Multi-threaded rendering - does it happen or not!

[ruggy1]

I have posted about this before but got no straight answers. Basically, does a core-2 duo (or quad) 3GHZ render a file faster than my 4 year old P3.4GHz CPU. As we all know, Moore's Law is dead, at least far as Intel is concerned, but I need to replace my trusted old high-speed friend. All I want is a fast straight render on a single PC. I cannot afford to chop it up into hundreds of pieces on hundreds of CPUs like the studios do. I do not believe Corel has the ability to develop multi-threaded rendering as the cost would be too high, so does anyone out there have any meaningful statistics I can digest?
Thanks

[Clevo]

much much faster rendering on my new quad core....

[neonbob]

Yes... the E6600 (or Q6600) will render MUCH faster than your existing system. Not withstanding, you can VERY EASILY overclock the Q6600 to 3Ghz, with the stock fan and such for a no-extra-charge boost. My q6600 replaced a D950 overclocked to 3.8Ghz and the 6600 is faster.

However, Video studio is not a true multi threaded program. You will find that the rendering speed of a q6600 (quad) is about the same as a e6600 (dual). If it was a true multi threaded system then the quad would be about double the speed as with Vegas or some other true multi thread software. None the less, if you are looking at a new PC, I would not bother with the duals... there is no sense. My guess is that corel will soon move to multi threaded programs as most other software companies are.

[Dirk67]

OK I just read this, and have almost the same Question:

we have to convert a huge collection of DV-Material to DVD-(mpeg2)-Material.

We want to buy new Hardware:
as I understand you, the transcoding will be faster with a Core2Duo (compared to single-processor-systems),
but there will be no difference in transcoding-speed between Core2Quad and Core2Duo ?

another question:
if I would buy a System with Core2Duo E6600, what would be the average transcoding time for 1 hour DV-Material to DVD ?
(just transcoding, no cut, no enhancement/filtering active...)

Has the 'size' of the RAM (1/2/4 GB)
or the type (and processing-power) of the Graphics-Card any influence to the transcoding-speed ?



.

[2Dogs]

OK I just read this, and have almost the same Question:

we have to convert a huge collection of DV-Material to DVD-(mpeg2)-Material.

We want to buy new Hardware:
as I understand you, the transcoding will be faster with a Core2Duo (compared to single-processor-systems),
but there will be no difference in transcoding-speed between Core2Quad and Core2Duo ?

I have no direct experience of using a quad core pc, but certainly with other video encoding applications, a Q6600 encodes significantly faster than an E6600. A more realistic comparison would be of a Q6600, running at 2.4Ghz, to a similarly priced E6850 or E8400, running at 3.0Ghz. If there's not much price difference between the quad core and dual core pc's you look at, it would make sense to go for the quad - since it would give you better "future proofing".

another question:
if I would buy a System with Core2Duo E6600, what would be the average transcoding time for 1 hour DV-Material to DVD ?
(just transcoding, no cut, no enhancement/filtering active...)

Video encoding speed scales almost linearly with cpu speed, for a given processor. My C2D laptop, at 1.8Ghz, encodes miniDV avi to DVD compliant mpeg-2 at just about real time. By contrast, the E6600 has more cache memory, and in a desktop pc equipped with 7200rpm hard drives, running at the stock 2.4Ghz, I would expect it to do the encoding at maybe 65% real time - i.e. a 60 minute video might take 40 minutes to encode. I'm sure that proud E6600 owners will jump in if I've underestimated the encoding ability!

Has the 'size' of the RAM (1/2/4 GB)
or the type (and processing-power) of the Graphics-Card any influence to the transcoding-speed ?

In my experience, proven by practical tests carried out with Celeron, Celeron M, Pentium 4, Pentium 4HT, Sempron and C2D pc's, the amount of RAM has virtually no effect on encoding speed. You will see a benefit when Smart Rendering - but that's not encoding anyway, really it's just writing the file from one location to another. In a pc equipped with an E6600, you probably wouldn't have less than 2GB of RAM, and at the present time, it's dirt cheap - you can pick up 2GB for about $30! Windows XP 32 bit edition can't use more than 3GB of RAM without some elaborate work-arounds, so you'll only truly see any benefit from 4GB if using a 64bit operating system.

Standard definition video editing puts very little strain on video resources, so even the humblest integrated graphics would be entirely satisfactory, and there would be no speed benefit gained by using a separate video card. Personally, however, I would fit a mid-range video card to a pc with an E6600, since you could then use it to play some nice looking games - but it's not necessary for the editing alone.

If you wanted to play full HD video, encoded using H.264, the E6600 is fast enough to do it without the benefit of hardware acceleration that many video cards offer.

You should be able to pick up an E6600 pc fairly cheaply, since it's now an "older" cpu though the more recent E8400, with 6MB of cache and running at 3.0Ghz seems to be available at the same price. Intel will be introducing a revised line-up of cpu's soon, using a smaller and more efficient 45nm manufacturing process - so prices of existing products will drop further.

[joosuna]

Ruggy..I compared my single cpu 3.0gHz to my dual core 3.0gHz with the same program. The rendering with the dual core was some what faster. Enough to notice the difference. Where the dual core did its magic was in making the DVD of my video projects. The single core would take about 3 times longer to do the job than the dual core in making a DVD. That was a dramatic difference.
signed
Joe O

[ruggy1]

Thanks for all your input guys - from what i can see a dual core will give me some benefits, but a quad will not. But the question still remains, when will MF and VS go multi-threaded and really use these extra CPU's?

[GuyL]

When will MF and VS go multi-threaded and really use these extra CPU's?

I hope soon. My friend and I have very similar systems. We both have Q6600 processors. We took a 20 minute DV video and rendered it to DVD settings. His system renders the video on Premiere Elements significantly faster then mine on Video Studio.

[Ken Berry]

For what it is worth, I have just been experimenting with DV > DVD conversions on my own Core Quad. I was pleased by the results, though they confirm that only two of the Quad's four cores seemed to be engaged on the conversion. The system details are, of course, under my System button below. I am running Vista Ultimate on it and using VS11.5+.

I started with a collection of (PAL) DV Type 1 files which totalled 58 minutes 30 seconds in length. I did no editing of any kind. I rendered to DVD compatible (PAL) mpeg-2 using a bitrate of 8000 kbps and LPCM audio. It took just 38 minutes 32 seconds to render. On my "old" P4 3.0 Ghz with HT and 2 GB RAM and NVidia 7600 GTS graphics, it would have taken anywhere between 1 hour 15 minutes to one hour 20 or 25 minutes, though the latter would probably have been with a certain amount of editing having been done.

I kept Task Manager visible during the whole process. As I say, only 2 of the processors (1 and 2 in from the left) showed high ranges of activity, generally in the 70 - 90% range, with a few troughs probably down to around 60%. The overall average for all four processors was around 44% and that remained fairly constant throughout, with only the occasional lurch up (to a max of 54% about 5 or 6 times) and down (to no lower than 38%). I had other programs running in the backgroup (Word 2007, Firefox, Outlook plus a variety of others that lodge themselves in the system tray) ...

RAM usage started out at 1.73 (I have 4 GB of system RAM) and slowly built up to 1.78 at about 70% of the conversion completed. It remained constant thereafter.

[Clevo]

For what it is worth, I have just been experimenting with DV > DVD conversions on my own Core Quad. I was pleased by the results, though they confirm that only two of the Quad's four cores seemed to be engaged on the conversion.

Yes..I agree that only 2 of 4 are used but also keep in mind that this means that you can play java games on the web while the other two cores are rendering/authering.

I drink enough coffee as it is.

[Ken Berry]

... or write a paper on international conflict prevention for a New York think-tank, which was what I was doing part of the time. You will recall I said I had Word 2007 open during the conversion process.

[etech6355]

I think it's hard to tell unless you know how the encoder was compiled. If the instuction sets are using highly optimized code such as hand machine coding for certain parts of the encoding. If you wrote a C++ program to encode an mpeg2 video file it could use all 4 processors at 90%. If the same code was optimized machine level code it could use 1 processor and perform the same work.

Similar to 2Dogs pointing out that a Core2-Duo running at 3Ghz (or overclocked) has very close to the same performance of a Core2-Quad running at 2.4Ghz.

When I encode video under Linux I can assign all 4 cores, they show approx 85%+ usage, yet the overall CPU Low Meter displays no more than 5% load.

As a test, I've used VS11+ to encode a 30 Minute DV to Mpeg2 conversion, similar to Ken's. Cpu usage is similar to what Ken posted. Yet, in another expensive encoder I own it uses all 4 processors at 90%. The VS11+ encoder takes just a little longer to perform the conversion, not much longer at all.
So I wouldn't complain about the VS ulead encoder, it's the main concept encoder and appears to me to have optimized code in it. The VS encoder doesn't appear to run at a high priority.