Recommened VIDEO CARD for Adobe Premiere Pro

[ALMedcalf6]

What VIDEO CARD do you guys recommened for Adobe Premiere Pro, I'm having some problems and I believe it's the Video Card...

[Darren_Kelly]

THe point is, that Nvidia had developed the CUDA environment, and Adobe designed for it because it provided the resources required.

I'm not sure if ATI's technology works the same way. I'd rather look at this a little differently.

In 1994, I purchased my first NLE. It was a Fast Video Machine. THe board set to have just 2 layers in realtimewas over $12,000.00. In addition, you needed atleast 2 SCSI drives. I bought 2X2GB because that cost me $7,000.00. That's GB guys. So to get realtime, I had spent $19,000.00 plus purchased a computer. A workstation class machine back then was about $7,000. So for about $26K, I had one monitor, plus a video out monitor. I used that system until the late 90's when I bought a Matrox card for around $5,000.00

Get the picture.

It's about 10 times cheaper to build a multilayer editing system, where you can have 3-4 monitors, have as many as 10 layers in real-time. Being asked to buy one of a select number of a single videop card to get 10X more ability is not much to ask.

Back in the same time in 1994 people where throwing $30K at software and hardware bundles from AVID and Media 100 - plus the drives (purchased from AVID or Media 100 at huge prices) and others. You could spend $100K for those 2 layer realtime systems.

Go buy one of the listed cards. If you work professionally you will get your investment back in days. We use to laugh because both Avid and Media 100 would always have a testimonial in their demo reels that said "I got my investment from purchasing a Media 100 in just the first Job" We loved that. They made all of us laugh in the NAB trade booth.

Now all you have to do is build a decent work station, and buy a car in the mid $300 range to do all that and more.

Signed

Grampa

[RjL190365]

Here's the problem:

I am not a paid professional at all (as far as video is concerned). I am just a casual video shooter who is simply frustrated with the limitations of every single one of the $100 consumer video editing programs (for example, many of those programs do not properly support progressive source video at frame rates above 30 fps (in which case every other frame gets dropped at the editing timeline no matter what) or do not properly support progressive source video at all at any frame rate (in which case the video gets interlaced at the timeline even if one does not want that to happen - and often using a bad-quality alogarithm) - and such mangling of the video at the timeline shows up in a painful manner in the finished product). Under those circumstances, I am forced to use a "prosumer" program.

With that said, although my main rig has one of the listed cards, it does not mean that a given future version of Premiere Pro will even support a currently listed card at all for the MPE GPU accelerated mode. In fact, given the history with some other NLEs, older cards that were previously listed are now no longer supported in GPU mode. Eventually, those older cards will no longer be supported even in software-only mode.

By the way, the GTX 480 has never been officially listed on the Adobe supported cards list even though its lesser GTX 470 sibling currently is listed.

[Darren_Kelly]

Well RJL 19th of March, 1965 -( just a guess)

I don't know what to tell you. You can use Premiere Elements, which is a pretty complete subset of Premiere, and over this holiday weekend seems to be available under $100.00. I don't know if it is CUDA based or not, but people do work on it and it has a good reputation. I've taught it, and like Photoshop Elements, I like them.

If I had a dollar for everytime someone said the editing system I was using was prosumer, or not professional, I would be a wealthy man."It's a poor artist that blames his tools" - not sure who made that famous.

OK, so your system is not capable of shooting and editing in 1080p. Here are a few facts about our old friend 1080p. Unless you are watching a blu Ray video that was shot, edited, and mastered to Blu ray in 1080p, you are not watching 1080p. All the cable and satellite broadcasters in North America only broadcast in 720p. Now, before I get hate mail, check it out folks.

You need a professional, broadcast grade monitor to see the differences between 720p, 1080i, and yes even 1080p. I had one once. It was an Ikegami and it cost just over $27,000.00. Wow did pictures on that look great. Funny enough, at the time I was shooting with the first "affordable" HD camera from JVC. We used this monitor to compare footage from that single chip camera with an FW900. There was a difference, but not enough to say drop everything.

I've been in this industry since the early 70's when we shot in black and white. A hand held camera weighed about 30lbs, had no shoulder mount, but instead a contraption that rested on your shoulder with the assistance of a flag pole type device to help you steady things. So, I'm about 3 years from saying 40 years. I've had years with sales over $1 million, and I've weathered 3 or more recessions, where one year I had sales of less than $100K. Not a good time.

The tools I've used have ranged from what people said were prosumer, but I could show them that "prosumer"footage on broadcast television. I've also seen way too much high quality stuff - RED included shot poorly, and look worse than the GoPro camera I use for extreme shooting.

You do the best with the gear you can afford. If you can't edit in 1080p, don't shoot that way. Use 720p or standard deffinition still exisits. It's the telling of the story that's important. You do it with the tools you have, and you do the best job you can do.

Since you're not doing this for money, do it to make yourself happy.

Good Luck

[RjL190365]

I tried it. Unfortunately, I had the exact same experience with it as I did with any other consumer program. At least with the most recent version that I used, it does not support 60p or even 50p at any resolution. Only 30p or less is supported even at 720p (and any 60i or 60p content chopped down to 30p looks horrible to my eyes). Worse, I cannot get the properly downsized (downrezzed) transcoded footage to work at all in any of those programs (at least without requiring extremely destructive recompression). The only downsizing that works at all with these cheapo programs uses completely wrong alogarithms that leave severe artifacts in the final image (with the worst being so bad that it might as well have only 15 lines total of resolution).

Moreover, none of the consumer programs have a GPU-accelerated mode at all. All aspects of those programs are software-only. (I confirmed this by running GPU-Z, and discovered that the GPU utilization is stuck at zero or near-zero even with a super-expensive Quadro that I borrowed for testing.) In addition, the consumer programs are strictly 32-bit only. Thus, they cannot take full advantage of even a very old single-core Pentium 4, let alone today's high performance systems.

By the way, my HD camera only shoots interlaced (1080i or 480i). Unfortunately, the consumer programs by themselves do a very poor job of downsizing interlaced footage. None of the still cameras in my possession shoot higher than VGA (640x480) - and at only 30p or 15p.

[Darren_Kelly]

Then, I guess for you, you need to not worry about hardware, you need to save some money for Premiere Pro 5 or 5.5

Since you are  not doing commercial work, you might look for an education priced copy of premiere. You can also look at Ebay, there are deals to be had.

Good Luck

[tiifos]

Relative newcomer to Premiere Pro / Adobe here; grateful for any advice you could offer:

I'm just getting setup with an editing/grading system based on a Mac Pro running OS10.7.5.

I've got a NVIDIA Geoforce GTX 570 2560Mb in PCI slot 1, but when I open Premiere Pro CS6 I get the message "GPU acceleration (CUDA) not available on this system".

Is this right? I thought with the 570 I was going to benefit from CUDA processing.

Thanks for any insight

[Bill_Gehrke]

Welcome to the furoms

You need to add "GeForce GTX 570 to your Adobe "cuda_supported_cards.txt" file

A suggestion to you, do not add to such and old thread, you will get more attention starting your own thread

[tiifos]

Bill,

Thanks for the input. How do I go about adding my GeoForce GTX 570 to the Adobe CUDA_supported_cards.txt file? I'm on a Mac. Is there somewhere I should have found this is the user manual?

[Bill_Gehrke]

Sorry but I am a PC person and I cannot remember where I found it but I do know that you have to use Terminal to find and added it to the file.  Try searching the Hardware forum or a Google search.  I checked my papers but could not readily find the copy of what I did to build my Hackintosh.  It is not in any user manual as this is an unofficial modification.

[Bill_Gehrke]

After all the speculation I thought this might be appropriate to present a few facts.  Here are my results on PPBM5.5 testing on my "library" of six CUDA cards that work with Premiere CS5.5.

[RjL190365]

Thanks, Bill, for the CS5.5 results. This confirms that if one is stuck with a cheapo GeForce or Quadro card with fewer than 96 CUDA cores on a reasonably fast i7 system, and he is using CS5.5, he might as well permanently lock CS5.5 to the MPE software-only mode and not even bother with the "hack" at all.  Under this scenario, the 9500 GT in MPE software-only mode achieves a total time of only 435 seconds versus 1002 seconds in MPE GPU-accelerated mode. (In fact, an overclocked i7-2600K with 16GB of RAM but a really cheapo GeForce card with CS5.5 set to the MPE GPU mode is even slower overall, especially in MPEG-2 encoding, than the 990-ish second result of my stock-speed i3-2100 with only 4GB of RAM and integrated Intel HD Graphics 2000 with CS5.5 set to software-only mode.) It also shows that the best current values among the CUDA GPUs have somewhere between 300 and 500 CUDA cores (this means the GTX 560, 560 Ti or 570, of which the 570 is officially on the Adobe list).

[Bill_Gehrke]

Tuesday the upgraded GTX 560 Ti with 448 cores goes on sale, that puts it in almost the 570 class.  Since the good nVidia Kepler's now look like it they could be almost a year away I may see if I can find one at a reasonable price in the next month or two.

[RjL190365]

Bill,

I will be submitting my CS5.5 results of my main i7-2600K rig with the GTX 470 at stock and at either 4.4GHz or 4.5GHz. However, my results are much, much closer to that of your GTX 285 than to that of your GTX 480.

EDIT: It turned out that I might need a new card and a new case in order to improve my scores with CS5.5. The particular GTX 470 I was using has an Nvidia reference cooler, and the GPU's fan speed fluctuated wildly and frequently ramped up to maximum speed during the MPEG-2 DVD test (this indicates that the GPU might have been throttling back frequently to avoid overheating). Moreover, my system has been somewhat less than totally stable with this card installed: Sometimes, I got no display while a few other times I had a 116 BSOD code just attempting to boot into Windows (although most of the BSODs occurred while I had that card running in an i7-950 system with a Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R v1.0, which was never totally stable to begin with). But my CPU (at least in the Cooler Master CM 690 II, which does not have a sufficient number of or sufficiently-sized fans for such a higher-end rig) is already running relatively warm, into the upper 70s C during Prime95 at a relatively modest overclock of 4.5GHz - and getting a new graphics card with a better but open cooler would have increased the heat inside the case (and therefore the CPU) by a fair amount. As it stands now, the 110-ish second time in the MPEG-2 DVD test is about par for a GTX 470 on an overclocked i7-2600K system, but I felt that it could have been quite a bit faster.

As for the case, then yes, a bigger case with better and more numerous fans would have allowed me to overclock my CPU even further without seriously overheating. Instead of the current 4.5GHz, I might have been able to reach 4.8GHz if I had a CM HAF 932 instead of the CM 690 II.

Message was edited by: RjL190365

[Bill_Gehrke]

Well I did it sooner than expected.  Before the end of the week I will be able to add the scores of the brand new "special edition" EVGA GTX 560 Ti 448 core GPU board to the table above.

[Jack-2959]

I am using an nVidia 550Ti.  First only use nVidia cards if you want to use the GPU acceleration, which is one of the main standouts points for PrPro for me.  Look up the number of CUDA cores on the card.  I have read that more is not necessarily better, the 550Ti has 96 I think.  There are better cards, some of which cost alot more, like the quadros.  Check out the good posts using searches for Mercury playback and GPU acceleration.  I think the minimum for acceleration is 768 MB of video ram.  Get DDR 3 or better DDR 5.  Forget DDR 2.  Good luck Jack

[mystickid]

I called adobe just to make sure, and only the cards listed on the pc requirements page support the mercury playback engine. In my budget range, I can only afford a GTX 470 or 570 (both cards are MPE supported). Ideally I want a GTX 560 because it's less expensive than the 570 and way ahead of my ATI 5570.  But the sad thing for me is that the 560 is not MPE supported; only the 470/570. Fiddlesticks!

[Bill_Gehrke]

B. S. The GTX 560 works fine! 
All you have to do is properly add it the "cuda_supported_cards.txt" file.  Search for nVidia hack

[Bill_Gehrke]

Here are some recent CS5.5.2 results the I have run with the PPBM5 Benchmark

Jack, Your GTX 550 is not really helping you much.

[mystickid]

Bill Gehrke wrote:

B. S. The GTX 560 works fine! 
All you have to do is properly add it the "cuda_supported_cards.txt" file.  Search for nVidia hack

Thank you Sir!

[59abbot]

GTX 570 is having similiar cost as if gtx 560 ti, they are around $280 range.  Evga, Asus & Gigabyte are all good quality premium brands that you could count on.  If budget is a concern, gtx 560 1gb is selling for below $200 depending on brand.  It bought to my attention that Sparkle gtx 560 1gb is for only $160. Specification of this video card is attached for your reference. 

[Bill_Gehrke]

March and April will most likely be producing some bargains on the GTX500 series as nVidia finally officially announces the GTX 600 series.

[RjL190365]

Thanks, Bill, for the mention of the forthcoming GTX 6## series.

I am suspecting that my particular GTX 470 that I have had for almost two years had been underperforming. As it turned out, I had purchased an early-revision reference GTX 470 card with a lousy reference cooler. That card had been running significantly hotter than it should have, which may have been the explanation for the MPEG-2 scores within PPBM5 that are just barely faster than a GTX 285.

I confirmed this after I tested my old GT 240 DDR5 card, which as expected delivered a MPEG-2 DVD score of 249 seconds (on my main i7-2600K system overclocked to 4.3GHz with 16GB of RAM) versus 111 seconds with the GTX 470. Though that score is a bit faster than I had previously thought, it was still slow enough to drag my system's total time from 239 seconds (with the GTX 470 at the same CPU overclock setting) to 404 seconds.

I will be testing two other GeForce cards with 1GB or more RAM (a GTX 560 non-Ti (336-core) that's currently in my i5-2400 auxiliary rig and a newly-purchased GTX 560 Ti 448 just to check that your 68-second MPEG-2 DVD score isn't a fluke).

UPDATE: As it turned out in my own testing, it was my particular GTX 470 that was, indeed, underperforming. It was only 10 seconds faster than the plain, non-Ti GTX 560 in the MPEG-2 DVD test -- 111 seconds for the GTX 470 versus 121 seconds for the GTX 560. Furthermore, that GTX 560 Ti 448 is no fluke: I achieved nearly the same score as you did (any slight differences were due to the differences in the tuning of the systems).

I will be putting up an updated score of my main i7-2600K system (with the GTX 560 Ti 448) on the PPBM5 site. If that system were counted with the 66 i7-2600, 2600K and 2700K systems running CS5.5 that are currently on the list, my system's new 190-second score (at a higher 4.6GHz) would rank fourth.

By the way, I would have been perfectly satisfied with the standard 384-core GTX 560 Ti on that main system of mine. However, most of the 384-core GTX 560 Ti cards from eVGA cost almost as much money as the eVGA GTX 560 Ti 448 FTW that I have (or put it this way, the cheapest eVGA-branded 384-core GTX 560 Ti costs only $45 less than the $290 GTX 560 Ti 448). That's too close for comfort, IMHO.

Had you included both of the "standard" GTX 560 series GPUs in your chart, the GTX 560 non-TI would have ranked about equal to the GTX 285 while the GTX 560 Ti (384-core) would have scored about mid-way vetween the GTX 560 Ti 448 and the GTX 285. The GT 440 with DDR5 RAM would have scored about 100 seconds slower overall than the GTX 550 Ti (this means that a cheapo nVidia GPU with only 96 CUDA cores and 128-bit DDR5 RAM would have made that overclocked i7-2600K as slow as or slower than a stock-speed i5 with a fast GPU). As it stands, the GTX 560 Ti 448 did so well because it uses the exact same GPU core as the GTX 570 and GTX 580.

Message was edited by: RjL190365

[RjL190365]

Jack,

As Bill stated, your GTX 550 Ti isn't helping your system's CS5.5 performance much. The GTX 550 Ti, with its 192 CUDA cores, is at a point where the performance starts to degrade substantially if you go any lower in the GeForce lineup. That's exactly why I picked a GTX 560 (336 CUDA cores) over the GTX 550 Ti for my auxiliary i5-2400 rig even though there is only about a $50 price difference between the two. Thus, while the GTX 550 Ti is perfectly adequate for CS5, it is marginal for CS5.5.

And had Bill included a GT 440 or GT 240 GDDR5 card, that overclocked i7-2600K system with such a 96-core card would have produced an MPEG-2 DVD time that's nearly double (read: almost twice as slow as) what he had attained from the GTX 550 Ti - well over 250 seconds (versus 146 seconds from the GTX 550 Ti).

By the way, cards with 768MB of VRAM cannot enable MPE GPU acceleration at all: MPE GPU acceleration requires a minimum of 765MB of free, unused VRAM in order to even work at all. Unfortunately, Windows itself eats up a few megabytes of that VRAM so that in the end a card with only 768MB of total VRAM has only 749MB of free unused VRAM. Thus, MPE will be "permanently" locked into the software-only mode with a 768MB card.

[Guest]

Rarely had a problem with this. However, for whom it may helped. I would recomend from below:

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Because It always meet my budget plan.

Denfintly need to call to be sure.