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MillimeterCS4 and 64-bit Systems, Part 2
Dec 22, 2008 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer
In this month’s first installment, I discussed the technical aspects of 64-bit computing as it related to Adobe Creative Suite 4 (CS4) performance. In this installment, I’ll detail the head to head tests between a 2.83GHz HP xw6600 workstation running Windows XP (32-bit version) with 3GB of RAM and a 3.33GHz HP xw8600 workstation running 64-bit Vista with 16GB of RAM. Both workstations have dual, quad-core processors for a total of eight cores.
From a strict processor-to-processor comparison, the xw8600 should be about 18 percent faster simply because of processor speed, 2.83GHz compared to 3.33GHz. To account for this, in addition to presenting raw scores, I also showed adjusted scores that reduced the encoding times of the 6600 by 18 percent.
Figure 1. PProHeadless.exe. To see this view of Windows Task Manager, click ctrl+alt+del and click the Processes tab.
Click here for a larger image
Mo Memory, Mo Memory
Before getting started, let’s review one fact about CS4 that didn’t quite make it up to the top of the new feature list: it requires a lot more memory for the same operations. For example, when rendering the HDV multicam project referred to below to Blu-ray-compatible MPEG-2 format, CS3 consumed 1.03GB of memory, while CS4 required 1.80GB.
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To be fair, as mentioned in the first installment, Adobe is recommending 64-bit systems for CS4, but to my recollection, that message came rather late. Nonetheless, the additional memory requirements make perfect sense; when Adobe architected Encore and Adobe Media Encoder (AME) to import Premiere Pro sequences directly, the company had to create some program that could render the sequences separately—kind of a Premiere Pro sequence interpreter. You won’t see this program running, but obviously it needs memory to run.
This is the PProHeadless.exe program that you can see in Figure 1, which inputs a Premiere Pro sequence, renders all edits, and hands off rendered frames in some easily recognizable intermediate file to AME and Encore. In addition to this application, Adobe also had to beef up the functionality of AME so it could operate as a standalone program, which also requires more RAM.
This brings to mind the phrase TANSTAAFL—which, for those sad souls who didn’t voraciously consume Robert Heinlein in their youth, stands for “There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.” The dish Adobe is serving up—separate operation for Encore and Adobe Media Encoder—is quite tasty, but the unadvertised price is that you might need to step up to a 64-bit system to really enjoy the fare.
How I Tested
I ran multiple tests using as many types of source files as I could find on my various hard disks (DV, HDV, AVCHD, DVCPRO HD) or download from the web (Red Digital Cinema). My general procedure was to create a test on the 32-bit system, copy the project file and content to the 64-bit system, then run the tests side by side recording Commit charge, processor utilization, and encoding time.
I kept most projects about 1 minute in length, and all employed a mixture of picture-in-picture, greenscreen, color correction, and relatively common effects. With each format, I included greenscreen both natively within Premiere Pro and via Dynamic Link from After Effects. I created all projects using native format presets in Premiere Pro and rendered to either DVD-compatible MPEG-2 (DV) or Blu-ray-compatible MPEG-2 (all HD formats).
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
