Toshiba Cell Processor cuts encoding times

apit34356 wrote on 4/17/2009, 8:45 AM

This cell product is a real killer! But its only a baby cell, ;-) compared to the PS3 and the IBM big brother cell! ;-) Another interesting product from Toshiba is the new, soon to be release mobilephone that can handle HD material and standard pc apps. Since Toshiba brought into Sony's IC manufacturing, Toshiba is wasting no time introducing some killer products, go Toshiba!

jabloomf1230 wrote on 4/17/2009, 10:45 AM

Here's the Leadtek PCI-E SpursEngine card:

http://www.engadget.com/2008/10/03/leadtek-intros-spursengine-packing-pci-e-card/

srode wrote on 4/17/2009, 3:03 PM

Will be great if it helps Vegas with AVCHD rendering - of course the CUDA would be nice to - if Vegas get's that as a usable feature. Better than real time rendering would be really nice!

NickHope wrote on 5/2/2009, 11:17 PM

Aside from the speed, will the quality of the encoded H.264 and MPEG2 video be totally dependent on the SpursEngline card, or will the codec still built into the encoding app (for example TMPEGEnc Xpress) still come into play?

JohnnyRoy wrote on 5/3/2009, 5:51 AM

This is a step in the right direction. I often said that someone should take the cell processor and make a rendering appliance that was affordable for event videographers and link that to Vegas network rendering and they would make a bundle. A card for your PC is a great idea toward that goal.

~jr

UlfLaursen wrote on 5/3/2009, 10:23 AM

I just got the firecoder blue card for from Canopus. Have only played a litle with it, but so far I am not that impressed compared to my dual quadcore Xeon WS. It comes with some kind of Toshiba processor I believe. It can do both AVCHD and MPEG2 encoding and burning, and decode AVCHD to an intermidiate.

/Ulf

jabloomf1230 wrote on 5/4/2009, 7:02 AM

Any co-processing is only as good as the amount of load sharing that can be accomplished by the software. At least from reading their the marketing materials, Pegasys claims that TMPGEnc XPress uses the CPU(s), the GPU(s) (CUDA) and the SpursEngine card simultaneously. Of course, it depends on which filters and codecs are written to take advantage of each computing technology.

NickHope wrote on 5/5/2009, 2:41 AM

So the software codec still controls the quality, rather than what's hard-wired into the card?

apit34356 wrote on 5/5/2009, 4:32 AM

All these "cards" are software controlled, starting parameters/variables are passed to the card. There no truly "Hardwired" encoders today, just self contained computers-on-a-board with software with selectable settings.

There are no Intel ics--= period -- that can process FFP calculations or video encoding as fast as the CELL. Its a matter of passing the data stream to it, which is strictly an OS and disk issues. You can "tied" a couple of I7's together, their just dusted in FFP or real math or vector calculations.

im.away wrote on 5/5/2009, 5:36 AM

Call me dumb, but having read the blurb at the link supplied by the original poster, I'm none the wiser.

OK, I have a Toshiba Qosmio G50 laptop with the cell processor, I have Vegas 8 Pro (soon to be V9.0) and I want to use this product to improve my rendering times. Can I do this from within Vegas or do I have to jump out of Vegas and use the plug-in? If I do have to jump out of Vegas, what do I have to do to render the project and benefit from the supposed speed gains?

If anyone can offer a plain English summary of how this plug-in can really help me I'd be most grateful.

Cheers

russ.

apit34356 wrote on 5/5/2009, 9:15 AM

russ, you actually have a good question in general. I don't have the Toshiba Qosmio G50 laptop in front of me, but VEGAS as a standard product uses a number of third party decoders from Apple to Maincept but non of these encoders use any external hardware(GCUs or "other").. To use the Toshiba Qosmio G50 cell features, new encoder software is required for VEGAS. But these third party encoders can be replaced with Toshiba Qosmio G50 cell friendly encoders if Toshiba makes them available or someone, ie. third party, does. When Toshiba bought the Sony cell ic plant and signed a number of licensing agreements, I was hoping that Toshiba software group would open up the cell apps for apps like VEGAS.

But I think IBM, SONY and TOSHIBA have a general agreement in the beginning to limit access to companies like Apple, Intel and MS which lead to the HD wars, etc, ......... and today, especially IBM and SONY , don't feel the needed to share with Apple or MS or Intel buddies. That said, I hope Toshiba opens up with drivers for all!

NickHope wrote on 5/7/2009, 8:14 AM

>> Can I do this from within Vegas or do I have to jump out of Vegas and use the plug-in? If I do have to jump out of Vegas, what do I have to do to render the project and benefit from the supposed speed gains? <<

Russ, one way to do it would be to get TMPGEnc Xpress and its SpursEngine plugin, then frameserve into it from Vegas using the Debugmode Framserver. My Xvid tutorial includes the framserving process which can also be applied to encoding h.264 or MPEG2 in TMPEGEnc Xpress.

apit34356 wrote on 5/7/2009, 10:59 AM

Nick, nice tutorial, but maybe more info about your suggestion about TMPGEnc Xpress and its SpursEngine plugin would help with the TOSHIBA laptop.

NickHope wrote on 5/7/2009, 11:57 PM

Well, TMPGEnc Xpress is pretty easy to use. It uses a wizard approach. You can just open up the frameserved .avi file, no problem, and work with it.

I don't have the SpursEngine plugin but according to the page, "select Toshiba Qosmio series laptop computers" are supported.

The H.264 codec in Xpress is a fairly recent MainConcept codec and significantly better than the old MC one in Vegas, or the Sony one in Vegas. I don't know if it will deliver quite the quality that the current open source x264 codec will though, but it's not far off.

MPEG2 in TMPGEnc is very good. Definitely superior to the MainConcept codec in Vegas. It's up there with CinemaCraft and Canopus Procoder. The main drawback, particularly compared to CinemaCraft, has been the slow enocoding speed, but with the SpursEngline plugin presumably that should now change.

Christian de Godzinsky wrote on 5/8/2009, 12:38 AM

This is one thing I never understood - how can the MPEG2 encoder in a Pro application (Vegas) be inferior - compared with other similar encoders on the market??? I'm clearly missing something here, something ELSE than just the pristine MPEG2 quality...

There are many threads covering the quality of the final MPEG2 output from Vegas, and many suggest that the MainConcept codec (used in Vegas) is not one of the best. But is it even Pro, as the name implies? I have some doubts...

Christian

NickHope wrote on 5/8/2009, 10:48 PM

The tests I did were based on encoding PAL interlaced DV (mostly underwater) to MPEG2 and watching on a couple of different computers, DVD players and TVs. I probably used a bitrate around 5000 bps. The Vegas ouput was clearly fuzzier/blurrier/less sharp at the same bit rate than CCE, Procoder 2 and TMPGEnc output. The CCE and Procoder MPEG2s looked just like the original footage, but the Vegas output clearly did not. It's a shame it's never been addressed.

Likewise H.264. The 2 codecs in Vegas 8 are clearly behind the pace and there's no mention of any updates in Vegas 9. We can encode in third party apps but it would be nice to be able to do it in Vegas and know the quality is spot on (c.f. the fantastic Vegas DV codec).

farss wrote on 5/9/2009, 12:16 AM

Not that I want to rain on anyone's parade however I think we need to keep in mind that these things only speed up the encoding part of the process. It's most unlikely they'll do anything for the rendering part. That may have no significance or a heck of a lot if you've got a FX heavy project or a lot of compositing.

Bob.

Christian de Godzinsky wrote on 5/9/2009, 2:45 AM

Thanx Nick for confirming this. I have been struggling also with the Vegas MPEG2 output quality, I get results with clearly lower sharpness that the source material, whatever the input is. Even for stills.

I know that an additional compression always reduces the quality somewhat but the difference is too often - too obvious. It seems that the Vegas MPEG2 encoder is really not up to par, at least compared to other alternatives (I have not compared myself). There are numeorus discussion threads also about the subject. People tweak all the settings to their max, but still do get fuzzier ouput than expected...

I still don't understand why a Pro application is not up to par... Or should SCS just rename it to Vegas Semi Pro? And why would I be forced to get a third party converter - to get really Pro results?

What about you guys also running FCP - or Premiere? Have you ever compared the MPEG2 output with the same source material - against Vegas MPEG2 output? Can you see a difference?

Christian

John_Cline wrote on 5/9/2009, 3:38 AM

Vegas is using the Main Concept MPEG2 encoder and so is Premiere. I use Canopus Procoder for MPEG2 encoding, but it also costs $600. That could explain why Vegas doesn't have a better encoder, it would add too much to the cost of Vegas. The Procoder output does look spectacular though.

srode wrote on 5/9/2009, 3:39 AM

Agreed - I have not been happy with the MPEG2 output quality - sharpness or color compression - same for the AVC output - glad to hear others mention this - I thought perhaps I had just not found the best settings yet. AVCHD is closer to my source material in sharpness however it still loses something in the color compression. I'm very interested in alternatives that have similar functionality to Vegas. Maybe Vegas pro 9 will have an improvement - however since it's not mentioned in the PR information I'm guessing not - who's used canopus and how well does it work as far as an NLE - similar flexibility to vegas for sound / transitions / effects? What do you use for Bluray / DVD authoring with it's output? All the searches I do for Canopus end up taking me to Edius - Procoder 3 or 4 software - is this what you are unsing John?

farss wrote on 5/9/2009, 6:14 AM

Just for the heck of it ran some tests to see how bad the MC encoder is. I encoded a still image with some pretty extreme chroma edges in it to both mpeg-2 and DV, both PAL.
I then subtracted both from the original and from each other.

There's noticeable chroma fringing in both, no doubt from the 4:2:0 subsampling. Comparing the DV to the mpeg-2 encode I'm hard pressed to find any difference.

i'd really like someone else to run the same kind of test. Over the years I've kept hearing these complaints about the MC encoder but it's never looked too shabby to me and I've used it to encode at some dangerously low bitrates. In part I've always attributed some my good fortune to working with PAL but I know some of those making this complaint are encoding directly from HDV so that argument kind of goes out the window.

Bob.

srode wrote on 5/9/2009, 6:38 AM

Bob, I'd be happy to do some tests and post data for you to compare but don't know how to do that - I would be comparing raw event AVCHD from my SR11 compared to MPEG2 and AVCHD from Vegas - at what every bit rates you would like to see - all 1920x1080i - it would be short events because the limit of my uploads are 5mb to the location I would link to.

farss wrote on 5/9/2009, 4:10 PM

You don't need me to do the comparison, Vegas provides the tools for doing this.

Put Image or video 1 on track 1
Put image or video 2 on track 2

Make track 1 50.0% transparent and apply the Sony Invert FX at 100%.

If what you have on track 1 and 2 are identical you will see only flat grey. Anything else shows the difference between the two images. To get a good look you may need to save a frame as .png and enlarge it in Photoshop.

Bob.

srode wrote on 5/9/2009, 5:16 PM

preview or render the 2 tracks?