A supplier came in with a test system I could punish for a week. 12 Gb RAM and 8 cores and a medium NVidia card.
Some functions really went a bit faster, when they worked that is. Because my older system also never functioned flawless, I was used to about the same amount of hangups and crashes.
Using Quicktime however, turned out to be a real bitch, because Apple doesn't seem to have a nice stable 64 bit PC version yet, or so I was told. I don't know what to believe anymore but I do know it caused problems.
I can't really do without Quicktime, because Quicktime with Animation codec is the only handy professional format to exchange video graphics with other systems and clients. My supplier said this all would be solved in near future.
I never tested reading from tape and writing to tape. When you create videos, you do that all the time. I did not test that since this never was an issue with previous systems. The new test system was not fully integrated into the studio because it came with a mini MXO2 from Matrox only, which has less professional options.
The supplier came to see my workflow and we both decided I would need a 12 core CPU, 48Gb RAM, Quadro 4000 equipped monster PC with a dedicated preview/scratch disk and a 5T raid 5 disk array.
In januari 2011 that was a VERY powerful machine, way above the needed specs.
I also should mention that some very handy hardware plugins were removed by Matrox because they claim nobody used them but me. I needed to buy Boris BCC and FEC in an attempt to compensate for the loss of the Matrox functions.
Everything was ordered and now the waiting began.
To be continued...
Thursday, 27 January 2011
Introduction to the Adobe CS5 and Matrox MXO2 Horror Show
For about a decade and somewhat more, I've been a media designer. I create images and I manipulate them, both moving and still. Think TV opening titles, websites, weather reports, special effects, print & pre-press etc.etc.
If that's your line of work, you probably need Adobe software. Photoshop and Illustrator are world standards. There's nothing much wrong about these programs.
For video work in a professional setting, you also need a video board that can connect to a broadcast studio control room. There are several brands, but Matrox has always sold reasonably reliable boards with good possibilities to hook up studio stuff at a pro level.
You can buy an Avid system, which is the only way to go if you want to do things right. However, if you're not chopping video at high speed but are more of an effects person like I am, you'd better choose something else than Avid. Since I already use many Adobe programs, it's only logical that I use Premiere for my video stuff. The programs are supposed to work together anyway.
My older computer system at work was five years old and started to fall apart. There was some CS4 software on it, but the video stuff still was Premiere 2.0 and a Matrox Axio board. I couldn't bring Premiere up to CS4 because the video board could not handle that much progress.
This set has always been somewhat unstable but not on such a level it could be endangering my workflow. It was quite a slow system which also stopped development of further enhanced video graphics. The new plugins just could not be handled by the computer.
I had to decide what new system should be bought and I always buy two identical sets for securing my continuity in case of technical trouble.
At the annual broadcast fair IBC, I saw a new system. Adobe CS5 on a monster PC, plus a Matrox video card and a NVidia graphics card. It had four 4K streams with effects on them, dancing around in real-time on the screen. I stopped being impressed by hardware long ago, since lots of machines disappointed me later on. This time I could not help it, being impressed.
You see, CS5 has an all new engine to accelerate your renderings. It uses special power called CUDA, which can be found on NVidia boards. Plus the Matrox board also has technology that should speed up the system quite a lot. Those accelerations used to work against each other like cowboys running after wild horses. But not anymore they said; now the cowboys would ride the horses and the video manipulations would gain in speed big time due to this double power. So they said.
If that's your line of work, you probably need Adobe software. Photoshop and Illustrator are world standards. There's nothing much wrong about these programs.
For video work in a professional setting, you also need a video board that can connect to a broadcast studio control room. There are several brands, but Matrox has always sold reasonably reliable boards with good possibilities to hook up studio stuff at a pro level.
You can buy an Avid system, which is the only way to go if you want to do things right. However, if you're not chopping video at high speed but are more of an effects person like I am, you'd better choose something else than Avid. Since I already use many Adobe programs, it's only logical that I use Premiere for my video stuff. The programs are supposed to work together anyway.
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My older computer system at work was five years old and started to fall apart. There was some CS4 software on it, but the video stuff still was Premiere 2.0 and a Matrox Axio board. I couldn't bring Premiere up to CS4 because the video board could not handle that much progress.
This set has always been somewhat unstable but not on such a level it could be endangering my workflow. It was quite a slow system which also stopped development of further enhanced video graphics. The new plugins just could not be handled by the computer.
I had to decide what new system should be bought and I always buy two identical sets for securing my continuity in case of technical trouble.
At the annual broadcast fair IBC, I saw a new system. Adobe CS5 on a monster PC, plus a Matrox video card and a NVidia graphics card. It had four 4K streams with effects on them, dancing around in real-time on the screen. I stopped being impressed by hardware long ago, since lots of machines disappointed me later on. This time I could not help it, being impressed.
You see, CS5 has an all new engine to accelerate your renderings. It uses special power called CUDA, which can be found on NVidia boards. Plus the Matrox board also has technology that should speed up the system quite a lot. Those accelerations used to work against each other like cowboys running after wild horses. But not anymore they said; now the cowboys would ride the horses and the video manipulations would gain in speed big time due to this double power. So they said.
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