Wow, that is pricey! I remember that it was in the neighborhood of 2K. Are you sure this is what Sony listed?

Thanks for the quick reply.

I honestly haven't seen Sony's list at all and I doubt there ever was one... would have been a first. But the general consensus in this form is that nothing has changed. Nvidia 500 series, AMD/ATI R9 series and the FirePro cards seem to work fine.

Yes, I even remember it was a first for Sony and it caused a little stir here. I've tried search but haven't been successful. The information was given in the thread that announced the availability of V 13.

I am with OldSmoke on this. I have never seen a "recommended" card. All I have ever seen is a list minimum cards and driver versions that work. That list has not changed, probably since V11.

that's so strange that I remember the post and even the followup posts, but I've been searching for a long time now and can't find anything even when I go by the date of 13'th release -- must have been dreaming. Yet....

Just one more attempt; I now remember that the information was given by a Sony administrator who joined a thread and answered many concerns of users shortly after V 13/310 came out. Among other things he had mentioned the ideal video card which they themselves use for testing new builds and when I looked it up and saw the 2K price shrugged the whole thing off. Now I'm trying to find out which card it was. Any idea who and how I should contact?

EDIT:

I just found the thread and OldSmoke, you were right, is was the AMD FirePro W9100, I just wasn't remembering the price correctly.

Paul

You can get 2x R9 290 for a lot less and I am sure they will do a good job too.

Will that allow me to have 4 monitors, or should I then get two of those?

@Paul

I think we start this over. To get the right card for your system we need to know a bit more. A single HD6970 can get you 4 monitors, 2x GTX580 like my setup will get you 4 monitors but more important is to know:

a) what kind of projects and file types are common for you
b) what kind of delivery format is important to you
c) what is your priority: timeline performance or fast encoding
d) what kind of 3rd part plug ins do you use

This will help to determine what card you need. Nvidia is good for CUDA which is mainly used in Sony AVC and MC AVC; ATI/AMD is better for OpenCL like timeline performance.

Assembling an NLE is sometimes a lot more about productivity in a general sense rather than how fast your preview is with a lengthy timeline. There is way too much emphasis in this forum on a PC with a hot video card.

I own and run an NLE business. Productivity is a very important component of this entity. I attack that problem with an emphasis on distributed computing. Hence my NLE is actually a networked farm of seven computer servers. Projects are divided into sub-projects and required skill-sets/w hardware/software deployments. When you examine all of my techinical aspects of the hardware, none of it is that far from middle of the road, including video cards. The most exotic hardware that I use relates to video capture, green-screen studio lighting and set materials, as well as harddrive raid arrays. In general my systems are not built around video cards and they do not play a large part in any step within this environs.

Thanks so much for your care, OldSmoke:

a) what kind of projects and file types are common for you

All my films are 2D animation and they run between 30 minutes to two hours. I've made a theatrically released feature film and a number of half hour TV specials, mostly for PBS or cable networks. Occasionally I'll make a TV commercial or 10 minute children's film for Scholastic.

I am currently completing a self funded 10 part series of 12 minute films for self distribution online through Amazon.

My films are all hand drawn using a Wacom tablet in software TVPaint. My project sizes are 1080p and higher but all clips are rendered as AVIs using a Motion-JPEG codec

b) what kind of delivery format is important to you

1080p Uncompressed (BGR24) or PNG sequences.

c) what is your priority: timeline performance or fast encoding

Timeline performance. Right now I export from TVPaint my AVIs as 720p because my Vegas is not capable of playing back full 1080p in best/full without badly stuttering.

d) what kind of 3rd part plug ins do you use

None whatsoever. I can draw any effect I need. Once I have completed a project, I replace my 720p clips with the same ones, only exported as 1080p uncompressed AVI. I am looking for a card with which I could work directly in 1080 without having to bother with a 720 intermediate format.

My soundtracks are WAV forms which are produced for me by a composer/engineer. I am the video editor of all my films, which is made of music, voice and SFX tracks. Final mix is done by my composer in his studio.

Analyzing what you say - indicates timeline peformance with your original PNG file sequences should be a piece of cake. Especially so if you use the source /destination formula of drive configuration with SSD drives for this kind of media.

What makes your workflow terribly problematic is creating .avi files with Motion JPEG encoding...why would you do this...because two problems come to mind - 1) Quality suffers, and 2) performance is going to be function of decode (which is not going to be easy for MJpeg unless you have a hardware assist.)

Whenever you deal with true animation source and no other - your best mechanisms are uncompressed streams usually pulling of a hardware designed RAID system - then your delivery is a function of drives and CPU - not anything to do with videocard.

Paul

Looking at your reply I would think a single R9 290 would do the job but I would also upgrade the system to a six core LGA 2011.

OldSmoke, This I wrote before I read your post above:

Well, please bear in mind that I am using the Motion JPEG encoding just for the 720 intermediate stage. It takes up a manageable amount of memory. Once I'm done, I will be exporting all my files all over again in PNG sequences. This is what i had done for my feature film (My Dog Tulip, distributed by New Yorker Films)) and I received high praises from a few of these video guy bloggers who are the self proclaimed watchdogs of the state of movie DVDs on the market.

Now I am ready to spend some money on simplifying my workflow to work with 1080p from start to finish. Also I should mention that I have been using the services of a professional IT who builds and services all our computers (since 1994). When I approached him with my desire to finally get this issue resolved, he suggested that I find out what people here use and recommend and he will carry out the purchase and installation in our computers (my wife and I are the only crew on our films).

So thank you for your help and advice and I will run with it to our IT and in time let you know how it works. Many thanks,

Paul

I got the following response from my IT. Would someone please just name a video card with which I cannot make a mistake (price doesn't matter).

Thaknks,

Paul:


Well, the videocards I cannot give much insight to as I have never sold any of them I would suggest posting the cards in your forum and ask which of them are the best option.
What I found on a video forum
http://forums.creativecow.net/thread/24/977679
This benchmark was made by SONY, so it's reliable.
AMD Radeon R9 290 : 22 seconds
AMD Radeon R9 290X : 22s
AMD Radeon R9 280 : 23s
AMD Radeon HD 7950B : 24s
AMD Radeon HD 7970 : 24s
AMD Radeon HD 6970 : 34s
AMD Radeon HD 5870 : 35s
NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan : 38s
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 : 39s
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 : 45s

It seems the R9 is what most recommend, you will definitely need to upgrade your power supply to at least a 750 watt unit.
$200.00 for a 1Kw.
189.00 850w
159.00 750w

http://www.anandtech.com has GPU reviews / perf tests that us Vegas rendering as a test result. You can see the perf difference between card models. I do believe that there is more to card selection than rendering results though, like do you need a 30-bit display capabilities, or not gimped floating point abilities.

Unfortunately that test doesn't include the older HD6970 and GTX580 cards; would have been nice to see those results too.

So I got the AMD FirePro V7900 (fireGL V) graphics card and an SSD for temp files and I am indeed enjoying the expected over all good performances with both my main programs, VegasPro 13 and TVP Pro 11. Thank you all who participated in this thread.

I am experiencing though one small but annoying glitch in Vegas: When I switch to the external preview monitor I get phantom artifacts of previously used GUI windows or my desktop showing through my Vegas GUI windows. A slight manual shift of the "transparent" window's border will make these disappear. Any advice on how to prevent this from happening would be greatly appreciated.

EDIT: To be more specific, these artifacts appear only in the Explorer window of Vegas and are specifically connected with activating and deactivating my external preview monitor (number 4). Also, whenever I switch between two applications.

HA! After much travail with trying to contact Sony (hopeless) trying to contact ADM support (hopeless) trying out several older ADM drivers (same artifacts issue with all of the ones I tested) uninstalling Vegas 13, reinstalling and resetting to factory settings, I found the culprit: Directory OPUS... What a bummer because I love that directory.

Directory Opus? Really? I use that program more than any other on my computers. Thankfully, I haven't noticed any of the issues that you've been having. (I have nVidia K-series Quadro cards.) It would be virtually impossible for me to give up Directory Opus.