Performance expectations

[Anonymous]

Hi all

I am running combustion on a HP workstation Dual core AMD285 4gig of ram,
with a 15 bay SAS raid-5 disk array 3.75Tb

To be totally honest I have not sat down with the machine and given it a really thorough testing but my first impression is that when caching sequences of frames it seems to be only marginally quciker than say using a normal computer and loading frames from the local C drive. I was expecting some reall speed increases. I am right in thinking that C4 will only cache 2gig but I thought it would get there quicker!?

Does any one have any ideas or experience with this?

I would appreciate any help.

[david stanford]

.. . . Mate:
I think C4 on Windows can only use 3 Gigs of RAM.
.:.A.:.

[bnw]

I heard that if you run the latest Combustion on 64-bit Windows, it can cache close to 4 gigs. I don’t understand how 🙂

[Anonymous]

Its not really the Ram and caching i have issue with, its the speed it is reading and loading the data in at.

I thought it would access the raid array much quicker, but at the moment it seems no faster than loading the media from the C drive.

I think before our system was installed it was tested and was reading and writing to the drives at close to 500meg a second.

So why not almost play real time in C4? ok i would expect the HD stuff to be slower but even the PAL media seems quite slow really

Thanks again

[Dejan]

Combustion is great but is slow period. I used to use c* with a BOXX in a similar config (+500mb/sec) and there is no visible speed increase, it’s just a little bit faster to load files from the disk. And when I say little faster I mean something really little.

You can only see a visible speed increase while working at footage level.

We can’t forget that c* has an old core now and that it was never meant to take any advantage from fas disk arrays, in c* it’s all about RAM.

You can try to turn on OpenGL to see if it gets a little faster then that, even tho OpenGL support in c* is far from being that great.

Cheers,

[bnw]

Actually I’ve also heard that Windows XP SP2 has a bug which limits disk throughput really severely – are you running SP2? Autodesk recommend SP1 for use with Toxik because of this, I don’t know if it affects Combustion… maybe give Autodesk a call?

[velislav]

loops wrote:

Actually I’ve also heard that Windows XP SP2 has a bug which limits disk throughput really severely – are you running SP2? Autodesk recommend SP1 for use with Toxik because of this, I don’t know if it affects Combustion…

Having just switched to a 1TB S-ATA Raid, I just did some tests on loading image-sequences and clips in C* and in Fusion …. same material … same Raid … Fusion, in some cases, is nearly as twice as fast loading that stuff into memory. So I guess its not the WinXP problem that keeps C* from loading faster 🙁

[Anonymous]

I hear what your saying, Combustion is great but it feels like it needs over hauling.

I am not sure wether I should ride it out to see what happens or convince my studio to turn to something like fusion or nuke!

We were going to buy a smoke but got two axio edits with the attahced storage so we could keep combustion or switch to a compositor that will actually use the storage. The rest of the guys in the studio all use C4 or AE and were a Max house. So it sort of makes sense to stay in the Autodesk loop! Toxix looks to bare bones at the moment and is really designed for large collaborative film jobs. So my head is spining.

we have the muscles in our two edits but combustion just wont use it!

[chris]

make sure you are using image sequences and not something like MOV or AVI. these will slow combustion down and its always faster to use image sequences (especially uncompressed ones)

//garyD

[Anonymous]

generally we always use tga or png sequences.

[david stanford]

Tga is the best!

[Dejan]

If you are buying a Smoke check Fusion and Connect they might be a great combo and also take a deep look at Nuke.

We use Nuke for almost everything relating comp work in here, combustion for simplier comps and retouching and After Effects for motion graphics and title work and we are also Max based on the 3D side of things. Editing is all done in Avid and FCP.

[kryptic]

I always have been a supporter of tga sequences with combustion but lately due to a mistake I rendered out an sgi seq and you know what?25fps against 8fps tga on the same dual proc intel machine.
Just my two cents.
Cheers

[chris]

Alvinvision wrote:

Tga is the best!

TGA can only be 8 bit per pixel.

//gD

[Author]

Posts