Hi just some comparison facts…
I have this passion for vid encoding/editing and have a studio in Jabalpur (hometown) for this purpose… where the passion brings in rations too (sorry for the lame poetry here)
I encoded a movie (bodyguard) 1 VCD version & 1 DVD version to HD (1280*720) using WM encoder…full settings max…It takes 2 passes…(note this is a long movie)
Simultaniously I told my shop boys to do the same movie on one of their systems and my bro to do it on the P4 660 @ home…(not at exactly the same time yaar, not needed cause u can store the time taken etc)…
On my sys…P4 3.2/875P/1.8 gig mem/6800GT it took me 15 hours for the VCD and 12.5 hours for the DVD (probably cause DVD qual is closer to HD than VCD…
The P3 with the 5700 (P3 933/D815E/FX 5700/512meg) took 27 hours VCD and 28.5 hours for the DVD…
The P4 660/925X/512 ddr2/X800XT took 9 hours for the VCD and some 7 (6 hours 40 some min) for the same…
Now this isn’t a benchy, just a comparison, I do this for a business remember not @ play…
Now the reasons for difference…the P3 can be excused as its not really meant for this and poor little thing…did its best…struggled throughout but no hanging @ all…
The P4 probably scores because of its SSE 3, which helps a lot (timed b4 this also)…but the 6800GT doesn’t move its a** (temps of the proccy soared but the GPU wasn’t working (idling)…
The X800XT on the 660 sys really worked cause WM enc. has an ATI only option that allows the ATI cards to help with some hardware load sharing…the temp of the ATI card also increased as it was being used (not anywhere as much as when gaming), but by some 15~20 degrees…
Point I’m making here is that the ATI card really helps with vid encoding and even content editing… One of the reasons for me going for a new sys (the 4400+ w 7800 series card) is that Nvidia promises the same kind of support that ATI has been delivering to vid guys like me…
Now many here may call me an ATI guy or something…but assuredly I am not… I believe in not choosing sides @ all, just taking the best hardware and only those components best suited to the work I do…
I mentioned wanting 2 hyper 48’s…initially I wanted 1 for my new (future) rig…but now after this little experiment I need one for the 660 as well… according to my brother the temperature (even after our a/c was @ 18 dec C) the temp went to nearly 78~ deg)…but its working fine…
Any other vid editing guys on TE???
Workers in our shop used to do that … we have a Array capture card(which was about 44k 3 years back) … we do video editing but in VCD quality and AFAIR it doesn’t take that much time on a stock 3000+venice … there are 3 systems for editing thing all are cheap systems with inbuilt graphics … wat was the length of ur movie …
Rahul not talking about editing…that we do all the time (we have 4 cheaper systems) I am talking about my 3 personal systems (The P3 one is in my shop in Jabalpur), P4 660 @ home in Jabalpur
and the 875P/3.2E is with me in Chennai…
What I am talking about doing is VCD/DVD to HD content…@ 1920i what we did was 1280*720 which is actually 1080i (encoder doesn’t support higher than this)…
I am trying to buy a hardware HD encoder also but the cheapest good ones are all 2K us $…min…cannot spend that now as its not really any use in my biz…just as some xperimenting for the future…
PS try it you’ll find that HD is very resource hungry and can be set to work in 2 passes…(I think AVID may have 3 passes last one for refining)…
Am trying avid…thanks to a friend..will use and let u know…
This is just an experiment with HD…of course it depends upon the efficiency of the software being used and also the source content…but with DVD 9 qual & HD encoding the content looks real lifelike… Cannot wait to try 1920 res when I get home this Christmas…
I use one of my machines dedicated for downloading and medica conversion. Thats what it oes 24x7.
I had never tried DVD/VCD to HD WMV conversion before. Most of the times its the WMV or DIVX conversion of my large VCD and DVD collection and get them into digital form.
Let me see if the card really works. I have access to both ATI and nvidia current generation cards and would love to try it out. If its too long PM me the details.
P.S. currently i use xmpeg with MS WMV9 VCM for WMV conversions.
right now I’m using WM encoder (but have found the content isn’t as good as native HD, not even close…I have some Nvidia native HD vid samples to compare…
I have a huge collection of some 900+ movies on around 400 VCD’s and maybe 300 or so DVD’s… Oh I have 2 backups (so 3 copies in all)
I don’t do the HD thingy for a biz… just experimenting and all…but we do vid editing and VHS to VCD/DVD etc…@ Jabalpur…(my shop)..
I just got hooked to HD @ an Nvidia demo (got the CD with a tennis match, some canoeing etc) man… the water…everything looks alive…crisp as burnt toast (heh)…
so here I am…I have access to the 6800GT and X800XT which I’m using and ATI wins hands down as far as encoding goes…Also besides dual core not many AMD’s will come close to the 660 (3.6 gig P4)…when it comes to encoding…
I am planning to go 7800GT/GTX next year on a 4400+…lets see
Also I am doing 1080i (1280*720) res…cannot wait for my hardware encoder to do 1920i…
I don’t see the point in upscaling VCD or DVD to HD. I don’t know how wm-encoder does it, but theres also a program which lets you do post-procesing through FFDSHOW, and then burn the result. FFDSHOW will probably give the best results after resize, denoise, deinterlace, sharpen and whatever else you want to throw at it. But I think it might sent render times through the roof.
But then, if this thing is just an experiment, it doesnt hurt to try. I’m searching for the link to that article, will post when I find it.
Just see the timings (they are through the roof and beyond)…with advanced adaptive deinterlacing you are looking @ 3+ hours on the 660 and maybe 20 hours on a 3.2 P4 (because I feel the ATI card on my sys helps a bit…)
And yes there’s no point really…just trying something out… But man the wait was worth it…the movie in question looks super cool in HD (15%~20% better) than even DVD9 qual…absolutely fantastic…
but with noise filtering, motion compensation, deinterlacing and more HD conversions take a long time…
Pass 1 took me around 8~9 hours I am talking about 1 CD here not the whole movie…
b***** hell… then I scaled things down a bit…
If u have 720i content just try upscaling to 1080i…
Vandal you must have heard abt ATI’s AVIVO on the x1800 ! Well those will help you in encoding video better and faster than what you currently achieving with your cpu. Also Zhop is a quite right and even i am confused as to why you want to upscale a low res 320*240 vcd to HD content. DVD is ok but even that isnt upto the task. Also try h.264 encoding once you get to lay your hands on a x1800 card. Mpeg 1/2 isnt quite upto the task when we are talking abt HD.
Now that blade is a good suggestion…also I was experimenting (saying VCD to HD ain’t good) isn’t good enough for me, I wanted facts in front… have used 110 GB (HDD space) in the last 8 days over my research thingy…
DVD to HD is a bit better…and can anyone forward some links for H 264 (as I guy here suggested I admit to being a tad lazy )
Some really interesting observations here Vandal (not to mention painful - 27 hours on a P3!). But I was always under the impression that graphics cards did nothing when it came to video editing or encoding.
I done a bit of video editing myself. Back in college we had a couple of projects (I studied journalism) where we had to make our own short films, documentaries etc. While most of the students always had the stuff edited in a professional studio, a couple of us would edit the stuff on our own machines. So that’s how I picked up editing.
I would use Adobe Premiere and apart from cutting, syncing etc. I tried my hand at some fade in/out effects, colour correction etc. But like I mentioned earlier, most of the effects are CPU effects, and only a few (at least on Pemiere) were classified as GPU effects - and the graphics card didn’t hardly anything during the final render. But then again, I only rendered the final videos to simple VCD MPEG and DVD MPEG-2 using the Adobe MPEG encoder plugin that comes with Premiere.
I’m guessing that the Adobe MPEG encoder doesn’t support offloading of instructions to the GPU, because 9 hours on a 3.6GHz 660 compared to 15 hours on the standard 3.2GHz is a huge difference - something that can’t be justified by a mere 400MHz clock increase and the other faff that comes along.
Oh another contributor may be the RAID thingy… the HDD used on the 3.2 isn’t in RAID but the 660 has a RAID array…(so does the 3.2 but its full so I’m using the xtra HDD…)
But you’re right that won’t contribute to 6 hours…so the G proccy has to have played a role…judging from what blade says (and I felt all along) ATI does this better
BTW DOES NVIDIA’S 7800 SERIES HAVE A SIMILAR THINGY TO THE ATI AS FAR AS VID ENCODING GOES (THE 6800GT DOESN’T AS IS SLOW HERE)…
IF NOT I WILL GO FOR AN X1800 IN LIEU OF THE 7800…)
Sorry for sounding Lame…but why would you want to convert a 320X240 VCD Mpeg1 (or even a 852 x 480 DVD MPEG2) to HD at 1280x720?
I mean wouldnt it be a wasted effort?
The reason why I am asking this is typically my video processing requirements revolve around either ripping DVD MPEG2’s to DIvX 1.5mbps or my home videos (720x576 DV Avi’s) to DivX 2.1mbps
then I scaled things down a bit…
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