Cupple Pre-Sales Questions

[Deano]

I'm planning on buying VS11.5 Plus, but still have a couple questions.

Q1)
ATI's Radeon HD 2600 and/or HD 2600 XT graphics cards claim to offload the system CPU load related to h.264/AVCHD playback.

Would that render the "VS Proxy" editing mode unnecessary, or is that a different topic altogether ?

Q2)
ASSUMING I have been able to create a VS project in AVCHD format, and that my 3 different burners are in working order...

Can I burn the SAME project to
1) Std. DVD
2) Blu Ray
3) HD DVD

OR,
For each burn format, do I have to start new project from scratch ?

I appreciate your patience if these are worn-out questions.

Many thanks in advance from Toronto ! .... dean

[Clevo]

I'll give you the answers to the way I understand it. As I don't use HD video.

1) VS will proxy edit no matter which processor does the processing. It's worth doing a search on the forum for Raedon in case there are associated problems I don't remember

2) No, you will have to select different output files. Sharing a SD file will be an SD file wether it's on a CD,DVD,Blu Ray etc. You won;t have to start from scratch each time. Just load up the same VSP file and output to the different devices (assuming you Started with AVCHD)

[Deano]

Nice answer on #2... thanks.

I give... what's an "SD file" ?

[Ron P.]

SD=Standard Definition, your average everyday DVD, that can hold 4.7 gig.

[etech6355]

The ATI's Radeon HD 2600 and/or HD 2600 XT Pro graphics card uses DDR3 video ram memory. It is a very fast card. Check to see if your selection of ATI cards uses DDR2 or DDR3. If you can afford it the DDR3 is faster. Programs that don't use the hardware acceleration on the card still perform well because it's simply a fast video card.

Q1) ATI's Radeon HD 2600 and/or HD 2600 XT graphics cards claim to offload the system CPU load related to h.264/AVCHD playback.

That's true, but you need the correct playback software that uses the cards avc/h264 acceleration features, PowerDvd7 Ultra, Windvd 8 Gold.

VideoStudio will not use the cards internal H264 acceleration. VideoStudio will use the DirectX acceleration which is pretty good because that is a high performance video card and ATI's video drivers are pretty good..
VideoStudio may also struggle a little with avchd/h264 video for editing & playback, depends on the videos framesize & bit-rates.

[2Dogs]

ATI's Radeon HD 2600 and/or HD 2600 XT graphics cards claim to offload the system CPU load related to h.264/AVCHD playback.

Would that render the "VS Proxy" editing mode unnecessary, or is that a different topic altogether ?

Hi Deano, I suspect VS would not be able to take advantage of the hardware H.264 decoding ability of the video cards, so in preview playback in the VS editor, Smart Proxy will reduce the resolution to SD to make it manageable. This will in no way compromise the output when you render the files, however.

You will be able to make full use of the accelerated video capabilities of the video cards when using a suitable software DVD player, however, such as PowerDVD 7.3 with the latest patch. Without offloading H.264 decoding onto the GPU, you'd need a pretty fast cpu, such as an E6600 or better for HD playback.

Although I don't have an HD camcorder, I think I'll potter around with some HD slideshows, now that the VS updates have enabled us to write HD content to a regular DVD.

[Deano]

Thansk for the great replies... you folks are super.