Cineform says "Athlon no good for ConnectHD"

MH_Stevens wrote on 3/14/2005, 4:52 PM

I just upgraded from a P4 2.66 to a system with an Athlon64 +3700 just to be able to use Cineforms's ConnectHD to edit HDV in my vegas. I heard much praise for the Athlon here from several sources. After experiencing some problems this is what Cinform support has said:

"Your Athlon will probably perform worse than your Pentium especially if the Pentium was HT. I too own an Athlon 64 and I love it. It blows the doors off of the Pentiums in many ways. A multi-task encoding is not one of those ways. The processor is still a 2.2 GHz processor, and will likely be worked to 100% regardless of Scene detection being on or off."

I'm a little confused and disapointed. Should I try to return my Athlon for a P4?

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Comments

Hulk wrote on 3/16/2005, 8:35 PM

Do you have the CDHD codec on your system?

Before you get rid of a really good cpu let's try to see how your system does with HDV compared to mine.

I have a P4 3.06 and with a 480x270x32 preview window size, set to "Preview - Auto" quality I get full frame rate playback (29.97fps) of a single stream with not effects. During a crossfade my frame rate drops to a minimum of 14fps and then hovers around 16-18 during the crossfade.

I'm using a Sony HDV 1080i video converted to medium quality CFHD.

How does your system do with those performance tests?

Editing native native HDV MPEG-2 TS streams is torture in my opinion. Torture for the user and torture for the computer. I wouldn't even consider it. A small $149 investment in the CineForm intermendiary is equal to literally thousands of dollars of hardware. In reality, I don't even know if a Windows/Vegas system exists that can edit MPEG-2 TS HDV streams as fast as a mid to high end P4 or AMD system.

There are also quality concerns about editing native MPEG-2 TS streams. CineForm can actually provide better quality than the raw stream. Read the white paper on the CineForm site for detailed info on that. Not to mention being able to "grab" any frame you want after conversion to CFHD.

- Mark

MH_Stevens wrote on 3/17/2005, 12:08 PM

Hulk: I may have found a part of my problem. My machine which should have had DDR-400, PC3200 RAM has SDRAM so it needs go back anyway. To answer your questions: I have the Cineform codex, and I too get full frame rate using the codex - ie with the .avi files - even with effects. With the native transport stream I get 6.5 fps clean and 3/4fps with transitions.. My settings are the same as yours but the connectHD can not handle scene detection or conversion on the fly. I first capture the m2t stream then convert with the Cineform codex. When you capture the trasport stream only ConnectHD can not detect scenes anyway.

jlafferty wrote on 3/17/2005, 4:10 PM

I have a similar situation - a dual AMD 2000+ with a Tyan Thunder Motherboard.

I have that exact same setup. The AthlonMP chips are restricted by the speed of your FSB and the multiplier, which on the Tyan boards is 266mhz by a max of 9x I think (??), or 2394mhz.

I'd say wait til next year when dual processor Athlon64 mobos get cheaper -- right now, they (the only one I know of, at least) go for just under $500 for the mobo alone. The bright side is this -- buy an SMP Athlon64 board now, with one processor, and upgrade to a second later. Then...as the dual core chips come down in price, swap out your "older" single core 64's for duals. It's a great migration scheme.

- jim

PeterWright wrote on 3/17/2005, 4:20 PM

Thanks Jim - I appreciate that. I was quoted about A$1200 for dual 2.8 cpus plus a second Gig of Ram - I may do better to save the money towards the next new machine.

TheHappyFriar wrote on 3/17/2005, 6:51 PM

you can get duel AMD 64's/FX's? I thought it was MP's & Opteron's only.

filmy wrote on 3/18/2005, 7:57 AM

In Case you have not seen it, I did not see that anyone mentioned this - but here is a link to a whitepaper Cineforms main engineer, Brian Schunck, wrote called Video Editing System Exploits the IntelÂ® PentiumÂ® 4 Processor in PDF format.

MH_Stevens wrote on 3/18/2005, 11:33 AM

Thanks Filmy, in all my contact with Cineform I was never pointed to this. Answers a lot of my problems with Athlon.

To update my original post, the latest upgrade to ConnectHD, v.1.6, does now work fine with the Athlon64.

jlafferty wrote on 3/19/2005, 6:32 PM

you can get duel AMD 64's/FX's? I thought it was MP's & Opteron's only.

I'm sorry, I misstyped there -- boards supporting dual Athlon64's will be out later this year, and by early next year probably within reach of our budgets.

- jim

TheHappyFriar wrote on 3/19/2005, 8:11 PM

Oh. Ok. I thought I was loosing my mind & missed the chance to have a duel AMD 64. :)

I wonder what promopted them to do that (maybe the thought of duel CPU's with duel core would stir up more business?)

MH_Stevens wrote on 3/22/2005, 3:17 PM

CONCLUTION:

I now have acquired a P4-3.4MHz, standard DDR-400 (PC3200P RAM) with an nVidia PCX5300 (128MB) and I can report that the NEW version of CineformHD works flawlessly - just as it did with my Athlon64. Despite what Cineform said conversion for me was quicker with the Athlon, but it has RAID 0 with system and data on the one pair while the Pentium has the two drives independant as system and data. To conclude, my problems were a combination of a poorly written first version of ConnectHD and an underspec system.

Spot|DSE wrote on 3/22/2005, 3:20 PM

Glad to hear you're up and running! Thanks for the followup.

PeterWright wrote on 3/22/2005, 4:49 PM

Is this version 1.6 the Sony Vegas version, or the more expensive Cineform one?

I bought 1.52 through Sony, but haven't been notified about an update.

Yoyodyne wrote on 3/22/2005, 5:45 PM

Good question - Peter, did you ever get render to m2t to work?

PeterWright wrote on 3/22/2005, 6:07 PM

Not yet! It gets about halfway through a 4 min project then the error message.

It would be good to hear from someone who HAS managed this.

Still not clear whether it's a Vegas issue, a Cineform issue or a joint venture ...

Yoyodyne wrote on 3/22/2005, 6:11 PM

I hear ya - I have not had Sony get back to me since I responded to their first tech support email. I might try a few things tommorrow but if that doesn't work I'll have to jump back to my restore point.

Thanks for the update,
Yoyodyne

MH_Stevens wrote on 3/23/2005, 8:51 PM

Cineform directed me to the 1.6 from THEIR site. SONY should have 1.6 up soon as the version for PremierPro has been out for at least two weks. I am still using the trial from Cineform and before I buy a licence I should get the SONY version to try I guess.