render engine, gpus and premiere pro projects?

[tfiproductions]

hello,

this is my 2nd post to your forum
i use adobe cs5 premiere pro
and want to use 2 gpus to use 4 monitors

i have a quadro 4000 and an geforce card...

could you please post back
stating what drivers you are using for the quadro 4000 card
and what drivers you are using for the geforce card?

thanks a bazillion for any insight / advice...

jeffrey

[krsz]

Hi,
Definitely not!

Read the following article, I think it will be helpful:
http://jeffpatton.net/2010/11/gtxquadro ... rendering/

krsz

[pixelrush]

I don't really see the need for four monitors.
Two would do most people just fine.
Do you have more that two eyes or one wallet?
Besides its a bit impractical to have four monitors on your desk let alone get the colour profiles to match.
Honestly I would go with just having a Quadro for a dual display and a Geforce for Octane.
I think Quadro 2000 and above play nicely with Photoshop gpu acceleration.
Some people say they have quadro and geforce drivers playing nicely on Win7 but I don't know about with 4 displays with spanning app windows.
You can try it or else try using a modded Quadro driver for both.
There are some details of that and an .ini on the commercial forum somewhere.
A Quadro 4000 will serve as a good display card for dual mons.

(posted from my new toy = Toshiba Thrive while sitting out in the garden )

[tfiproductions]

hello,

thanks a ton for your answer...

2 monitors for PPRO, 1 monitor for AE, 1 monitor for os stuff like evga precision, task manager, etc.

i don't need the color profiles to match right now

i'm getting into s3d stuff

the high school i work for is picking up the tab

can you tell me where this 'commercial forum' is please

i am trying to get a very efficient workflow established
by the time school starts in sept so we can put together
our own album/musicvideo/documentary on sustainability...

i work with the learning disabled students
so by design patience is not a strongpoint...

again, thank you so much for your help,

jeffrey

[pixelrush]

The commercial forum is available to you here when you purchase Octane.
However the mod I spoke of isn't something Refractive supply.
The info just happens to be kicking around in there.
I won't tell you it definitely will work for your situation because I don't know.
I use a mod driver myself and its OK - see sign.
Going forward it may not always be so given Nvidias disposition to nobbling their cards.
Personally I think you are nuts to use four displays but hey its a free world
Even if you succeed with four you will want to drop back to two for Octane so the Geforce can run cuda exclusively.

[tfiproductions]

hello,

i have never heard of octane until finding this thread about multiple gpus
you seem really knowledgeable about the program so here is my whole situation:

if octane is a render engine can i use it to render my Premeire Pro cs5.03 projects
by sending them through adobe media encoder and FRAMESERVE to OCTANE?

in reality i have an asus p6x58d-e mother board with 2 quadro 4000's
(i was told to use to gpu's with the same drivers and i had already installed 1 quadro 4000)
i have an older geforce card which was why i was wanted to know how you were mixing drivers
thank you for answering that question...

if you have any advice, knowledge, insight into being able to use OCTANE TO GPU RENDER with 2 quadro4000s
by FRAMESERVING TO OCTANE through media encoder...
my cameras are canon mts avchd footage

i know i may have severely overkilled by getting 2 quadro 4000s just to display onto 4 monitors but if
there is a way to incorporate octane into my workflow that provides good/fast gpu renders then i'll be interested...

i teach English, i am not a tech head,
the only knowledge i have so far of octane is that is a gpu rendering program

i wanted to post back hoping you're still online

thanks again,

jeffrey

[pixelrush]

I am not sure you understand what Octane does actually.
It renders (makes 2d photo-realistic pics) using 3d geometry ex polygon meshes (.obj format) imported from modelling apps like Maya, Max, Sketchup or Blender.
It has nothing to do with video editing or compositing as such although you might use the rendered images or animation sequences produced by Octane in a video.

Edit: After some research I think what you are interested in is the Adobe Premiere Pro 'Mercury Playback Engine'? which is GPU accelerated.(introduced in CS5 according to wikipedia )
This does run on Quadro like the Quadro 4000 and also top end Geforce.
It 'renders' in the sense that it processes video editing and effects utilising cuda in GPU.
This is different from the 'rendering' of an image from models by Octane in GPU using cuda.
Octane users are interested in rendering in the manner of an artists rendering of a proposed building or product albeit a very life like one.
I think you need to follow up 'Mercury Playback Engine' at the Adobe site to see what it does and how to enable its use, etc
here are a few random links to start with:
http://blogs.adobe.com/premiereprotrain ... e-pro.html
http://www.studio1productions.com/Artic ... ereCS5.htm

still ok to address your video card questions assuming you are still looking at Octane rendering -
thats a decent mobo and seeing as how you have that and 2 quadro 4000 already I would be inclined to get a cheap low power single slot quadro - a 400 or 600 - and stick it in the third pci-e slot for the Octane display while the 4000 do the cuda work. toss the old geforce (probably just as good as the duster I was hit with at school...)
The 2gb space will be a good size for most Octane projects and 2x256 cores will be quite fast to render -almost as fast as a sigle GTX580.
These three quadros will all be happy sharing the same std quadro driver without issues or ongoing specialist support/hacks in your demanding environment.
Now when you run your 4 monitors for usual graphics work everything is cool.
The quadro 400 can either be idle or run a fifth monitor (just because you can)..perhaps that can have a webcam feed like a rear view mirror to spot wayward students throwing darts behind your back while you are admiring the pixel wall you have
When it comes to running serious Octane sessions disconnect the displays from the 4000's and just use the one in the 400/600 for UI display.
In the Octane preferences you set the 400/600 to be 'inactive' and the two 4000's to be 'active'
Depending on the mobo you might need to either have the 400/600 in the first pci-e slot so Windows can boot or be able to set the mobo Bios to look to the 3rd pci-e slot first for the primary card if you place it there.
The obvious difficulty if you have to put a 4000 at the bottom of the case is case clearance and ventilation issues.
The 3 card config also allows you the option to run a different Octane session on each 4000 card if you wish although at half the previous speed, or only one card while you did graphics stuff on the others = 3 monitors, 1 Octane session and no partridge in a pear tree...
btw go for 64 bit OS and 8gb or 12 gb of ram to utilise 2gb vram for Octane.
HTH

sorry for the punctuation and grammar English has always been my weak subject.

[tfiproductions]

hello,

your information is wonderful
i read the faq 'after' i had posted
and realized that an octane render is different than a PPRO render
nonetheless you came through with great help

i guess i can use octane to render images that i can import into AE then if necessary
incoporate them into PPRO

but the workflow doesn't go the other way: PPRO to AE to OCTANE...
it was a good amount of schooling i got last night

the asus mobo with the x58'chipset' only offers 36 lanes of pcie
and each quadro uses 16

perhaps you can still help me

i have the quadros installed each using 16 (16x2=32 lanes)
leaving me with 4 lanes...

do you know if there is a way to control the amount of pcie lanes
a gpu card uses from the bios or another setting?

i am not at home in front of my rig until august 13th

i was also looking at the cubix xpander and the netstor solutions
for adding an external pcei housing, but they are soooooooooooooo expensive
it would be better to just get a more advanced motherboard...

speaking of which, do you of a less expensive solution than
the cubix or the netstor ?

thanks again,

i'll probably have more questions about octane in a minute


jeffrey


btw, i sincerely loved the 'throwing darts behind my head' line: classic!

[pixelrush]

The PCI-E connectors for video cards are the long ones with the retaining clips.
The way they typically work though is that the first one operates at 16x speed and subsequent cards operate at 8x speed.
Depends on the mobo and how you populate the slots. Yours is SLI capable but that is not needed by Octane.
It doesn't make a lot of difference to have 8x speed, the loading of the data is just a little slower.
For gaming rigs it is the same deal - you might have three identical video cards but the bus runs at 16x,8x,8x.
You just need usefully spaced slots for the cards so they fit.
I am not sure if Premiere can take advantage of multiple cards doing GPU acceleration but I guess so.
It seems that unlike Octane the video card can display and compute at the same time without causing issues.
Octane is happiest to run with one card handling the UI and another(s) running the cuda app.
You would need to chase up that sort of info at Adobe website.
The mobo you have ought to be fine for Octane and Premiere.
Unless your mobo can't accomodate more video cards ie no slots for it or power supply then there is no real need to look at an expander.
Some people have put together heavy duty Octane rigs with many cards but this is to get render horsepower.
I think you will be happy with two Quadro 4000 for both apps.
It depends how serious your need is for speed and how much you are willing to spend.
Rendering at GTX580 speed will be satisfying for many people and I would say for your students it would be OK.
Primarily I think your intent is to accelerate video production so I would target your set up to that.

[tfiproductions]

hello,

i am trying to figure out how PPRO is going to use 2 gpu's
and talking to you is helping me do that

the asus mobo has 3 pcie slots x16 length
but only 2 will use x16 speed at one time

so while away from my rig, i'm trying to come up with the best workflow

PPRO does not use SLI

Though PPRO may be limited to 1 gpu for cuda acceleration
i think AfterEffects can process opengl and cuda
(which hopefully will benefit from 2 quadro's)

general usage: what type of performance 'hit' happens when
you stick a x16 lane card like the quadro4000 in a x8 slot?
(is it only the 'slower rendering of data'?)

what else does the speed of the pcie lane control?

again, do you know if there is a way to specify the speed of a x16 lane, or a x8 lane?

or if i'm using sata3 or usb3, people say that bandwith is taken away from
the 36 lanes of pcie bandwith of the x58architecture...any thoughts?


talk to you soon,

jeffrey