I have a ati hd4870 right now and wondering what the upgrade options are. I don't care about power consumption. I just want more POWER.
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Video cards
- Thread starter matteusclement
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Do you use CS5 or Final Cut? I'd personally go with a 5870 since I like things to just work, though 6870 sounds pretty plug and play-ish. If you are a heavy Adobe user, you're looking for a GTX 285, unless you can afford a new quadro, which is well north of $1000.
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Final cut all the way. Tried the 285 with CS5.5 and I was less than impressed.
6870? is that even working with mac?
6870? is that even working with mac?
I'm curious with what you weren't impressed with. The performance of Premiere Pro CS5.5 is pretty impressive in my opinion. And I'm a former FCP instructor, worked at Apple on FCP and Motion, founded SF Cutters, etc.
Keep in mind, you can always make a feature request for any features you don't like, don't function the way you want or are missing: http://www.adobe.com/go/wish
If it's FCP, and you want power in an Apple "just works" fashion, a 5870 is your only choice. Value wise it is leagues better than any available nvidia cards, though so is the 5770 for about half the price. The 6870 is a mostly plug and play solution if you choose the right card, though that could change abruptly at any point. If you just want it to work, like I do, go 5870. I couldn't justify one for my 1,1 as the 5770 is only marginally slower with old machines, but with your shiny newer Pro the 5870 offers tons of power.
COLOR is a huge factor. The workflow of going from cuts to color to effects and then out was awesome.
MOTION is also a great feature.
At this point in time, I don't have time to learn After effects, which will be a turning point back for me.
Other cons: windows/adobe crashing is just getting to be too much. I thought win7 would sort that out, but it didn't. I've never had Final Cut crash on me. EVER.
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So you can plop in a PC version of a 6870 right now and it works?
I don't have any experience with the 6870, but there's a good thread on the Mac Pro forum about it. The 6870 isn't much better than a 5870 from what I've seen, it's just a matter of the cheaper price on a PC 6870 vs the Apple 5870. There are issues in OSX with the 6870, obviously the 5870 doesn't suffer from those issues. If money isn't that big an issue, I'd grab a 5870 and call it a day.
Yeah, I hear you. It is possible to send an XML from Premiere Pro to FCP and then go to Color. It's faster than transcoding in FCP, editing and going to Color. Check that out. In the future, look into our new color tools. We acquired Iridas Speed Grade, so that will be a boon to users like yourself that need advanced color tools. Right now, a lot of our users are using Colorista.
Motion is very cool. I know it well as I used it since Motion 1 and beta tested Motion 4 inside the mothership for FCS3, which was fun. Checked out the FCPX/Motion 5 workflow? It's a lot more cumbersome than it used to be.
I'm sure you know that After Effects is king in the compositing realm and it will never hurt you to get some basic chops in that application. I got some pretty serious AE chops, then found myself working at Pixar on Nemo and WALLE!
Basically, you use Premiere Pro and After Effects, much like you do with FCP 7 and Motion 4. We can have AE comps "dynamically linked" to a Premiere Pro sequence and make changes that update in the timeline.
I love learning new apps, but that's me. To each his own.
Never crashed FCP? Wow, I wish I could say that!
Crashing is unusual for CS5 and CS5.5 unless your system is not up to snuff. A 64bit OS like Windows 7 needs a lot of CPU power and RAM for a smooth experience. If you have a good system and have installed all the updates, bring your problem to the Premiere Pro user-to-user forum, where there are a lot of experts around, and we'll get you sorted out.
Cheers,
Kevin
To me it seems they have flipped the Paradigm around. You start doing your stuff in Motion first, then publish it to FCP X. Not sure, though, if I'm really impressed with that change.
It never hurts to learn something new (well, it can be hurtful, but in the end...). AE and Motion have a lot in common, but are two different animals. There's lot in AE that can't do in Motion and the over way around. If you only have to create swipes, lower thirds, keying, openers - basically TV show work, you'll do fine with Motion. It has been easier to learn for me.
Kevin - I have a quad core at 3.4ghz, 8gigs of Ram and RAID 0's and 1's. I think it has the punch needed.
SOunds like the 5870 it is. Or bleed my 4870 to death.
I AM still curious if the 5870 will THAT much of a difference.
SOunds like the 5870 it is. Or bleed my 4870 to death.
I AM still curious if the 5870 will THAT much of a difference.
I have a hard time seeing the 5870 make that much of an impact over other optimization you could be doing to your system. Not that much software is really video card dependent at this point, and while it would help, there are other things you could do that would help more. It's different if you use Motion a ton, but Final Cut won't see that much of a gain. I'm not sure about Color.
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Where do you think the better funds would go?
TheStrudel said:
Where do you think the better funds would go?
Are you already using faster hard drives? Considered SSDs? Have adequate RAM? If you tell us where you're slowing down, it's easier to make a recommendation.
You're probably not using FCP X, but it's reputedly far faster than FCP 7. It should be; it's been rewritten from the ground up to take advantage of your hardware.
You're probably not using FCP X, but it's reputedly far faster than FCP 7. It should be; it's been rewritten from the ground up to take advantage of your hardware.
That's logical, but if you can't identify the video card as a cause of slowdowns, upgrading it simply won't help you. And you're really only going to see that in Motion and/or Color.
ATI cards are generally best for Color. NVIDIA cards won't do 10-bit linear or log output in Color (limitation in the original code); 8-bit or 32-bit float (ridiculously big files) only.
However, I seriously doubt that Color will see a significant benefit using a 5870 card over the 4870 you already have. My 8800 GT shows practically no difference in effects and render performance over the stock 2600 XT I used to have installed. The 8800 GT is obviously the faster card by leaps and bounds, but this could be due to other things like software optimization.
Motion (if you use it) would probably scale better with a faster card.
But generally speaking, a 5870 probably won't bring much to the table for you in FCS in general. FCP-X, different story.
Not quite ready for FCX yet.
I'm thinking an SSD might get me better results.
The 5870 at $450 could get me a mighty nice SSD....
I'm thinking an SSD might get me better results.
The 5870 at $450 could get me a mighty nice SSD....