Thread: Question: video editing

Not sure what you mean by stock, but I think that card is way beyond the 8800GT with 512MB I had. So yeah it should be fine I'd guess, even overkill by a wide margin.

Typically, the GPU is only useful in accellerating the playback of high def videos. There are some newer video encoders that leverage the computational power of GPUs to speed up encoding, but they are expensively prohibitive for someone not doing professional video production.

Originally Posted by Veovis

Not sure what you mean by stock, but I think that card is way beyond the 8800GT with 512MB I had. So yeah it should be fine I'd guess, even overkill by a wide margin.

The GT220 is less than an 8800GT. The GT250 is equivalent to the 8800GT.

I regularly convert video and if you use GPU enhanced software and good video cards (I have the equivalent of 3 4850HD cards in my box) you can speed up that encoding IMMENSELY. A video that might take 30 minutes using cpu alone might take 2 minutes using GPU acceleration. As long as you have a 2xx series card (nvidia) or a 4800 series card (ati) or higher then you can use the gpu to accelerate video encoding. Nothing prohibitively expensive there.

So yes. GPU *can* be very influential in the actual encoding if you use software that can take advantage of it. There's not a lot of software that does though. At least not right now. I expect we'll start seeing a lot more software take advantage of GPU acceleration for general computing in the near future though.

Kanati, I have a 4890. How do I use that to speed up encoding?

CPU if hes doing any editing involving a rendering engine (adobe AE, Pr). GPU is not really used in single frame step rendering (what most video editing software is utilizing), other then to simply display what the CPU has calculated the resultant frame to be. Now all this skips the need for GPU and related OS UI. If hes looking to rock a dual monitor setup of large resolutions then he will also need GPU power.

Originally Posted by Veovis

Kanati, I have a 4890. How do I use that to speed up encoding?

The catalyst control center should have something called "Avivo" in it. Unfortunately, so far this is the only way to utilize the gpu in video conversion on an ATI card I believe. I haven't yet found any other software that does it anyway. But I expect it will change soon as general computing with a gpu is starting to gain ground. Nvidia tesla cards are being called supercomputers in a 1U case now.

But back to avivo... You have to set the catalyst control center to basic mode. When you do you will be able to use the avivo wizard to convert video from one format to another. This won't help with the actual editing as that will have to be done in another package, but you can edit it in that package and render to an uncompressed format which will take far less time to do than rendering it to say, divx or h264. Then you can have the avivo tool use the 600 cores in your 4890 (I have a 4850X2 and a 4890 in my box right now) to do the actual conversion which will be pretty quick.

Yeah, I already do my rendering to uncompressed formats (out of Vegas) and then do my real rendering in a GUI for x264. I'll try your avivo trick next time and see if it makes a diff. Thanks.