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Desktop Studios:
Introduction 1. Apple Power Mac G4 2. Dell Precision 530 3. Emagen Graphyte 3 2100+ 4. Xenon Nitro 2100i 5. Scenarios Benchmarks Specifications Editor's Choice About RMIT labs |
Does your organisation boast a budding Tim Burton or a
corporate Coen brothers? If you're planning to produce video or 3D animation, we look at some top-end workstations you'll need to create your masterpieces.
Those in the business of digital content creationââ,¬"such as video and film editing, 3D animation, and even high-end design and engineeringââ,¬"are aware of the enormous processing and storage resources these applications require. But many other companies from time to time have the need to create training, orientation, or promotional videos strictly for in-house consumption, which depending on the volumes required may not be economical or desirable to outsource.
Obviously for in-house communications, production standards need not be as professional as for promotional material to a wider audience. That said, the systems we looked at here can definitely produce a professional finish. Ultimately the quality of the finished product will rely on the skills of the staffââ,¬"giving someone a fine scalpel does not make them a great surgeon.
What's required?
Just what sort of tools do you need for digital content creation?
The hardware needs to be relatively powerful unless you have lots of spare time on your hands. Just how powerful depends on how fancy you intend the final output to be. If you're grabbing video footage, editing it, and joining the sequences with simple titles and/or transitions, then an expensive and powerful 3D graphics card is probably not necessary. A single processor system should be more than adequate.
If the final product has to include lots of spiffy 3D transition effects or custom-generated 3D ray-traced sequences, you need plenty of 3D and CPU grunt and as much hard drive space as you can afford.
How we tested
For the purposes of this comparison, we took the middle ground, and looked at what would be required to do some 3D transitions and a small sequence of 3D animation, but nothing too heavy. As a consequence the systems submitted are quite powerful with dual processors, but the 3D graphics is perhaps a little below a dedicated rendering workstationââ,¬"although by no means wimpy.
We decided to create a standard set of tasks that would duplicate the requirements of creating an in-house training and information video, and run through those tasks on each workstation. Obviously, we weren't intending to produce an in-house version of Lord of the Rings, so we needed a typical software suite to exercise the PCs while keeping a handle on costs.
For starters we decided on Adobe Premiere 6.02, a very flexible and user-friendly video editing package with heaps of third-party plug-ins available. While we had found the previous version of Premiere a littleââ,¬"dare we sayââ,¬"buggy, the latest version and its attendant patches was pretty solid.
Premiere has a great list of standard features and tools, but we felt we needed a touch more in the way of 3D transitions to spice up the final product. For this we used Xplode Professional from Canopus Australia.
The final piece of test software may well be superfluous for most simple applications, but demonstrates what can be done if you yearn to be that bit more creative: Discreet's 3ds max V4.2.
We captured around 15 minutes of video from a Sony DCRTRV330 digital 8 video camera, and edited it down to just 10 minutes in Premiere. (In real life, for a finished product of 10 minutes, you would probably need a great deal more than 15 minutes of original footage.) We added a simple title sequence at the start and inserted neat but CPU punishing Xplode 3D transitions between each scene. We then rendered one of 3ds max's 10-second animated projects and added it to the end of the Premiere movie. We checked for dropped frames during the capture, and as one would expect with systems of this calibre, there were none. We also timed the creation of the animated sequence and the final render of the entire Premiere movie. The 10 minute, 150,001 frame movie had such complex 3D transitions that the workstations required around the 10 minute mark or more to render out to an AVI. In general practice you would not be anywhere near as heavy handed with the 3D transitions, indeed most business presentations would look a lot cleaner with simple cuts or dissolves between scenes. This would cut back on the AVI rendering time dramatically.
In addition to our movie creation test, we also ran SPECapc for 3ds max 4.2.6 which punishes the workstation with a suite of 3ds max tasks.
Hyper-Threading
The Xenon and Dell workstations tested were each configured with a pair of Xeon processors featuring Intel's Hyper-Threading technology.
Hyper-Threading aims to increase the processing throughput of a single processor by running multiple processing threads through simultaneously. In effect, it makes the operating system believe that one processor is actually two. While most applications would not benefit greatly, the multi-threaded nature of digital content processing means this technique could make a significant difference.
We decided to run both the Premiere and 3ds max benchmarks on the Xenon with the Hyper-Threading (HT) enabled and disabled; luckily the Iwill motherboard BIOS has an option to enable or disable this feature.
While we found a modest performance increase in favour of the new technology, it was far from earth shattering. The render of the 3D animation was only 1.1 percent slower with HT disabled. Premiere was not much different. Obviously this is not a definitive test of HT, but we expected the performance advantage to be greater for a multiprocessor-aware software package such as 3ds max.
Another benefit of HT is in heavy server processing, which we hope to examine in a future review.
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