OT-Video Cards

vidiot57 wrote on 12/3/2005, 11:29 AM

Hello all,

I am looking at building my own Dual Core AMD system for my Vegas Suite.. And am not real sure about the video card aspect... If my motherboard has the PCI Express slots, what type of Video Card should i buy using this slot to drive 2 monitors?? Will this be sufficient for me to display a HDV video on my secondary display ??
Should my outputs be DV-I ?? And what about SLI technology? Does this help us editors? or is that more to help the gamers??

Thanks,

Mike m.

Comments

JohnnyRoy wrote on 12/3/2005, 9:55 PM

> I am looking at building my own Dual Core AMD system for my Vegas Suite.. And am not real sure about the video card aspect...

Great! I just built one myself. My parts list is on my web site.

> If my motherboard has the PCI Express slots, what type of Video Card should i buy using this slot to drive 2 monitors??

The nVidia 6600GT is nice, or the 6800GS. Both have dual monitors plus S-Video/HDTV out puts. Matrox makes some nice cards but I’ve never owned one.

> Will this be sufficient for me to display a HDV video on my secondary display ??

Not from Vegas. Vegas will not use your graphics card’s GPU at all :( but other applications like Serious Magic Ultra 2 and Magic Bullet will. For HDV in Vegas it’s raw processing power that counts the most.

> Should my outputs be DV-I ??

It’s pretty hard to find a graphics card without DVI these days. Yes, DVI will give the best quality when paired with a DVI monitor.

> And what about SLI technology? Does this help us editors? or is that more to help the gamers??

Just for gamer really but if you plan to do some serious 3D work like with 3D Studio Max, Maya, or Cinema 4D, you might benefit from it. (It’s overkill if you ask me)

~jr

vidiot57 wrote on 12/4/2005, 6:01 AM

Hi,

Thanks Johnny for responding and the info.. I am thinking of using the same motherboard you are using for your Dual Core..Its good to hear someone is actually using this set-up.Can you play and edit a single stream of HDV in realtime with your set-up??
Also thanks for the heads up on the Dell "features"..

mike m.

vidiot57 wrote on 12/4/2005, 6:11 AM

Johnny,

Forgive me, thought of more questions..I am wondering how stable your Dual Core system has been.. ??
And as far as using the SLI technology, you use 2 different graphics cards which work in tandem with each other..Is this correct??

Thanks again..

mike m.

JJKizak wrote on 12/4/2005, 6:23 AM

You use two SLI graphic cards in parallel.

JJK

JohnnyRoy wrote on 12/4/2005, 1:44 PM

I can play native HDV in real-time in Preview mode full screen on my Windows Secondary Display or in a 720x540 window (the largest window my 1280x1024 LCD can handle). I can preview in Good mode at about 15fps.

BUT, you don’t want to edit native HDV unless you are just doing kind of a “cuts-only” edit. This is because HDV is stored as a 15 frame GOP. So there are only 2 full frames (I-frames) in each second of video. The reset (B & P-frames) are delta and predictive frames. You really don’t want to be editing and color correcting frames that don’t exist (and 14 out of every 15 frames don’t exist as full frames). This is why most NLE vendors recommend that you convert your footage to a full-frame intermediate format for editing. Intermediate formats are very large but they perform very well.

~jr