64 BIT OR NOT?

[Ken Bouchard]

I'll be putting together a system to be used only for video conversions (vcr
to dvd), would it be worth going to 64 bit technology or should I just stick
with a fast 32 bit system with lots of ram? any opinons graciously accepted.


thanks,

 

[Thomas Wendell]

We're speaking software now?? As all new systems are already 64bit (AMD A64,
Sempron 3000->, Intel Core and Core Duo, "older" Pentium 6xx, 8xx and 9xx
series)

The problem comes down to finding the 64bit software....

I don't know what's available in the Linux world, but in Windows, it's still
32bit XP, as there's a definitive lack of driver support for the 64bit
version....


--
Tumppi
=================================
Most learned on these newsgroups
Helsinki, FINLAND
(translations from/to FI not always accurate
=================================

 

[John Miller]

"with lots of ram" - there is a false belief that you need huge amounts of
RAM. You can get by with 512MB and 1GB is plenty. If you are thinking of
more than 1GB, don't - spend the money elsewhere - such as on a faster CPU.
A lot of people (especially with a vested interested - such as retailers)
claim you need >1GB for video editing. I have challenged them to provide
hard numbers - no replies. The important thing for RAM is to make sure you
have the optimum arrangement for the motherboard - e.g., 2 x 512MB instead
of 1 x 1GB etc.

This is from a post on rec.video.desktop where I show that even 512MB is
ample:

I find the claim that 1GB is the minimum quite laughable.

As I type, I have Premiere Pro chugging away creating an MPEG2 file from two
DV AVI sources with titles and picture-in-picture. I am monitoring its
memory usage with Task Manager on a dual core Pentium D 2.8GHz with 1GB RAM.

CPU Use - 50% (kinda disappointing...maybe due to using a USB2.0 external
drive rather than Firewire)
Peak Mem Usage - 236,404K (i.e., 0.23GB)
Commit Charge (i.e, total mem use by all apps etc) - 469MB

Apps running: Premiere Pro, Outlook, Outlook Express plus a lot of services
etc.

So even a 512MB could cope without having to thrash to disk all the time
(especially if not running the other apps)

I'd like to see the claims for 2GB backed up with some hard numbers...

Any editing systems that require that much memory at a given time sound
rather suspect to me as far as quality of programming goes.

John.

 

[Jeff Rife]

John Miller (john_NO_@_SPAM_enosoft.net) wrote in rec.video.dvd.misc:

"with lots of ram" - there is a false belief that you need huge amounts of
RAM. You can get by with 512MB and 1GB is plenty.

I'm not sure what DVDs *you* are editing, but the last project I created
with Adobe Encore 2.0 was using 850MB of RAM while I was working on it.
It was painfully slow even with 2GB of RAM in the machine...I'd hate to
think what it would have been like if it had to swap with only 512MB of
real RAM.

If you are thinking of
more than 1GB, don't - spend the money elsewhere - such as on a faster CPU.

No, this won't help nearly as much. After about 2.5GHz, you won't see any
real increase in speed for the actual editing process, although rendering
out to another format will be helped. But, don't spend money for a bleeding
edge 3.4GHz CPU...live with a 3.2GHz and spend the money you save on RAM
and real fast hard drives.

 

[John Miller]

"Encore" means "More", after all.

Any app that uses that much memory is a disgrace. There's no excuse for it.
How much video does 850MB represent? Why doesn't the software make more
intelligent use of the host system's file system? Pure and simple - sloppy
programming. Adobe are notorious for it.

 

[Mark]

"Encore" means "More", after all.

Any app that uses that much memory is a disgrace. There's no excuse for
it. How much video does 850MB represent? Why doesn't the software make
more intelligent use of the host system's file system? Pure and simple -
sloppy programming. Adobe are notorious for it.

I'm not sure what you mean here. It is well known that disk access is slower
than memory access. Hence, if an editing program is to be as responsive as
possible, then it should have as much of the video in memory as possible. Of
course, 850MB of video isn't much at all, but ideally the editor program
should adapt and use however much memory is available to it (although you
should also be able to set its maximum, and it should also potentially adapt
this maximum based on what other demands are being placed on memory).

I would have thought a poor video editing program is one that lets a lot of
memory stand idle rather than using it??

 

[Goldmine]

I just put in a 64 bit athlon processor unit and it runs 30-40 deg cooler
than my previous 3.2. ghz athlon XP. Athlon 64 bit processors run 32 bit
programs very well. I dont have any 64 bit programs, but my 32 bit pgms run
about 20% faster on a 3.2 ghz 64 bit athlon than they did on the older 32
bit processor. The biggest difference is now I dont need a 1 HP fan to keep
the cpu cool.

64 bit pentium processors, though , do not perform well with 32 bit
software. Another reason I bought 1000 shares of AMD. I have yet to see
any company spend money on 64 bit software, just because they make
processors for it.

 

[Jeff Rife]

John Miller (john_NO_@_SPAM_enosoft.net) wrote in rec.video.dvd.misc:

Any app that uses that much memory is a disgrace. There's no excuse for it.
How much video does 850MB represent?

Less than 2GB on the final DVD, with the average bitrate about 4Mbps.

Why doesn't the software make more
intelligent use of the host system's file system? Pure and simple - sloppy
programming. Adobe are notorious for it.

And yet, you're bragging about how little memory you need to run Premiere
Pro, also made by Adobe.

Still, if you understood anything about audio and video editing (and DVD
creation), you'd know why so much memory is needed. The primary reason is
to give the user preview and feedback of how the finished product will
look and sound.

 

[John Miller]

Adobe are notorious for bloatware. Acrobat is an example and, based on
what's been posted, so is Encore. I still think 300MB is a lot for an NLE
to use at any one moment.

As it happens, I know a lot about audio and video editing - been doing NLE
since 1995 and I write commercial software for video editing - so I know
what the OS can do and I know what crap Adobe have built into their later
offerings. I know that they - along with Ulead and others - continue to use
old, off-the-shelf code - such as Video for Windows - do not fully embrace
DirectShow and - like the Mac world - add fluff instead of working on the
core of the software to make it quick and versatile. I can achieve in
realtime (without special RT hardware) what these "cutting edge" NLEs can
only dream about - why, because I went back to the basics, identified the
real bottlenecks in video editing and wrote my own encoding/decoding engine
from scratch.

850MB is a shit load of RAM and there is ABSOLUTELY NO NEED to have all the
video loaded all the time - smart programmers would make use of the features
built in to the OS. If you don't know what those are, don't worry. But
Adobe sure as hell should.

You've just been duped and conned into believing that because it's video, it
needs a lot of memory.

Show me the hard figures - show me the CPU usage used by the application,
the memory usage (not for the whole system, just the

 

[Jeff Rife]

John Miller (john_NO_@_SPAM_enosoft.net) wrote in rec.video.dvd.misc:

850MB is a shit load of RAM
Agreed.

and there is ABSOLUTELY NO NEED to have all the
video loaded all the time

And yet, if you have the RAM, it *should* all be in memory all the time,
so that you can jump to different parts as quickly as possible.

- smart programmers would make use of the features
built in to the OS. If you don't know what those are, don't worry.

I do know what they are, and smart programmers tend not to use a lot of
them, since most are designed to allow multitasking to work better, when
what you really want is to keep your video editing app in memory at all
times.

Show me the hard figures - show me the CPU usage used by the application,
the memory usage (not for the whole system, just the

CPU use was insignificant, and the 850MB was for Adobe Encore alone. The
RAM usage and virtual allocation were within 5% of each other, but I can't
recall which was larger.

You've got to remember that Encore isn't a video editing app...it's a DVD
authoring tool. As such, it's actually a lot worse about memory than most
video editors. Encore needs to have converted-for-preview versions of
the audio and video handy. Sure, it doesn't load them until you first
work with a particular cut, but they stay in memory if you have the space,
which was my point. If I had only had 512MB of RAM, trying to preview the
DVD would have been painful as I switched between different titles.

One other reason Adobe video apps use more than others is that Adobe
converts all audio to 32-bit and all video to something more than 8-bits
per channel (I can't recall if they use 10 or 12). Although this does
take up a lot more space, it increases the accuracy of audio and video
effects.

 

[Mark]

Adobe are notorious for bloatware. Acrobat is an example and, based on
what's been posted, so is Encore. I still think 300MB is a lot for an NLE
to use at any one moment.

As it happens, I know a lot about audio and video editing - been doing NLE
since 1995 and I write commercial software for video editing - so I know
what the OS can do and I know what crap Adobe have built into their later
offerings. I know that they - along with Ulead and others - continue to
use old, off-the-shelf code - such as Video for Windows - do not fully
embrace DirectShow and - like the Mac world - add fluff instead of working
on the core of the software to make it quick and versatile. I can achieve
in realtime (without special RT hardware) what these "cutting edge" NLEs
can only dream about - why, because I went back to the basics, identified
the real bottlenecks in video editing and wrote my own encoding/decoding
engine from scratch.

850MB is a shit load of RAM and there is ABSOLUTELY NO NEED to have all
the video loaded all the time - smart programmers would make use of the
features built in to the OS. If you don't know what those are, don't
worry. But Adobe sure as hell should.

Just because you use capitals to make a point does NOT make it true. It is
well known that memory access is much faster than disk access. Hence, the
application should be using memory rather than disk if there is free memory
available.

 

[Justin]

John Miller wrote on [Wed, 2 Aug 2006 18:20:49 -0400]:

850MB is a shit load of RAM and there is ABSOLUTELY NO NEED to have all the
video loaded all the time - smart programmers would make use of the features
built in to the OS. If you don't know what those are, don't worry. But
Adobe sure as hell should.

Show me the hard figures - show me the CPU usage used by the application,
the memory usage (not for the whole system, just the

Translationg: I am telling you that smart programmers know what they are
doing and provide no proof but expect facts and figures to refute me.