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Posted by Smarty on 11/04/07 21:32
Martin,
My thought in raising this Penryn / SSE4 point to Paul was that Intel will
unquestionably apply a jolt, perhaps a seismic jolt, to the industry when
the Penryn comes out, forcing pricing adjustments and re-consideration of
"high-end" video NLE platforms. The h.264/mpeg4/AVC world has brought with
it an immense processing burden, which brings many machines which easily
handle HDV nearly to a screeching halt. My 3 GHz Pentium 4 literally cannot
handle the workload and my 8 core MacPro wasn't a lot better. Thankfully I
have been working in HDV for the last 3 years, and only consider h.264 as an
alternative encoding strategy to making red laser HD DVD and BluRay BMDV
disks which play for hours and avoid the madness of 25 dollar blank disks
and $600 burners. Being impatient, I willingly spend major dollars on fast
rendering computers, so I lust for the new SSE4 / Penryn performance.
Regarding what to get next year, my sense is the $700 variety platform which
nappy describes is really a superb bargain and a very adequate HDV editing
platform, having used this approximate version of Intel hardware myself for
quite a while. For HDV work, I can't think of any reason to wait further
since the 'sweet spot' in performance at $700 has already been reached. For
AVCHD/h.264 fans, including those who (like myself) wish to dabble on, or
really work at true encoding / rendering of any amount of h.264/AVC work, I
am convinced from what I have seen so far that the extra hardware boost of
Penryn is well worth the wait and the extra expense, especially after the
initial excitement and pricing have dissipated a bit. I base this on the
absolutely painful h.264 work I have done so far with Vegas 8 and Macintosh
NLEs.
I may be entirely wrong, and I clearly remember my astonishment the first
time I used Ulead's prior Video Studio to render some HDV and thought I was
in rendering heaven. The cheap software product not only rendered the pants
off of anything else I had ever seen by a longshot time-wise, but the
frame-grabs, when carefully compared to the very same frames rendered in FCP
HD Studio and Vegas were as good or in some cases better. I bring this point
up only to say that somebody out there may be ingenious enough to devise a
really fast and good transcoding / rendering algorithm which leapfrogs the
rest of the pack, at which time h.264 may be as easily worked as HDV is
today. Alternately, a good hardware accelerator in a mid-sized CPU may be
yet another good alternative if h.264 ids in your future, but I have yet to
personally compare Edius, Matrox, and others who do this type of thing to
see if any really are worth the $$$.
As a sidebar, most reviews I have been reading of the Penryn note that most
apps benefit little from the new chip, and then close with the reminder that
time will be needed for the software developers to really learn and exploit
the SSE4. Such has always been the case with new processors and instruction
sets, but the near term benefits are indeed small until the software
arrives. I typically buy CPUs with a 4 year retention philosophy, and am
willing to buy the newest hardware in anticipation of a payoff a year or two
later. This may not make any sense for others however.
Hope some of this rambling may be of some value.
Smarty
"Martin Heffels" <goofie@flikken.net> wrote in message
news:o4asi31a468sdcmhdsqhu748k3pg1lrope@4ax.com...
> On Sun, 04 Nov 2007 15:04:08 GMT, "Smarty" <nobody@nobody.com> wrote:
>
>>Regarding Penryn / Skulltrail:
>
> Interesting. Thanks for the links, Smarty. Now I'm even more confused what
> to get next year ;-)
>
> cheers
>
> -martin-
> --
> Official website "Jonah's Quid" http://www.jonahsquids.co.uk
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