Re: Are Realtime HD Previews Possible With An NVIDIA QuadroFX 5600?

with mac (probably pc too) you can hand 2gb of ram to each core for rendering, if multiprocessing is enabled in ae (cs3). the way multiprocessing gets around the 32bit ram addressing is by running a separate render engine for each core. each render engine is then allowed it's own ram allocation, so in effect the each core gets it own ram allocation too.

soon (rumors are now mid january), cs3 will handle the p2/mxf files directly, so you won't need to convert them to avi.

however, to get as fast of processing as you can with ae, you'll want to convert your dvcprohd to something that does not compress with temporal/interframe compression.

uncompressed or none would be best, particularly if you can use a 16pbc codec. lossless animation is pretty good, although it is 8bpc. image sequences are also very good (tif, targa, png. etc). if you had a mac and fcp prores would be decent, it will maintain the 4:2:2 color space, but only uses intraframe compression (although, i'm not sure about decompression load). avid has a very similar hd codec you can download from them. photojpeg at high quality settings may also work well too.

if you use a codec that produces large files (like uncompressed), you will need to have a fast disk array, one capable of data rate fast enough to play back at least one stream of uncompressed hd in realtime. a 4 drive sata2 striped (raid0) drive array may achieve that, and 8 drive array should do that with out a problem.

Kevin Camp
Designer - KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW