EEVblog #726 - Dual Xeon Video Editing Machine Build

[EEVblog]

And it seems no one noticed that I plugged the video card into a PCIEx16 slot going to the 2nd CPU 
I have no idea what bottleneck that adds in practice, but it won't help.

[EEVblog]

Non ecc and faster memory can improve performance, not dramatically, but it can.

Seems not:
http://www.techspot.com/article/845-ddr3-ram-vs-ecc-memory/

And someone pointed out the E5-2630v2 does not support faster than 1333MHz memory, but that seems to be incorrect:
http://ark.intel.com/products/75790/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-2630-v2-15M-Cache-2_60-GHz
It can support up to 1600Mhz it seems.

[Psi]

could try going to huffyuv codec (multithreaded version) in Sony and then huffyuv to h264 in handbrake

Huffyuv is compressed but lossless. Files are large but realistic for a intermediate step.

Im not sure how the multithreaded performance of huffyuv compares to other codecs.

[Ed.Kloonk]

And it seems no one noticed that I plugged the video card into a PCIEx16 slot going to the 2nd CPU 
I have no idea what bottleneck that adds in practice, but it won't help.

Wondering if that's why the Sony Software baulked when you transplanted the system. Some kind of inumeration mismatch. Hardly matters now tho...

[Fungus]

I said think about it for a future investment. No one "needs" 4k, you provide high resolution images of teardowns.

Right now the 4k cameras are still in the 'early adopter' price range, ie. too expensive.

Those who say there is no noticeable difference in image quality in 1080 vs 4k are the same who said there is no difference in 720 vs 1080 and 480 vs 720 a few years ago. If there is no difference, an entire industry wouldn't make the jump as the technology becomes available.

The 'industry' will jump as a marketing move - to sell new TVs. They'll advertise and pay for TV presenters/celebrities to casually mention how amazing their new TV is, even though they probably got theirs for free, it was the top-of-the-line model, and they probably don't even know what to look for in a TV image.

Plus: As soon as manufacturing costs go down to the same price level as the old ones, all the stores will stop selling the old stuff. All you'll be able to buy is 4k (or whatever) whether it's noticeably better or not.

In short: The industry 'jumping' doesn't tell you anything about the quality of a product. The difference to the consumer might be very small.

If you watch movies from 10 feet away on a 100" TV then of course 4k is going to look much better than 1080p. On a 24" panel? Not so much...

[mariush]

3) Direct uncompressed output using the Sony YUV Video For Windows codec actually works (it had issues on my old machine)
1:46 for the 1min test video which is pretty good and the fastest yet. That was to the SSD. File size was 12.163GB for the 1 min, so that means a 1 hour video would need 730GB.
Such an output would need about 114MB/s write speed, so that makes a 7200 rpm drive a WD Black suitable. 1GB+ of SSD would of course be very expensive and of no improvement.
So this seems like the best solution for now.
I might try some of the other VFW codecs again, but I've been advised by top people close to the metal that the Sony CODEC is pretty darn good at this.

You could try the Lagarith Lossless Video Codec. It probably compresses a bit better and is quite fast.
http://lags.leetcode.net/codec.html

MagicYUV is much faster and often compresses better (but depends on content)

ps.  I don't like Google Chrome and I'm too used to Firefox to use something else, so I'm stuck with 25 fps. 50fps is not that big of an improvement to make me switch to Chrome just to watch the videos.
 
4k would work on any browser and would be a nice thing especially for pcb closeups or similar things. It would take more disk space (as 4k cameras i saw record at 60-100mbps) to back up stuff but for most of your videos about 20 mbps for final render would be enough (since there's not much motion and so on). But hard drives are relatively cheap.

I don't think about it from the viewpoint "people have 1080p monitors or lower", i think of the large sensors in 4k cameras and the sharpness, fine detail etc compared to regular hd cameras, it would help for some of your videos.

[Fungus]

I have downloaded the latest Cyberlink power director to try (again, have tried it years ago, it was not suitable) as it now promises lighting speed and several have testified to that.

There might be a new version or two since then (I'm new to video editing).

I'm not going to claim Power Director is perfect. There's definitely a lack of "power user" options for engineers to fiddle with but if you relax and trust it, it seems to do the job.

It needs two things to make it perfect for blog-videos IMHO:
a) Better audio handling in the 'trim' tool - I want to see the audio and hear it when I move the scrubber.
b) A dynamic range compressor on the Audio track. The 'normalize track' tool works great but it's conservative with the level, I want a bit more volume.

I can live with (a) and I do (b) as a separate step (it's easy to do...)

I haven't tried Sony, I started out with Premiere Pro ("PP").

PP never gave me the impression that it was for casual users or people who aren't being paid by the hour. Everything was long and involved, with endless options. PD is much simpler.

Things that really killed Premiere Pro for me:
a) No way to match the audio levels across all the clips. Audio mixing is a lot of manual work in PP.
b) No way to remove a clip from the timeline and have it close the gap automatically. WTF?!! Similarly for inserting/replacing clips. You're screwed if you want make changes in the middle of the timeline.

nb. This was on PP CS6 so (b) might be fixed. I googled long and hard for an answer to (a) but there's nothing.

[Fungus]

Another thing to keep in mind: LGA2011 CPUs have a quad-channel memory controller so unless you put four similar DIMMs on each CPU, you are only enabling half of the RAM bandwidth each CPU is capable of. This could be a massive bottleneck when all 24 threads are enabled.

Would also probably be best that each CPU has an identical memory configuration to the other.  I think the Dell Precision Workstations with Xeon cpus will warn you if your memory layout is not optimal at start-up.

Why? Each CPU has it's own memory controller. What difference would it make?

People going on and on about RAM are barking up the wrong tree IMHO.

Workstation RAM is expensive. At best you'll only shift the bottleneck somewhere else. Fiddling with the RAM certainly won't get you the 200-300% speed increase implied by all those CPUs.

I'd say the problem is with the software, not the hardware. Dave needs a better codec for Sony or a different video editor.

[EEVblog]

Wondering if that's why the Sony Software baulked when you transplanted the system. Some kind of inumeration mismatch.

Yes, could very well be. Have done it before and it's worked

[EEVblog]

Why? Each CPU has it's own memory controller. What difference would it make?
People going on and on about RAM are barking up the wrong tree IMHO.

I think the 4 channel thing has merit, I at least want to fill all 4 slots on each CPU.

Workstation RAM is expensive. At best you'll only shift the bottleneck somewhere else. Fiddling with the RAM certainly won't get you the 200-300% speed increase implied by all those CPUs.

Agreed. I don't expect a big improvement.
Anyway someone is kindly donating some.

[george graves]

I'm not going to claim Power Director is perfect.

It needs two things to make it perfect for blog-videos IMHO:
a) Better audio handling in the 'trim' tool - I want to see the audio and hear it when I move the scrubber.
b) A dynamic range compressor on the Audio track. The 'normalize track' tool works great but it's conservative with the level, I want a bit more volume.

a) No way to match the audio levels across all the clips. Audio mixing is a lot of manual work in PP.
b) No way to remove a clip from the timeline and have it close the gap automatically. WTF?!! Similarly for inserting/replacing clips. You're screwed if you want make changes in the middle of the timeline.

Trading one consumer software for another isn't going to help.  If you want pro rendering times, you need pro software - and a set up to match.  I've said it already.  And yes, as mentioned...let me highlight this....every piece of editing software has it upside and down sides. As a professional editor, I've edited on Media 100's, Avid, Premiere, Sony Vegas Pro, Xpress, Xpress DV.  Heck I started in tape to tape.  My first "edit" was on a set of sony 3/4" Umatic VTRs. One of the traps is, that if you get use to one piece of software, and then try to move to the other, your knee jerk reaction will be "Why is the heck can't I do XYZ that I use to be able to do so easily!!!"  You quickly get over it, and learn the "real" way of doing things.  In the end it's much better. 

A few things.

- "normalizing" audio is like using a hammer on top of someone's head to say hello.  A graphic compressor/limiter is much better.
-  I'm not a huge fan of premiere pro - but the latest version is awesome - and it's only like $30 a month.  And it's not hard at all to learn.  If you can learn eagle cad, PP is super easy.
- yes even PP has fit to fill, over wright, JKL trimming, and most importantly, 3 point editing (3 point editing is where you supply 3 of 4 parts, IN, OUT of both the source and record - it'll calculate the other.)  (My guess is that almost no-one in this thread even knows what JKL trimming is.)
- 4K for a talking head video?    Yea, enjoy those render times.

Things we learned in this tread:  Someone is having fun building a PC and learning about the world of video. And he likes to re-encode his encodes.

[adam1213]

Adding more CPUs can result in contention for shared resources e.g. memory. This can result in worse performance.

note: It may be something else impacting performance.

[Dany J.]

dave did you even try my method?? man my HD6950 is rendering at double the real-time speed on exactly the same setting you made your videos, if it didn't work then pretty sure you have your setup wrong, IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO NOT GET HUGE BOOST USING AN R9-290

[EEVblog]

4k would work on any browser and would be a nice thing especially for pcb closeups or similar things. It would take more disk space (as 4k cameras i saw record at 60-100mbps) to back up stuff but for most of your videos about 20 mbps for final render would be enough (since there's not much motion and so on). But hard drives are relatively cheap.

60-100Mbps is twice to over 3 times my current bit rate at 50/60fps.

I don't think about it from the viewpoint "people have 1080p monitors or lower", i think of the large sensors in 4k cameras and the sharpness, fine detail etc compared to regular hd cameras, it would help for some of your videos.

Of course it would.
Unfortunately it's not a simple matter of going out and buying a couple of 4K cameras. Everything has to be tested in a complete end-end workflow, not only for features and suitability, but speed and operator sanity during use.
For example, my more expensive Sony NEX-VG30, an otherwise awesome HD camera, is practically useless for my day-to-day blog shooting as a main camera. That is why I use my less expensive and technically inferior Canon HF G30 camera for most bench stuff. If has a lot of little things that enable a better, faster, and less stressful workflow. The last thing I want is a technically awesome 4K camera, but is annoying as hell to use when you have to shoot 200 clips in a day.
And then other changes might be forced upon me as an unforeseen result. It can be like starting the blog from scratch and learning all over again.
And if 50fps rendering is annoyingly slow, I can't wait to process 2-3+ times the bitrate 
So switching to new 4K cameras is to be done with the utmost of caution and fear.

[EEVblog]

dave did you even try my method??

Yes.

man my HD6950 is rendering at double the real-time speed on exactly the same setting you made your videos

Wrong. You are rendering at a very low 10Mbps. And I'd bet you aren't using a mix of the exact same 60fps and 50fps source AVCHD files that I am either.
These things make a huge difference.

[Dany J.]

no i tried it before i posted it i rendered at 26 Mbps and it was still around double realtime, i will try to mix videos and will see if you are right about that

[Dany J.]

look right now i am gunna record it on video, will use a mixed HD game of throne clips 1 50 and 1 60fps, will render at exactly the same setting you use.. and i will let you see the difference between using CPU alone and GPU.

[RoTTe]

Just an idea: Give us the RAW Sony Vegas project and leave us fight to win the contest. Tons of people rendering the same project sharing the time and specs of his computer. A lot of data to compare . This CPU vs GPU vs Memory vs HyperThreading vs whatever vs SATA vs USB3 NEC vs USB3 xPress Intel vs more things kill me please. I love to stablish a base line (maybe a lower specs machine go faster -hello software problem-, maybe the actual rendering time is pretty good for the specs -hi there hardware power-)

Good luck!

[Dany J.]

Here you go dave check this video out.i even did that while capturing my screen in HD res lol
i didn't show entire rendering process just time estimated time left by SOny movie studio and i completed the rendering it is almost the same

Without the screen cap running the time is:
8:13 CPU
1:20 GPU

don't tell me your video are different and this stuff, it is clear man that my CPU had a rough time dealing with this 2 minute clip while with GPU it was a breeze although it is an old beast. so Opencl is the way to go still wondering why it didn't work for you
http://youtu.be/1zbfnwaV9ds

edit: the whole clip is 2 minutes long realtime

[george graves]

Just an idea: Give us the RAW Sony Vegas project and leave us fight to win the contest.

That's never going to happen.

[Fungus]

Trading one consumer software for another isn't going to help.  If you want pro rendering times, you need pro software

That's complete rubbish. Repeating it endlessly won't make it any more true.

(Perhaps you'd like to post some "pro rendering times" for us to look at and analyze. I already posted the time taken to render this blog video...)

Rendering speed comes from a tiny 'codec' module. Provided he knows what he's doing, a guy in a shed can optimize that just as well as a team of 'software architects' sitting on a cloud somewhere. There's no big secrets out there. Video encoding is a mathematical transform.

You really think Cyberlink are holding back? Why would they? Rendering speed is a big selling point (and also very easy for reviewers to measure and compare!!)

http://www.version-2.com.sg/products/cyberlink/powerdirector9/truevelocity

nb. Quite another thing is broadcaster-level installations which can often have custom hardware accelerators, etc. Even so, I think they tend more towards racks of consumer PCs these days.


You want case studies of corporations vs. guys in sheds? Intel set up a special software division a while ago to produce libraries that would run faster on an Intel CPU than anywhere else, libraries for things like JPEG decompression. Everybody needs fast JPEG decompression, right?

Intel threw lots of resources at it for several years but it was never even as fast as ordinary libjpeg, which was mostly written by a single guy in his spare time.

Eventually "Intel Performance Labs" faded from view and even Google can barely find "IJL15" (the last version of the infamous jpeg library).

[Corporate666]

Trading one consumer software for another isn't going to help.  If you want pro rendering times, you need pro software

That's complete rubbish. Repeating it endlessly won't make it any more true.

People who consider themselves "pros" have a vested interest in hyping their unobtanium skills, software and hardware and like to profess others don't "get it", when they are shown to be incorrect.

I think George is still smarting from his 3rd of 4th time of being proven wrong about what Dave is doing wrong.

[Fungus]

Just an idea: Give us the RAW Sony Vegas project and leave us fight to win the contest. Tons of people rendering the same project sharing the time and specs of his computer.

Dave is looking for a BIG difference, not a few percent.

He already has a decent i7 and a massive Xeon machine to try Sony Vegas on. He's already tried different graphics cards, it's not working out.

What's needed is either a) A better codec for Sony, or (b) Some completely different software that *does* have a better codec.

[victor]

I'm don't claim myself an expert, I'm just giving ideas.

Just release your raw 1 minute sample to see if anyone can beat your time, then you can try some software/hardware settings yourself. IF YOU WISH.

[RoTTe]

Just an idea: Give us the RAW Sony Vegas project and leave us fight to win the contest. Tons of people rendering the same project sharing the time and specs of his computer.

Dave is looking for a BIG difference, not a few percent.

He already has a decent i7 and a massive Xeon machine to try Sony Vegas on. He's already tried different graphics cards, it's not working out.

What's needed is either a) A better codec for Sony, or (b) Some completely different software that *does* have a better codec.

Two weeks ago, I updated the ATI drivers (why ? i don't know). I lost a lot of hours later with two monitors (U2713HM of dell) one blue fog and the another one with a red thing overlay killing my eyes. Somehow the new ATI driver mix the DDC calibration from one monitor and ignore the another one.

I know that is not the normal thing because the normal thing don't fuck my monitors from the beginning. There are a lot of parameters with codecs and encoding, my laptop uses the integrated graphic card (i7 HD4000 blah blah) for encoding/decoding software and the NVIDIA for another things (You need to execute Altium associated with the Nvidia card or you'll hammer the laptop hard).

Maybe I lost something important but I don't know if 3x the realtime with that config is the normal timming, the epic timming or just the worst timming of the world. Do you know for sure ? I don't