GeekNights Monday - Upgrading PCs

MrPeriod

Tonight on GeekNights, in response to some unnamed friends not understanding when/how to upgrade their computers, we talk about upgrading computers. From the "$300 for 4MB of RAM" era to the "upgrade every component every six months" era to the modern "just get a new video card and maybe an SSD" era, there's fun for the whole family. But seriously, just upgrade your video card. It's way, way cheaper than buying a new computer.

In the news, Tivo still exists, and is selling a $5,000... NAS/HTPC? (To whom?) Also, the FAA is going after drone users and all the amazing things they're using them for.

• Calcio Fiorentino
• Night of the Hunter

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Rym

My current (2009) computer rendering a 1080p (downscaled from 4k) video with CUDA rendering on the GTX770 video card.

Rochelle

MrPeriod said:

in response to some unnamed friends not understanding when/how to upgrade their computers,

Am I one of these friends? :P At least I recently learned how to replace a 8 year old mobo/cpu.

Rym

No, you're not. This friend admitted on twitter that they can't add a videocard to a PC.

Matt

Will listen to this episode later. I'm hanging on to a 2009 HTPC, that only had one very minor video card upgrade along the way. It was only a $900 build, and that included a nice wireless keyboard/mouse. I can't run much in the way of 3D games with any graphical intensity. Most FPS is out of the question but I rarely get that itch anyway.

Just hoping this thing hangs on as long as possible, but I will enjoy getting a new HTPC when it goes. In the meantime, my time and money has gone into improving the home network, getting a nice network storage going w/ proper backups, and everything perfectly organized.

Ikatono

Currently my only computer is my laptop (T530) so I'm a little limited in what I can do, but I have a few upgrades planned for when I start getting paid:

1) Upgrade my RAM from 1x4gb to 2x4gb
2) Get an mSATA SSD
3) get a caddy to replace my optical drive and put a big ol' 5400 hdd in it.

Upgrading the video card on a laptop is stupid/impossible, right? Because of form factor and cooling and all that?

Rym

Yeah, more economical to just replace the whole laptop in most cases. But in your case, the ram upgrade would probably help.

Cremlian

God a SSD solves almost anything. Been upgrading all the order laptops with SSD at work and it's amazing the performance you get out of it compared to those crumby laptop harddrives.

MATATAT

The OSX memory management anecdote is true. One of my friends is working at a place developing a scalable storage solution and they've more or less decided to stop tying to get it to work on OSX because its mem management is so trash that they can't speed up the software. So it's currently exclusive to Unix builds.

Axel

I heard your name of the AMV and I hoped it would be this song by 30 Seconds to Mars, because that song would never fit Kirby, making this hilarious. You did not disappoint.

Mycroft000

Apple may be expensive, and I won't deny they do price their memory way too high for the average consumer, but their Mac Pros, old and new, aren't for the average consumer. While I concede that they overprice the memory, they do so because in the exceedingly rare cases where the third party memory fails, if you're mid edit on a project where you're billing $125/hour you can't afford that failure.

I have no explanation or defense for why they charge so much for storage.

How long is the video that's taking 9hrs to render?

Rym

A single GeekNights panel (about an hour long) with two camera angles and some scaling takes 5-7 hours to render with hardware accelleration.

Victor Frost

What, really? I have a GTX760 and similar videos only take ~2-3 hours at most. I generally get 2-2.5x realtime on renders. I mean, if I'm doing some some really hinky stuff like a chain of color correction, scaling, and time stretching, then it bogs down a bit, but only in those parts. Are you sure you still have CUDA/OpenGL enabled? Have you updated the drivers recently?

Apreche

Victor Frost said:

What, really? I have a GTX760 and similar videos only take ~2-3 hours at most. I generally get 2-2.5x realtime on renders. I mean, if I'm doing some some really hinky stuff like a chain of color correction, scaling, and time stretching, then it bogs down a bit, but only in those parts. Are you sure you still have CUDA/OpenGL enabled? Have you updated the drivers recently?

What software are you using for your encoding, and what output settings are you using?

Rym

Victor Frost said:

What, really? I have a GTX760 and similar videos only take ~2-3 hours at most. I generally get 2-2.5x realtime on renders. I mean, if I'm doing some some really hinky stuff like a chain of color correction, scaling, and time stretching, then it bogs down a bit, but only in those parts. Are you sure you still have CUDA/OpenGL enabled? Have you updated the drivers recently?

I am 100% sure. In software-only mode, the same render takes 12-14 hours.

1. Multiple camera angles (3-4), most of which are transformed
2. Multiple video/audio sources
3. Color correction
4. Level correction
5. (often) Grain correction
6. Encoding to Youtube's recommendations (h.264 high profile 50mbps target VBR1)

5-7 hours with CUDA. 12-14 without.

Matt

In response to some of the news bits and chatter early in this episode:

- Tivo is fucking awesome, if you have a need for it. We've not had cable in 5 years, but now live close enough to NYC to get awesome antenna reception of the broadcast channels. My wife does watch a significant amount of broadcast TV, and I find it nice to have for Foosball, the rare live event, when my Luddite elders come over, etc. Tivo has a $50 DVR with no cable card slot, solely for antenna users. It's $15/month which sounds pricey, but is exactly what the cable company would have charged you, and isn't a horrible deal compared to the cost of Hulu+

The Tivo has all sorts of little "nice touch" features, and I can't even remember them all. The last one I encountered was when we recorded a few kids shows on PBS (specific ones that weren't on Netflix at the time). When we got to the end of an episode off of DVR, the Tivo actually gave us a notification that the show was now on Netflix, and that if we wanted to keep watching more, just hit 1 button and it would take us right into the next episode. Craziness.

- Do not assume that the TV industry has strong IT. The networks do, sure, but the vast majority of content is contracted out to various production companies. Many of them are practically pop-up companies that exist for a few years and then close. The owner's cousin is much more likely to be hired to run their IT than someone with actual IT experience. At every position, they would rather have someone with a TV background who "knows how TV works" than the actual qualifications to do the job. They also have the mindset that they need to buy the "TV version" of any piece of IT equipment, even if it has no greater capability or reliability than the standard consumer versions of said equipment. It's hilarious how much they overpay at times.

Victor Frost

Apreche said:

What software are you using for your encoding, and what output settings are you using?

I'm using Sony Vegas 13. Here are my encoding settings:
MP4 (AVC/AAC) Progressive
Audio: 192Kbps, 48kHz, 16 bit, Stereo, AAC
Video: 29.970 fps, 1280x720 Progressive, YUV, Average 20Mbps with a maximum of 50Mbps, progressive download enabled.

I downsample my 1080p 30FPS recordings to 720p to allow some pan and scan ability.

Rym said:

6. Encoding to Youtube's recommendations (h.264 high profile 50mbps target VBR1)

Okay, I looked at a couple of your videos and you don't need to do that. Those settings are for pro youtubers (SciShow and the like) shooting on sets with DLSRs and yada yada. YouTube will process your video just fine at half of that and, unless your footage is recorded at that rate, you're not gaining anything by it. I don't know what kind of cameras you're using, but I shoot with my Samsung NX300 at 1080p 30fps and it records at around 16Mbps (~28 if I shoot at 60FPS). For conventions, I shoot with both that camera and my JVC camcorder (1080p 30fps, 28Mbps), and it still renders at about 2-2.5x speed after editing.

If you go down to 20Mbps, I don't think you'll see any real drop in quality and your render times will be cut in half.


Sample video:

Rym

Youtube recommends that because it makes the transcoding high quality (according to them). Even lower quality videos are suggested to be uploaded at max. They even say to upload at 60fps if that's what your sources are.

Apreche

We are outputting 1080p, not 720p. We've always done everything at 1080p. Why would make your video worse by downscaling from 1080p to 720p? It's not like it's an MP3 where nobody can tell the difference between 256kbps and 320kbps.

Second of all my camera is for reals. With the GH4 I typically record Netrunner videos at 1080p 30fps 50Mbps. That's pretty much as low as it goes.

The panel we just did at PAX I recorded at 3840x2160 (4K) 30fps 100Mbps

Also, we're using Adobe Premiere and Adobe Media Encoder.

So the reason your encodes take so much less time is because your source material is way smaller and your output frames are half as large. Also, are you not doing VBR?

Rym

VBR quadruples the time. If I turn VBR off, renders are ultra fast and the files are awful.

Apreche

Rym said:

VBR quadruples the time. If I turn VBR off, renders are ultra fast and the files are awful.

And if you do 2-pass, it takes even longer.

Victor Frost

Ah, I forgot you guys shoot at 4k. That would definitely explain it.

Apreche said:

We are outputting 1080p, not 720p. We've always done everything at 1080p. Why would make your video worse by downscaling from 1080p to 720p? It's not like it's an MP3 where nobody can tell the difference between 256kbps and 320kbps.

I started doing it when my JVC was my primary camera so I could do cropping and downscale to cover up some of the faults of the small sensor. I still do cropping but, since my Samsung has a much larger sensor than my JVC, maybe I can get away with rendering at 1080 now.

Apreche said:

The panel we just did at PAX I recorded at 3840x2160 (4K) 30fps 100Mbps

Why is there so much noise in the How to Win Every Game video? Was the lighting that bad?

Apreche said:

Also, we're using Adobe Premiere and Adobe Media Encoder.

I tried Premier for a while earlier this year, but it never encoded nearly as fast as Vegas did.

Apreche said:

So the reason your encodes take so much less time is because your source material is way smaller and your output frames are half as large. Also, are you not doing VBR?

I am. It averages at 20, but has a max of 50.

Rym

It was wicked dark in the room. That's where the noise came from. I'm amazed it turned out as well as it did considering. Notice how bright the splashback from the projector is on our faces when we change slides.

I couldn't get the denoisers to clean it up enough without adding too many artifacts, so I left it.

Victor Frost

Jaysus. Anime Expo rooms are typically pretty bright so I thought you guys were shooting with GoPros or something based on the noise.

Apreche

We don't have lights, so we have to crank up the ISO which results in noise. It's also not like we have a lot of time to setup in advance.

Victor Frost

How far before your panel start time do you get there? I get there a half hour ahead to start setting up my cameras and coordinate with the room staff.

Apreche

Victor Frost said:

How far before your panel start time do you get there? I get there a half hour ahead to start setting up my cameras and coordinate with the room staff.

The previous panel ends a half hour before. We are there even before that, but we have less than 30 minutes to set up. It takes a lot of time to setup our things well. It's even worse that camera location is heavily limited by the location of power outlets and the heads of people in the audience.

Starfox

How about you guys talk about upgrading old computers? Like the crazies who mod an Apple ][ to play CD-ROM games, that kind of thing.

Victor Frost

Apreche said:

The previous panel ends a half hour before. We are there even before that, but we have less than 30 minutes to set up. It takes a lot of time to setup our things well. It's even worse that camera location is heavily limited by the location of power outlets and the heads of people in the audience.

Ah, yeah, if there's one thing that JVC camera does well is battery life. It'll go for three hours before it dies.

Apreche

Starfox said:

How about you guys talk about upgrading old computers? Like the crazies who mod an Apple ][ to play CD-ROM games, that kind of thing.

I haven't done that since high school. There not much to say either. Buy and apple ][gs and a bunch if parts on eBay. Repair them if necessary. Stick them together. The. Use it for something you normal computer can do trivially.

Dragonmaster Lou

I remember back in college we used to get a bunch of old computers and turn them into serial terminals for our Linux server. We had an old 286 clone in the dorm library and an old MacPlus in our dorm kitchen, all wired to the server via serial cables. It was kinda neat to be able to check your email in the kitchen (no wifi at the time) while cooking dinner.