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MillimeterReview: HP Z800
Apr 1, 2009 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer
Workstation integrates the Intel Nehalem processor into a brand-new toolless chassis.
Table 2: Adobe Premiere Pro benchmarks.
Adobe Premiere Pro
I am a heavy Adobe Creative Suite 4 (CS4) user, and I was happy to have a couple of real-world projects to throw at the Z800. First, there was the aforementioned ballet performance, which was a two-camera HDV shoot that I mixed using Premiere Pro’s multicam feature and delivered on SD DVD. I also shot a single-camera show in progressive widescreen DV for a local group auditioning for America’s Got Talent. The edited clips were less than 10 minutes long, which I rendered to H.264 for uploading to the show and to YouTube. Table 2 contains those results.
As mentioned earlier, the Z800 really excelled in the ballet test. Though the 31 percent performance boost over the xw8600 in the DV concert clip is also nothing to sneeze at. Why was there so much less of a performance disparity in the DV test than in the first test? It probably relates to the fact that SD has less than a quarter of the pixels of an HDV stream, making throughput to the processor—Nehalem’s greatest strength—much less of an issue. H.264 also encodes more slowly than MPEG-2, which again favors the older-style Xeons, because getting data to the CPU is much less important.
The Red Digital Cinema Red One-related tests are not real-world tests (I wish); rather, they’re Red clips I downloaded from the Web and produced into a short 90-second project with two picture-in-picture effects and one greenscreen effect. The first was provided via Adobe After Effects through Dynamic Link; I applied the second using Premiere Pro’s native chroma-key filter.
When using After Effects and Dynamic Link, the test is much more computationally intense and consumes more memory, forcing the 32-bit xw6600 computer to store data to and from the hard disk (called “paging”), which destroyed its performance. The native greenscreen test used the same files and was the same duration, but this test was relatively simpler to compute because Premiere Pro’s chroma-key filter is not as complex (nor as capable) as the excellent After Effects Keylight filter. Obviously, the xw6600’s time comes back to earth in the second test because After Effects and Dynamic Link are no longer required, reducing the overall memory requirements to less than 2GB.
It’s impossible to tell exactly what’s going on in any particular test, but one interpretation of the Red-related results is that as projects decrease in complexity, data throughput becomes more important—which would explain why the Z800’s advantage over the xw8600 and especially the Z400 becomes more pronounced in the second Red test. When combined with the results of the first Red test, I take this to indicate that if you’re a video editor mushing through long, relatively lightly edited productions—such as event, training, and other videos—the Z800 should deliver very impressive performance gains. On the other hand, if you’re producing short, heavily edited 30-second to 60-second clips that involve lots of effects and processing, the decrease in rendering time will be sizeable, but not nearly as significant.
Continue the discussion on Crosstalk the Millimeter Forum.