[Aindreas Gallagher] "I share this too - but, you know, sometimes (a little too much even) you self deprecate with 'I'm dumb' stuff, Jeremy,"
Hey! I said I'm a nerd, are you calling me dumb? ;-D
Really, I can't possibly know everyone's requirements and experiences, I can only share mine. So in reality, I am not dumb, but I am certainly not omniscient. Some people can edit looking at artifacts. It drives me batty. It's the way I am, but not the way the world might feel.
Here's the odd things:
Some codecs require massive CPU to play and GPU has not much to do with it. R3d is one of those codecs. So is AVCHD. LongGOP AVCHD is a computationally "expensive" codec (even though the codec comes in very affordable cameras). I have an older laptop, and just playing back one stream of native AVCHD causes a huge CPU spike (hovers around 120% on my macbook pro that's 3 years old).
According to this
linked Adobe document, here's what CUDA processes:
some effects
scaling
deinterlacing
blending modes
color space conversions
cs6 added a few more effects.
So PLAYBACK, general playback that is, is not CUDA/openCL based. Playback is based on CPU.
Considering you are thinking of getting a quad core, very new CPU and a "supported" GPU, I think that you will probably be just fine. If you had no AVCHD material, you'd be even better. I find that i-frame MXF codecs (like P2 based DVCPro HD, and Avc-Intra) work really really well.
What is GPU accelerated are effects. So the faster your GPU, the more you can do in real time when playing back a CPU expensive codec, along with real time effects.
That same AVCHD clip I told you about: if I add a 3way CC, the CPU jumps to 165-180% and frames drop while playing back and that's just adding the filter, there's no adjustments made to to the color at all.
Drop to half resolution, and playback works.
Adjusting this in real time simply does work at any resolution.
If I had a supported GPU, this would probably work, but my CPU is a bit long in the tooth by Adobe standards, and is also running the "wrong" OS.
I will say, however, I had this very same laptop on set the last few days, checking green screen shots from an Arri Alexa @ 444 ProRes in AE CS6.
The speed improvement over CS5.5 was astounding. I even tried 32bit for yucks. AE CS6 is sweet. You will love it.
Clear as mud, right?
