card(s) for video editing

using Avid Xpress DV and need to know what the difference between a high end gaming card and a Quadro 4 or Quadro FX card would be.

i have no experience with the quadro cards and need your guys help.

this is for a dept at work that does video editing. management doesn't want to spend more then $400 on a card. i'm doing my best to have them send back 5 IBM'S they just got with LOW end agp fx cards.

what do you recommend?

As far as I am aware, gaming cards for desktops aim at speed as a priority, and use different techniques to get good fps and good image quality.

Designer/CAD/etc cards aim for precision and image quality as priority. Speed isnt so important.

i may be wrong, but for video editing, the card will not really have much impact. what you really are after is a really fast cpu, and lots of bandwidth. quadro's are mainly for 3d rendering, afaik.

what you MAY want a better card for, would be dual monitor hookups and such.

but please, someone correct me if i'm wrong.

here are the specs that they recommend for the program.

Minimum Specifications for PC Workstations and Notebooks

* Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 1 or 2
* 933 MHz Pentium III or any Pentium 4 or any Pentium M processor
* 1 GB system memory (1.5 GB recommended)
* A qualified graphics card (as supported by system vendor); Avid recommends the NVIDIA Quadro®4 980 XGL (Windows) or the NVIDIA QuadroFX 1100
* An IEEE-1394 (FireWire) port or qualified DV In/Out Card (see below)
* 20 GB or larger internal disk drive
* CD or DVD-ROM drive


the cards they specify are $500-$600 bucks.
you could get a damn nice gaming card for 1/2 to 3/4 the price.

Im not sure what Avid Xpress is, although for the actually rendering work its CPU power, RAM bandwidth and size and storage performance that makes a big difference.

hUMANbEATbOX said:

i may be wrong, but for video editing, the card will not really have much impact. what you really are after is a really fast cpu, and lots of bandwidth. quadro's are mainly for 3d rendering, afaik.

what you MAY want a better card for, would be dual monitor hookups and such.

but please, someone correct me if i'm wrong.

Click to expand...

You are partially right, in so far as you are not using all the cheesy 3D Video FX like pagecurls, 3D fonts etc. (which is why they recommend the OpenGL cards - most FX are open GL in the editing programs)

In real world video editing you really don't use them too often, and I personally would rather go with a faster CPU, Ram to cut down rendering times for common used effects like color correction etc.

I personally think the Matrox Parhelia is the best Video Card for editing ( unless you want to go to a dedicated Video render card) due to it having 3 heads - you can use it for 2 Computer monitors and a seperate Video (TV) monitor.

Mike

One way to save money would be to buy a radeon 9700 non pro and softmod it into a firegl.

I know someone on the forums here bought an XTPE and did a mod to a FireGLX3 said they saw a significant performance boost