Comments

Rob Franks wrote on 6/5/2010, 9:19 AM
A pretty dumb question overall don't you think?

I don't think you'll find one single person who wants to see the growth of Vegas stifled. With that however (and I have stated this to you before) Vegas 9 is almost a year old while PP is brand new..... a rather silly comparison.

That being said... SCS does have a serious decision to make with regard to preview. Just about everybody else now has gone with some kind of hardware acceleration, and I don't think SCS can ignore this any longer.
A. Grandt wrote on 6/5/2010, 9:51 AM
I agree with you Rob.

The last time we heard anything definite about this from SCS (as far as I recall) was quite some time ago, and that hardware acceleration (CUDA or AMD's version) was a no go

At that time I think the reasoning were that it added needless complexity and there were questions about it's stability and overall performance benefit (the added overhead talking to the GPU outweighing the gain for anything complex).

CUDA have come a long way since.

Besides I don't think CUDA alone will solve Vegas' preview problems. It seems to me that SCS need to take that rendering code apart and give it an overhaul, the way it stutters and struggles at times, seems to suggest that it may not have scaled to HD as well as SCS and we might have hoped it would. Sadly I also know that a major overhaul may not necessarily make people happy, as new problems are bound to be introduced.
JohnnyRoy wrote on 6/5/2010, 10:32 AM
Well... that depends on whether I have to add $1,500 Quadro graphics card to my PC or not like you have to do with Adobe products! I have Adobe CS5 and a CUDA enabled GeForce graphics card and Adobe doesn't use it!!! So what's the point of being CUDA enabled if you are going to artificially stack the deck to sell overpriced Quadro cards for Nvidia?

I don't think CUDA enabling is the panacea you think it is. At least I'm not seeing it.

Yea, I would like to see smooth playback, but not at the cost of buying a $1,500 graphics card that has the same specs as a $99 card. If Sony does add CUDA enabled preview, I hope it means "all" CUDA cards and not just overprices Quadro CUDA cards like Adobe.

~jr
Rob Franks wrote on 6/5/2010, 10:36 AM
"Besides I don't think CUDA alone will solve Vegas' preview problems."

I'm inclined to agree. You can STILL pretty easily bog Cuda down to a stutter and a jump simply by adding enough tracks or effects. Once you bog it down you're back to the same old stutter with no way out. A lot of additional bucks spent for nothing.

What has never failed is dynamic ram playback. Although it does take time to load and it sucks up memory, it plays at full frame rate no matter what you throw at it.

Given these 2 little facts I would say that some sort of combination of two technologies would far outweigh either one on its own. Kind of like what Sony did in combining their OIS systems and their EIS systems. The end result is a pretty super-duper on-board cam stabilizer system.
Cliff Etzel wrote on 6/5/2010, 10:41 AM
This came in yesterday via Twitter from SCS and I quote:

"Big Sony Creative Software news just over the horizon! Make sure to check in next week"

That's all they're saying...

Cliff Etzel
Solo Video Journalist | Micro Documentary Film Maker
bluprojekt | SoloVJ Blog
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farss wrote on 6/5/2010, 3:23 PM
Current performance is clearly inadequate but simply throwing CUDA at it is not the solution. The code base looks and works like a patchwork quilt. It needs a redesign from the ground up before trying to meld anything else into it.

The preview performance the competition has does not come from CUDA. A solid code base, intelligent memory and core management is how they're doing it. Get that into Vegas and then yes, the option to use say a GTX480 (which only costs $500) would be nice

Bob.

Sebaz wrote on 6/5/2010, 4:53 PM
Well... that depends on whether I have to add $1,500 Quadro graphics card to my PC or not like you have to do with Adobe products! I have Adobe CS5 and a CUDA enabled GeForce graphics card and Adobe doesn't use it!!! So what's the point of being CUDA enabled if you are going to artificially stack the deck to sell overpriced Quadro cards for Nvidia?

Johnny, if you google around you can find that there's a very easy hack (just modifying a text file, as far as I've seen) that will allow you to use that Mercury engine in any Cuda card as long as it has at leat 768 Mb of RAM. I have an ATI card so no luck for me, but I read that people are making it work in Nvidia cards of around $100.
MarkWWW wrote on 6/6/2010, 6:22 AM
I doubt if that is anything to do with Vegas Pro. It is almost certainly just the official announcement of Vegas Movie Studio 10, which has already been leaked. Lots of discussion in the VMS forum.

Mark
jabloomf1230 wrote on 6/6/2010, 1:43 PM
As you stated, PP CS5 works pretty much with any CUDA-enabled card, including my nVidia GTX 275, which works great. But it only speeds up CUDA-enabled transitions and effects, plus previewing. It has virtually no affect on encoding the timeline. And if your storage subsystem or CPU becomes the limiting factor, you won't get the full benefit of the Mercury Playback Engine.

Adobe was clever about limiting the "official" list of CS5 supported video cards to the Quadros and one consumer model (GTX 285) that they had extensively tested. There's no point in drowning your support staff with questions from people who aren't going to purchase a supported video card. Adobe is presently testing additional video cards and is planning on adding to the list of supported cards.

My thinking on CUDA is, if people have fast video cards, you might was well write your software to use them. SCS should take a long, hard look at that for Vegas Pro 10.