Old Movie/Film & Vitascene

[Rusty]

Angelo,
You must like Vitascene as much as I do!
But your testing would give me a case of the crazies!

Nice work though.
I'm now in the market for an 8800Ultra.

Rusty

[Angelo]

I just put in a request to ProDAD for RT preview to external monitor; for example it's difficult to properly adjust Film-Look colors. I did get a response that they are going to look into it and will take a few weeks.

...Angelo

[Angelo]

I’ve done some testing with the short time I had my brother-in-law’s XFX GeForce 8800GTS 320MB that is has 500Mhz GPU and 1.6Ghz memory clock (looking at the specs). Comparing to my ATI X800XL 256MB with 398Mhz GPU and 493Mhz memory.

XFX 8800GTS loaded with ForceWare v163.71 and also loaded XP32-bit DX9c_ang2007. The Driver DX3D was setup with 8x AA, Supersampling AA Transparency and set vertical refresh to always OFF. Edius/DVStorm’s overlay works set to UpdateOverlay.

ATI X800XL used Omega Drivers 7.0.9.1 (based on ATI’s catalyst 7.9) with 6x AA, Adaptive AA Quality and vertical refresh to OFF. Edius/DVStorm’s overlay setting works set to NONE.

For HD editing and previewing with OHCI, ATI wins this one. ATI’s Theater Mode gives me full overlay on my 720p HDTV with step-by-step frame accuracy from Edius’ timeline. It’s not perfect like NX that gives you true audio and video synchronizing from Edius’ timeline, BUT a good “poor” man’s HD out. Nvidia’s video-out there was no overlay out; cloning was the best I can do, which was totally useless.

For filter and transition testing I used Vitascene’s Film Look #177, Border #342 and Glitter Wipe #279 (5 sec transition). Xplode Pro4 I used the Ripple transition (5 sec transition).

When it come’s to RT Xplode the X800XL did it all the non-Vitascene filtered video footage in RT with the buffer staying full from 480p to HQ HDV timelines. The 8800GTS with lacking support from Xplode could not compete one 5-second Xplode Por4 Ripple effect, stopped about midway.

So far X800XL beat 8800GTS in HD video-out and RT playback with Xplode Pro4; more to do with the lack of support. I also have to say that the OmegaDriver’s also have a better looking overlay then the ForceWare drivers.

I did test different sized footage and any scaling lowered the performance and will not be shown has the chart as it will get to complicated for one chart. So I’m going to keep the chart very simple with 480p footage shown on a 480p timeline and so forth.

DVStorm and OHCI 480p timelines had the same performance with the OHCI having the option for a large buffer which increases the wait time to pre-fill the buffer. On the other hand the DVStorm offers perfect Edius AV playback.

HQ_480p = HQ 480p footage on a DVStorm 480p timeline
HQ_720p = HQ 720p footage on a OHCI 720p timeline
HQ_HDV1080i = HQ HDV 1080i footage on a OHCI HDV 1080i timeline

Transition competing without stopping will be shown as RT otherwise Render.

Rendering video filters will indicate if the effect is playable in RT by having a value of 1.00 or greater. The value will be shown for “X800XL / 8800GTS”.


……………...............………HQ_480p………..HQ_720p….....…… .HQ_HDV1080i
.................................XL / GTS........XL / GTS................XL / GTS

5sec Glitter Wipe #279
+ No Filters………............RT / RT………..Render / RT……... Render / Render

5sec Glitter Wipe #279
+ Film #177……...........….RT / RT……...Render / Render…. Render / Render

5sec Glitter Wipe #279
+ Border #342…….........Render / RT…… Render / Render…. Render / Render

5sec Xpro4 Ripple
+ No Filter……...........…...RT / Render…….RT / Render………..RT / Render

5sec Xpro4 Ripple
+ Film #177……..........….RT / Render…….. Render / Render….. Render / Render

5sec Xpro4 Ripple
+ Border #342…......….Render / Render….. Render / Render….. Render / Render

Render
Border #342…...........…….0.52 / 1.30…………0.20 / 0.58……......0.06 / 0.22
8800GTS performance
increase…..............……………+150%……………..+190%……... ...…….+267%

Render
Film #177……...............……2.16 / 2.73…………0.91 / 1.39……..…0.30 / 0.64
8800GTS performance
increase……..................……….+26%……………….+53%……. ....……..+113%

Being that I’m still editing with the DVStrom with 480p footage the cost to upgrade to an 8800GTS doesn’t offer the performance gains within Edius 4.51c.

If I were doing a lot of HD Vitascene with a NX card I would skip the 8800GTS and go for the 8800Ultra with more pipes/processors and memory bandwidth as the performance for the top-of-line 8800Ultra would double the performance of the 8800GTS, IMHO.

…Angelo

[UBI2002]

Hello Angelo!

If Everest is running, your playback performance get´s down a little bit. So don´t think your computer is broken! :-))

UBI

[Angelo]

UBI, thanks for the additional information.

My brother-in-law has a 8800 that I can test with my DVStorm, which is very picky with graphic cards. I'll post back after I'm done testing the 8800.

...Angelo

[UBI2002]

Hello!

They told it to me, too. But if i watch Everest during playback m2t files with Vitascene transitions from the
Edius Timeline the used Video Memory of my 8800 GTS 320 MB is maximum 200 MB. In most cases
80 - 120 MB. Old Movie uses only 40 MB!!!

UBI

[Angelo]

Using OHIC HD 1080i or 720p timelines I don't get RT with Vitascene with the X800XL. This is where a nVidia 8800GTS would help, the only question is +640MB of VRAM needed for 1080p or is 320MB okay?

JFYI, I received an email from ProDAD about video memory:
For HD-Video do you should have 512MB graphics memory.
Normally, 256 is enough, but this is the minimum.

...Angelo

[Rusty]

I'm using a Radeon X1300 with decent results.

Rusty
I'll check out OmegaDrivers

Woah!
OmegaDrivers work really well! Edius overlay has a much better image! No more laggy/jaggy looking images.

They get my recommendation with Edius (so far)
Vitascene still a struggle, but working nicely.

Rusty

[Rusty]

NX w/Expansion for HDV.
Hard to do without.
My Expansion card went out reciently and it was a tough week without.
San Jose got me a new one pronto!

Rusty

[Angelo]

I'm using a Radeon X1300 with decent results.

Rusty
I'll check out OmegaDrivers

You must be using OHCI or NX.

I recall testing my office PC's X1650Pro in my video PC and was getting choppy/jerky motion with Vitascene and DVStorm, here's my post.

So I'm very reluctant to do any video card upgrading with the DVStorm unless I know some one that is using Vitascene with the DVStorm without any problems. I was even thinking about the GeForce 8800GTS but I don't want to buy it unless I can return it.

Right now with Vitascene v1.0.33 has fixed my overlay and crashing problems, plus it has given me better performance with X800XL that also works with Xplode in RT.

...Angelo

[Rusty]

My Vitascene RT performance is limited to the X800XL. What video card are you using?

...Angelo

I'm using a Radeon X1300 with decent results.

Rusty
I'll check out OmegaDrivers

[Angelo]

Angelo,

Is OmegaDriver for your video card?

Rusty

I still have my ATI X800XL the OmegaDrivers are 3rd party modified ATI drivers.

OmegaDrivers Goal:

The purpose of the Omega Drivers is to provide gamers with an alternate set of drivers, ones that have more options and features than the original sets. The drivers contain optimizations, extra features (like OC capabilities), more resolutions and internal tweaks that can give them the edge in a gaming environment over the normal drivers, which are often tailored for synthetic benchmarks. All Omega driver sets are tested (unless noted) by myself in my own PC or in an alternate PC (in the case of the Nvidia drivers) to ensure maximum compatibility and reliability.

My Vitascene RT performance is limited to the X800XL. What video card are you using?

...Angelo

[pjsssss]

It's for the ATI graphic cards.

[Rusty]

Angelo,

Is OmegaDriver for your video card?

Nice to see positive results with the new Vitascene build. (downloading now)

I can (usually) tiptoe around with Vitascene all day. I can just about guarantee a crash (as you described) by jumping from another app directly to a backwards timeline scrub. Forward is usually ok.

Rusty

[Angelo]

Do you get RT with HDV projects or DV only?

Rusty

Yesterday OmegaDriver released v7.9, which I installed. Vitascene v1.0.32 operated with the same issues.

Today ProDAD emailed Vitascene service update v1.0.33. This is the first time I was able to fully "play around" is Vitascene for over 2 hours without a single crash with Edius v4.51c. Before with Vitascene v1.0.32 just changing settings would make Edius crash hard with no error messages within minutes. There is RT improvements, for example with a DVStorm 29.97p timeline Film-look on a HQ1080i file is now RT.

I also tested OHCI 720p timeline with a pre-filled 512MB buffer (or 281 frame buffer) I get the following run times:

video file...........v1.0.32.........v1.0.33
HQ(HDV)1080i....18sec...........35sec
HQ720p.............20sec...........1min22sec
HQ480p.............21sec...........54sec

When I tested an HDV OHCI 1080i timeline there was no improvement, but I think the problem is with the video card's graphics memory only having 256MB, don't know. I will be email ProDAD about this and to find out how much ram is needed for 1080i/p.

...Angelo