testing CUDA: which NLE?

megabit wrote on 12/21/2009, 4:33 AM

Throughout January, I will be testing a super new workstation we're preparing for our CAE bundle (my main occupation, BTW). It'll have the PNY Quadro FX 4800 graphics card (192 CUDA Cores) plus the PNY Tesla C1060 (240 Streaming Processor Cores) coprocessor.

Even though my main interest is accelerating our CAE software number crunching, I'd also like to test it with my HD video... Of course Vegas (no matter how much I like it) will not even notice the extra power, therefore I'd like to install some trial of another NLE that would :)

What do you advise? Which NLE trial is best to download and benchmark? Also, since many trials do not offer full functionality (like Mpeg encoding, HD, not to mention XDCAM EX format) - is there anyone who owns a licence for such an NLE, and would trust me enough to lend it to me for a week or two?

Thanks for any suggestions/help, and Merry Christmas!

Piotr

PS: I could try Premiere CS4, but the trial cannot do EX...

Comments

Jay Gladwell wrote on 12/21/2009, 5:53 AM

Piotr, as much as I understand your situation, honestly, this post is in very poor taste.

How would like it if someone were to come to you and say, "As much as I like you, we won't be able to use you for our video production (insert any reason), therefore we'd like to use some other videographer. Who would you suggest?"

farss wrote on 12/21/2009, 6:26 AM

As far as I know Adobe's products are the only ones that would use CUDA and even then they're unable to use it for much. They're certainly not making much use of the very high end cards. The demos I've seen, and they went out of their way to demo this, showed little speed difference between the card in a laptop and a full on firebreathing HP workstation that cost big time.
Some color grading systems do use GPU acceleration but the graphics card and HD SDI daughter board are around $10K from memory.

CUDA is of far more use in CAE and CAD, much of the work is in rasterising vector graphics and the like.

Of course the high end Avid system use lots of hardware acceleration but then I think you're into $100K+ systems and it's all purpose built.

Bob.

megabit wrote on 12/21/2009, 6:48 AM

Bob,

Thanks for your sound (as always) advice. I guess I'll use the opportunity of testing this workstation by giving a try to the only CUDA-supporting NLE I do have, i.e. the Cyberlink PowerDirector 8.0 (which I never use BTW as it's generally not even in the same league as our beloved Vegas Pro :)).

Jay,

Christmas is coming, so I'll refrain from stronger reaction to your post - but frankly, I don't understand what your problem is with my post. I treat this forum as a platform for exchanging problems, solutions, ideas etc. with a group of mates, which I've almost come to treat as friends. I NEVER said I'm going to ditch Vegas in favour of Premiere or anything else; it so happens that video editing is my second profession, and I'm lucky enough to have been given the opportunity of testing a nice piece of hardware...

I've just tried to ask my friends' advice here; what do you find wrong with that?

Merry Christmas to you, Jay.

Piotr

Jay Gladwell wrote on 12/21/2009, 8:12 AM

The Christmas season is not a license for us to be exercise poor taste. My original explanation was very clear, there is no need to repeat it. I provided an example of what was being done. It was not an attack. There is no reason for a "strong reaction." It's not what was said, but where it was said.

It is my opinion that what was done was in poor taste. You are free to do as you wish, as we all are. No hard feelings.

Merry Christmas to you, too, Piotr. And I sincerely mean it.

megabit wrote on 12/21/2009, 8:59 AM

Dear Jay,

Even though I never engage in disputes like this, I need to stress that:

1. During my 55 years of life, I have never been accused of bad taste (a credit to how my Parents raised me - not my own merits)
2. My Christmas wishes to you were sincere, too.

If you strongly believe I made a mistake with my post, please feel free to ask the Moderator to delete it. If I offended your feelings - please accept my apologies.

I have no more to say on the subject.

Piotr

Mike M. wrote on 12/21/2009, 11:16 PM

We've been playing around with this GUI free package. Not an NLE, but a tool for video/audio conversion based on mplayer and other open source programs. A few bugs, but it seems to work with CUDA based cards.

http://www.mediacoderhq.com/index.htm

megabit wrote on 12/22/2009, 3:07 AM

Thanks Mixer440; I'll certainly give it a try - if only out of pure curiosity :)

LSHorwitz wrote on 12/23/2009, 7:00 AM

Cuda-enabled NLE / video software I use here includes Pegasys TMPG Express 4, Badaboom, Power Director 8, and MediaShow Espresso. The most frequently cited benchmarks for demonstrating accelerated video rendering are with TMPG Express 4.

Hope this helps,
Larry