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

Thanks for the real-world information you obtained.

In numerous tests I've done it seems to me that the best way to utilize more RAM is to work with uncompressed images (that is, pre-render the video tracks) and put them in a RAM disk. Of course, this only works if the total length of all tracks is very short since the availabilty of RAM is limited (and you would still need a lot of it). Otherwise, a RAID array would be the next best thing for performance of course, and then tracks could be as long as needed.

The reason I mention using a RAM disk is that if the source files are already compressed in some format then the speed of a RAM disk compared to a RAID array, or even just a single drive would be largely irrelevant. This, of course, is because even a single hard disk could keep up with a few streams of this type of data. However, the overall rendering process would be significantly sped up if actual uncompressed frames were in a RAM disk where they could obviously load significantly faster than even the fastest RAID array.

So the way I see it, you copy the uncompressed images from a hard drive to a RAM disk just once per session, and then as you spend hours refining the effects work, all rendering happens incredibly fast. This would be a great way to utilize more RAM (or else maximize the RAM per core and use a RAID array as the other alternative like I mentioned above. Of course, if going the route of a RAM disk you would also want to ensure the system is battery backed!)

I realize, though, that this works great for my workflow but many others might be working on much longer video tracks so perhaps it wouldn't be of benefit. In one such case I was working on a 33 second segment that would take about 10 minutes to render each time. If I had had uncompressed frames in a RAM disk then every time I had made slight alterations to an effect then I could have seen the results so much faster.

So this is why I've been considering a lot more RAM. Not just to increase the RAM per core, but to provide a RAM disk for doing rotocope work that requires an entire video track to be re-rendered each time, just to see the results of even a small change. Of course, if this were also combined with the background rendering of Nucleo Pro then the results would be even better still.

Anyway, just my thoughts...

Brendan