Streaming Learning Center

If you’re an editor or a compressionist, your livelihood depends upon the stability and throughput of your production station. If you plan to buy a new Windows workstation in 2012, here are some thoughts to consider when choosing and configuring your system.

From the operating system to the graphics card, here is all you need to know to buy the best workstation for your budget.

Depending upon the project type, rendering with GPU-acceleration in Creative Suite 5.5 can reduce rendering time by up to 92% over CPU-only rendering. Since NVIDIA's CUDA technology is the only GPU that currently accelerates rendering in the Adobe Media Encoder and Premiere Pro, buying a notebook without NVIDIA hardware for CS5.5 production is a huge mistake.

If you're in the market for such a notebook, the HP 8760w is a dream machine that performs as well or better than a single CPU desktop workstation. If you need an external eSATA drive for production work, the Akitio Taurus Mini Super-S LCM should be on your short list.

HP invited a bunch of journalists, myself included, out to visit their facility in Fort Collins, CO, the headquarters for workstation design, support and marketing. Beyond the desire to meet and greet friends old and new, I had one goal – to learn what makes a computer a workstation.

If you click over the the main story, you'll see that I learned a whole lot more.

In the first edition of this month’s Affordable HD enewsletter, we keep the focus on the Apple Mac Pro, specifically analyzing the optimal memory configurations for editing and encoding with Apple Final Cut Studio, Adobe Creative Suite 4, and Telestream Episode Engine. I looked at several scenarios.

In 2009, Intel launched its Nehalem line of workstations, which started with three models: the low-end Z400, the mid-range Z600, and the high-end Z800; later it was supplemented by the entry-level Z200. I had a look at the Z400, a single CPU quad-core, and the Z800, a dual-processor, quad-core system. Now HP is updating its workstation line to incorporate Intel's new Westmere processor, which uses 32nm manufacturing technology to enable six cores on each CPU. HP sent me one of the first dual-processor six-core Z800 systems off the line, and I had about 2 days to run it through its paces for various digital video-processing tasks. 

My test system shipped with two 3.33GHz X5680 Xeon processors, with 24GB of RAM running the 64-bit version of Windows 7, which I like heaps better than Vista. The graphics card was an NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800 with 1.5GB of dedicated memory and access to 3.5GB more system memory. With a 15K 150GB system drive and 1TB video drive, the total system price was a little more than $12,000, though Z800 prices start at $1,799.

A Windows 7 upgrade can cost more than $300 for the software alone -- is it worth it if you're a streaming producer looking to shave encoding times? Well, that's what I detail in this article.

By way of background, I had a great testbed for this - a dual processor, quad core 3.33 Ghz Xeon (Nehalem-based) computer from custom workstation manufacturer Puget Systems. Puget supplied the workstation with three system drives in an easily swappable drive bay so I could change operating systems in a matter of moments. Thus equipped, I loaded a number of programs on the three system drives, including Adobe Media Encoder, On 2 Flix Pro, Rhozet Carbon Coder, Sorenson Squeeze and Telestream Episode, and ran the encoding trials on each platform. Click over to the main article to see the results.

On March 30, 2009, Hewlett Packard announced three new workstations that leverage Intel’s new Nehalem line of CPUs. To assess the significance of these new computers to the streaming market, I tested two Nehalem-based systems against older generation dual core, quad-core and eight core systems, using a range of encoding programs, including Adobe Media Encoder, On2 Flix Pro, Rhozet Carbon Coder, Sorenson Squeeze and Telestream Episode.

Though performance varies by the task, on average, Nehalem outperformed a similarly configured eight-core system based upon the previous Intel Xeon architecture by over 40% in four of five tests, with an 18% performance boost in the fifth.

Producers in mission critical, time-sensitive encoding applications should immediately start purchasing Nehalem-based systems like the HP Z800 over systems based upon Intel’s previous Xeon architecture. If current throughput levels are an issue, you should also consider retiring your current workstations, and installing Nehalem-based systems. Producers who are considering expanding their render farm facilities to meet encoding demand should also consider swapping out current systems for Nehalem-based systems, which are more powerful and more power efficient. High volume producers should strongly consider a dual-CPU system, which typically perform much faster than single CPU solutions.

Finally, if you’re a small producer who’s been putting off purchasing a system for editing and encoding, boy, are you going to be glad that you did.