of this year. So the transition is happening on the PC platform, but again it remains to be seen what practical benefits this may offer.

http://www.intel.com/technology/64bitextensions/

Fred Finn · January 26th, 2005, 12:35 PM

I tried to run linux this past week to take advantage of the 64 bit system, MAN I wish they would get the driver support together. I couldn't get anything working after a week of trying. Even for stuff that they should natively support (nvidia 6600gt and monitors). I would love to use Linux but it just isn't worth the hassle.

Rhett Allen · January 26th, 2005, 12:54 PM

A week! Quitter! I'll bet I spent 6 months trying to get Linux installed on my machine and now that I have, I can't find anything good to do with it. I guess I am just going to try to use it as a server because it's too difficult to find (and install) any really decent software.
It's a shame really because the system looks and feels so snappy (Athlon XP2000+) but I installed Firefox 4 times before I could figure out where the heck it was putting it. If you have a dedicated Linux geek on staff it would be fine but my brain doesn't have that much room left in it.

Yi Fong Yu · January 26th, 2005, 01:37 PM

that's the life is a *nix user. if you get through all the initial setups there's nothing else likes it performance-wise and stability-wise. you pay for what you get, if not with money than with time.

Graham Hickling · January 26th, 2005, 07:16 PM

This is a bit OT of what's become the main thrust of this thread but ... you mention the "seamless integration of Mainconcept with Premiere" as the reason you prefer it over Procoder.

Are you aware that Procoder chucks a couple of plugins into the Premiere directory? These let you encode directly out of the timeline, in a very similar manner to Mainconcept.

Scott Osborne · January 27th, 2005, 09:30 AM

I have noticed that.....However The Adobe Media encoder....As its now called. Is intergrated into the entire Adobe Creative suite....As far as I know Procoder doesn't install those plugins to Encore.

I am trying Cinelarra again. But this time with a loaner dual opty workstation. I am still configuring Mandrake 9.2...I tried using 10 but its still to buggy. Cinelarra is now fully supporting 64 bit so I am going to find out if this is the route i should be heading.

As far as I can tell its pretty stable so far. But its more than likely going to be one of those things that i am going to spend more time trying to get it to work than actually editing with the thing.( ala my old RT2500). I would almost pay money for it if it were stable and a little more user freindly. I am by no means a linux kernel hacker

January 15th, 2005, 09:15 AM	#18
Fred Finn Regular Crew Join Date: Jan 2004 Location: Jackson, WY Posts: 178	I'm sure this same discussion ocurred on the change from 16 bit as well. And look at us now. __________________ i am the muffin man.

January 26th, 2005, 12:35 PM	#25
Fred Finn Regular Crew Join Date: Jan 2004 Location: Jackson, WY Posts: 178	I tried to run linux this past week to take advantage of the 64 bit system, MAN I wish they would get the driver support together. I couldn't get anything working after a week of trying. Even for stuff that they should natively support (nvidia 6600gt and monitors). I would love to use Linux but it just isn't worth the hassle. __________________ i am the muffin man.

January 26th, 2005, 01:37 PM	#27
Yi Fong Yu Trustee Join Date: Sep 2002 Location: Vulcan Posts: 1,564	that's the life is a *nix user. if you get through all the initial setups there's nothing else likes it performance-wise and stability-wise. you pay for what you get, if not with money than with time. __________________ bow wow wow

January 27th, 2005, 09:30 AM	#29
Scott Osborne Regular Crew Join Date: Jan 2003 Location: Rochester NY Posts: 116	I have noticed that.....However The Adobe Media encoder....As its now called. Is intergrated into the entire Adobe Creative suite....As far as I know Procoder doesn't install those plugins to Encore. I am trying Cinelarra again. But this time with a loaner dual opty workstation. I am still configuring Mandrake 9.2...I tried using 10 but its still to buggy. Cinelarra is now fully supporting 64 bit so I am going to find out if this is the route i should be heading. As far as I can tell its pretty stable so far. But its more than likely going to be one of those things that i am going to spend more time trying to get it to work than actually editing with the thing.( ala my old RT2500). I would almost pay money for it if it were stable and a little more user freindly. I am by no means a linux kernel hacker __________________ Scott Osborne Infinite Video Productions

July 28th, 2004, 03:41 PM	#16
Gints Klimanis Inner Circle Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: San Jose, CA Posts: 2,222	>64-bit does have another advantage that I did not mention in >that you can address more RAM Yeah, Glenn, you were always posting the speedup with your RAM disk. With the 64-bit Windows and a lot of money, you can make a monster RAM disk. While this may not help for the usual DV.avi to MPEG2, it would help immensely for operations involving uncompressed video.

July 29th, 2004, 08:05 PM	#17
Glenn Chan Inner Circle Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: Toronto, Canada Posts: 4,750	How much do you think a RAM disk for uncompressed video would cost? :D Quick and dirty calculation: Assume a 1GB DIMM (Registered) costs $430. Non-registered RAM will not work since they are limited to 4 DIMMs (technical reasons). Assume uncompressed video is 65GB/hour. (this is probably wrong) You have an imaginary motherboard with 65 RAM slots (yeah right.... it'd run out of space). I'm also assuming it's free (yeah right... such a motherboard would likely be ridiculously expensive). So that's $27950 *before the motherboard*. In two years, maybe the price of RAM will drop in half as long as the manufacturers don't start price fixing again. The motherboard will likely not have 64 DIMM slots... which means you have to use higher capacity DIMMs instead. This would raise the price a lot. Why not just get an Avid with hardware acceleration?

January 15th, 2005, 01:26 PM	#19
Rhett Allen Major Player Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Plano, TX Posts: 607	It's been a while since this discussions was active but I thought I would make note that Cinelerra is supported in 64bit environments, in fact it's recommended setup is a Dual Opteron system. " Cinelerra is more stable in a 64 bit operating system than a 32 bit operating system. The reason is intermediate address calculations start screwing up at around 512MB on a 32 bit system. Multiplying and adding small registers can wrap around even 512MB numbers and that's what we're especially seeing with memory intensive floating point images. Fortunately Cinelerra and Linux are now fully functional on the dew-opp. The dual Opteron, that is. This is improvement you can feel. Floating point image calculations finish in a snap. Never cower in fear over 2 gig virtual set sizes again. Cinelerra's floating point imaging is the application your dew-opp has been looking for." -from Cinelerra website Recommended setup: Dual 2.4Ghz Opteron 4GB RAM. 200 GB storage for movie files. Gigabit ethernet ...of course the new Mac OSX (Tiger) is going to be 64bit as well so it can take advantage of those big 64bit G5 processors. Too bad it's taking Windoze so long to get their 64bit OS produced. I've been hearing "Longhorn is coming in the next few months" since 2001! I'm over it!

January 16th, 2005, 05:31 PM	#20
Kevin Shaw Inner Circle Join Date: Sep 2004 Location: Sacramento, CA Posts: 2,488	<<<...of course the new Mac OSX (Tiger) is going to be 64bit as well so it can take advantage of those big 64bit G5 processors. Too bad it's taking Windoze so long to get their 64bit OS produced. I've been hearing "Longhorn is coming in the next few months" since 2001! I'm over it! -->>> As I understand it, the Mac OS is turning out to have a lot less 64-bit features than Apple would like people to believe, at least so far. Meanwhile, Windows has had a full 64-bit version for several years now (for Itanium processors), and the new "extended" 32/64 bit OS will easily outsell and outperform Mac OSX. I'm sure Apple will do everything they can to take advantage of 64-bit computing, but as usual it won't give them any advantage in the long run. Most computer users are so over Apple, it's a miracle the company is still in business. :-)

January 16th, 2005, 06:30 PM	#21
Rhett Allen Major Player Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Plano, TX Posts: 607	Which version of Windows is 64bit? 2003 Server? The only non-enterprise version I have seen is WinXP Pro X64 but it's not official yet (only as pre-release) but specifically does not support Itanium Processors. (not that I was looking at Itaniums anyway, too expensive for mortals) There really isn't much 64bit software (for consumers) on Mac or Windows yet but it will come soon enough (since neither OS is native 64bit). Cinelerra is the only "video" software I've seen but it only runs on Linux, (which is fine by me) the only drawback is it's steep minimum hardware requirements. I fully expect Apple will port FCP and Shake to 64bit (if they haven't already) very soon after Tiger is released. They are the only consumer computer company shipping an almost exclusively 64bit processor product line and the OS is expected to be 64bit native in the next few months so it would make since they at the very least have their own Pro Apps run 64bit to help boost sales. (but I'm not holding my breath) The history of Apple really has been a miracle but I'm glad they have held on and NOT gone out of business, not that I really believed they ever would especially now with such a great product line and their stock trading almost 3 times what Microsoft's is. MSFT$26->AAPL$70 I think the next year or two is going to be pretty amazing with the push of 64bit computing coming into fruition for the masses. I always remember drooling and dreaming of this day when I used SGI's but could never afford to buy one. I'd still like to have an SGI Tezro Quad though! That's my new dream machine! DRRRROOOOOOOLLLL!

January 16th, 2005, 07:40 PM	#22
Kevin Shaw Inner Circle Join Date: Sep 2004 Location: Sacramento, CA Posts: 2,488	Yeah, I was referring to the 64-bit enterprise version of Windows, to make the point that it has at least been done. If anyone can make a relatively quick transtion to 64-bit computing for "consumer" applications I suppose Apple can, but so far it appears they've been exaggerating their progress in this regard. And even if they do manage to recompile their code to 64-bit, it remains to be seen how much benefit that offers for video editing purposes. All the editing tools I need seem to be working pretty well in their 32-bit incarnations, so I don't see the switch to 64-bit being all that big a deal. This applies to both what Apple is doing and what's happening on the PC platform. Regarding stock prices, it's meaningless to compare the cost per share of any two stocks. What you can compare usefully is the total market capitalization: for Apple that's currently $28.4 billion while Microsoft is ten times higher at $284 billion, Intel is $145 billion, Dell is $100 billion, HP is $60.6 billion, and so on. It's impressive that Apple can still deliver products which give them the value they do have, and their stock is definitely up recently. Gotta give 'em credit for that.

January 16th, 2005, 08:44 PM	#23
Rhett Allen Major Player Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Plano, TX Posts: 607	Have you ever seen what is available from SGI in respect to video? Play around with some of their equipment for a few minutes and you'll immediately see what a 64bit OS and application can do. It'll blow you away! Really, the power is mind-numbing. Now, is it really something that most of us need? No. Not unless you have a couple hundred thousand dollars burning a hole in your pocket. For DV it would be about as much overkill as having a Formula 1 car for a daily driver. Fun and fast but way more than necessary. Current stock prices are really of no long term importance but I was just listing Apple's because they seem to be making a very good recovery (in the business worlds eyes). (I just hope they don't stop making computers in favor of MP3 players, hahaha) AMD is really being the leader in X86 64bit inroads but we still have to wait for software to be optimized for it. The challenge is that most companies focus on the P4 architecture because of it's enormous install base. I'm a little disappointed that Intel hasn't moved faster to develop, or at least move towards more 64bit processors at this level but I guess they make enough money keeping Itanium at a server level and P4 at consumer/workstation level.

January 16th, 2005, 09:04 PM	#24
Kevin Shaw Inner Circle Join Date: Sep 2004 Location: Sacramento, CA Posts: 2,488	<<<I'm a little disappointed that Intel hasn't moved faster to develop, or at least move towards more 64bit processors at this level but I guess they make enough money keeping Itanium at a server level and P4 at consumer/workstation level. -->>> Have you been reading the news lately? Intel is shipping "EM64T" processors now and I think is expected to have most of their Pentium/Xeon chips include this feature by the end of this year. So the transition is happening on the PC platform, but again it remains to be seen what practical benefits this may offer. http://www.intel.com/technology/64bitextensions/

January 26th, 2005, 12:54 PM	#26
Rhett Allen Major Player Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Plano, TX Posts: 607	A week! Quitter! I'll bet I spent 6 months trying to get Linux installed on my machine and now that I have, I can't find anything good to do with it. I guess I am just going to try to use it as a server because it's too difficult to find (and install) any really decent software. It's a shame really because the system looks and feels so snappy (Athlon XP2000+) but I installed Firefox 4 times before I could figure out where the heck it was putting it. If you have a dedicated Linux geek on staff it would be fine but my brain doesn't have that much room left in it.

January 26th, 2005, 07:16 PM	#28
Graham Hickling Trustee Join Date: May 2004 Location: Knoxville, Tennessee Posts: 1,669	This is a bit OT of what's become the main thrust of this thread but ... you mention the "seamless integration of Mainconcept with Premiere" as the reason you prefer it over Procoder. Are you aware that Procoder chucks a couple of plugins into the Premiere directory? These let you encode directly out of the timeline, in a very similar manner to Mainconcept.