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Configuring Your System for CS4, Part 2

Feb 23, 2009 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer

           

In the last installment, I described buying considerations and costs for system RAM and CPUs for Apple’s Mac Pro and HP’s xw8600 workstation. In this installment, I’ll present the results of a series of benchmark tests with the two systems. As you probably recall, both systems use quad-core Intel Xeon processors, and both used 64-bit operating systems—OS X 10.5.5 for the Mac and 64-bit Windows Vista Business, Service Pack 1, on the HP workstation.

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Configuring Your System for CS4, Part 1 This month, I’ll review how the number of processors and the amount of RAM impact encoding performance, and then find other, non-CS4-related fish to fry... CS4 and 64-bit Systems, Part 1 So there I was, testing Adobe Creative Suite 4 (CS4)’s AVCHD compatibility. I created a simple project, about 4 minutes long, two picture-in-picture overlays with simple rotation and color correction... Test Drive: Nvidia Quadro CX and Adobe CS4, Part 1 This month, in our quest to identify the optimal CS4 configuration, we look at graphic chip manufacturer Nvidia’s Quadro CX technology...

The benchmark tests differ by format and computer. To test Windows performance, the DV test is the longest (about 4 minutes) and most comprehensive, and it includes color correction, chroma key via Adobe After Effects using Dynamic Link, chroma key via Adobe’s native Color Key filter, transparency, titles, logo insertion, and other effects. To test performance under the various test configurations, I rendered this file to DVD-compatible MPEG-2 in Adobe Media Encoder.

The other tests were all 1 minute long and included multiple tracks, with spinning, 1/4-screen picture-in-picture effects, color correction, and chroma key via After Effects using Dynamic Link. With all HD formats, I rendered to Blu-ray-compatible MPEG-2 format in Adobe Media Encoder. I describe how these tests differed from the tests I performed on the Mac below, but the numbers are not comparable.

Both sets of tests certainly could have been longer and more complex, but the number of tests (38 on the HP Windows test system alone) dictated that they be short and sweet. Even at the 1 minute duration, the 4K Red source files still took at least 18 minutes to render—and it doesn’t take long to eat into nights, weekends, and quality time with the kiddies.

In all instances, I kept Premiere Pro open while encoding, though I wasn’t actively editing. After running all the timed benchmark tests, I re-ran the DVCPRO HD-to-Blu-ray project again and tried some minor edits, including rendering a portion of the timeline, to gauge system responsiveness during the encoding cycle. I report the results of those tests below.