Help choosing options for rendering youtube videos

Hardware
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IDK if hardware in general is a good board, but its about as good as any other one?

So I’m looking at actually trying to do my youtube channel again. I’ve given it a break for a while, moved some stuff around, and been playing with editing here and there on the side when I’m bored and just want to make something.

Thing is, all my hardware is so old I don’t really have a good rendering computer on hand. I have my MSI running windows, but I don’t own premier, nor am I buying that pile of shit. Same for sony vegas. I could use DaVinci resolve, of course, or lightworks, but I have absolutely 0 experience with both of them and I am not taking half a year to learn ANOTHER editor. Its just not worth my bloody time, nor money.

So I have some ideas, but one in particular I want to investigate.

So the machine I will be recording gameplay for gaming videos is my MSI GS63VR, which at the moment has a dead ribbon cable for the HDD bay, so I only have 500GB on a M.2 NVME SSD. Not really an issue as I am putting up a NAS soon to specifically dump video files to, but as well I want as much space on the laptop itself for video recordings. Also a reason I’m not installing an editor to my windows machine.

The machines I have left over, then, to edit with are a few thinkpads, a few mac pro’s, and my powerpc machines, all of which I have used for editing, and I have editing software either built, prepped, or have CD’s for (I have a PPC copy of final cut express 4 or 5). The best machine is my Mac Pro 3,1 with dual quade cores and 64GB of ram, so obviously I want to go with that. However, rendering times are still kind of ass, so I’m wondering how I can speed that up for cheap?

I decided that I am getting a new GPU for the machine soon as a 6870 is just not going to cut it. I’m going to wait for the 580 price drop after the new year, or get a 5500XT and call it good. But, whether in linux or OSX, unless I do GPU rendering (which might actually do just fine but hear me out), its still kinda meh because pcie 2 and not that fast of ram.

2 ideas, but I need verification if I can do one of them.

Can I edit in Final Cut Pro 10 / KDenLive, then render the video separately on an FFMPEG setup on another machine?

The reason I ask this is I can go out, spend 100 bucks on a barely used PS3 slim, crack it, install linux, and then tada I have retardedly fast video rendering right there. I forget who it was in the PowerPC news thread that said they use their PS3’s for copying DVD’s and rendering video, but the report back was that it was faster on the PS3 than it was on their workstation.

The other idea was to find one of these sexy fucking things, and they really aren’t that pricey.

gigaAccel

Now, again, I could get basically the same thing with a PS3, but IDK if it’d be worth it over all.

Or should I just bite the bullet and deal with 3 hour render times on 1080p60 videos?

EDIT: For reference…

They both would provide the same firepower at around the same price, though I might be able to get a final gen PS3 for like 120 bucks at a local store in some guys basement lol.

Edit 2: If not one of the previous options and just me getting a 5500XT, what should I do to optimize for speed? Is there anything software wise I could do?

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Using DaVinci Resolve myself after I could not be bothered to watch SonyVegas 14 slowly crawl throug renders, the jump is not that big.

Resolve needs a balanced machine with focus towards the CPU.
That MSI notebook is your best bet for rendering.

The MacPro 3.1 with all that RAM is ofcourse a nice system to edit video on. I am neither familiar with the platform nor the OS (or final cut). If that accelerator card is supported in OS and video editor, it is the cleanest solution.

Figure out how to hook it to the MSI…
And find yourself all the CPU cores you can.

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hmmmm

Yeah the card is suppolted in osx and linux. Atm I’m in linux tho.

I know the laptop it my best bet, but tbh its fans ramp up playing minecraft. I’m half worried it’ll fry itself XD

In osx I can use gpu compute instead of processor compute, but idk how to compare twe E5462’s to a 55 or 5700xt (honestly have not made up my mind).

Edit: the msi has a 1060 6gb in it. I think its fine lol.

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I can’t validate what’s been said about the ability to render using a PS3, but I can say this. I was working at IBM when the PS3 was designed, manufactured, and I participated in marketing it as part of a volunteer program at the company.

If rendering is a possibility that’s practical, then it’s a great system for leveraging toward that purpose for a few reasons.

1st. The PS3 was built like a tank, for scientific computing at the heart of it’s design and then modified to meet the needs of gaming and keep it’s price down. This was achieved by changing a few of it’s interconnects and removing certain threading features that were later discovered to be the source of most modern vulnerabilities inherent to today’s hardware designs. If the design had been brought to it’s full flower, even back then, within the generation of hardware released during this period, it could have far exceeded the performance characteristics it was released with which were already 5 to 7 years ahead of nVidia workstation cards. If the gaming and programming communities would have been amenable to learning to leverage it’s hardware appropriately, all new gaming machines would have persisted to use it’s ARM architecture and it would be a mainstay for home media delivery today. It is simply a superior product and architecture for it’s purposes. The PS3’s characteristics are more similar to a quadro workstation card because it’s components don’t burn out. So you can think of it like a sturdy quadro card which costs 4 or 5 times more than the similar gaming card with the same performance properties except, like a quadro, it doesn’t burn out.

2nd. Which is much more obvious, is that it’s always desirable to have an independent machine for rendering, which doesn’t prevent you from being productive working on parallel projects.

I have a PS3, which I bought back when I was working for IBM, not because I’m much of a console gamer but because of the machine’s special-ness. It’s one of precious few hardware devices without the obvious flaws of sub par memory management and other processing flim flam. Everything else we buy from essentially every manufacturer today is basically crap, even super high end business hardware such as Xeon’s and newer generations of laptops with hardware vulnerabilities known to the manufacturers built in persistently due to incompetence and by design. More and ever greater levels of corruption are built into people’s devices, which they pay their hard earned money for, and that’s an upsetting and outrageous trend I sort of wish people would push back on a lot more.

The PS3, designed with a chip in it which was re-appropriated from scientific computing to gaming as a new industry standard, is “hard core”, and was not designed with “extra room” for wrecking your work or wasting your time.

If you can and do make this work, I’d love to hear what your results are!

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YOU ARE THE PERSON I NEEDED INFO FROM HOLY SHiT

This is- exactly why, instead of wasting 300 bucks on a ryzen 1400 system thats used around my area, I was thinking instantly “Cell is exactly what would make this shit go quickly”. I was thinking PS3 especially because I could strip the board and PSU out and half ass a big ass cooler to the processor, I have a hyper 212 evo lying around that would be PERFECT for this, and just mount it in some ass raidmax case I have.

I figured keep the heatsoak down in the MSI, which already has provided me with issues galore in the past, and keep everything workstation related actually in my workstation, or in a separate box completely.

Theres a reason theres powerpc macsn all over my house, but thats another thread lol.

Hmmm. Would you be willing to help me optimize a linux system if I go down this path instead of the giga-accel or new gpu? You’'re probably the one to ask around here if you have a background.

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No problem!

If you have the resources to take it as far as it can go, add an Intel data-center SSD to it with the CRC data validation feature present in the drive. I made a video about it, myself, after I was shocked by the vast improvement in video streaming quality obtained by adding the error correction feature back to the cached video streaming packets, after this feature was removed from the system for cost reasons. (https://youtu.be/syonwjaEGw8)

Also, if you have a APC with business class “Pure Sine” voltage regulation, that will go a huge way toward making the system last as long as possible.

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I have 200 bucks max I can use on this whole thing, which is why I am trying to keep the prices low and the power high. I could go higher, yes, but thats not going to happen within a month lol.

Didn’t know I could add ECC BACK to the PS3… Can I bump the memory up at all? Or like… Does the system make a swap partition? I was honestly thinking about hooking it up to a small 4 disk hard drive shelf that I have that has a sata cable on it and seeing what would happen.

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I don’t have experience working on Linux in the context of the PS3. I did flash it over to the alternative OS back in the day, just to see what it was like, but I worked in Finance so I had lots of other competing priorities and didn’t get to play with it much.

I’m a capitalist, and you can sense how offended I am at the issues I’ve read about and experienced using more modern hardware designed with ulterior motives.

However, I will jump in if you have questions I can answer. Wendell is a Linux GURU. You could pitch this idea to his as a potential video! :slight_smile:

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:thonk:

@wendell senpai get in here plz

Honestly I’m not that big on needing the most free hardware, I just don’t want to wast 1300 bucks on a new computer when having a good gpu in my mac pro makes it an A+ system already. Why waste the money? Besides I spent 700 bucks on my MSI last year I really don’t need to be fucking around with new hardware when I already did lol.

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You get a memory bump by virtue of the DRAM cache on whatever drive you decide to use. It is a common misinterpretation that the original SATA I interface is a limiting factor in NAND drive performance.

In practice, the hardware isn’t designed with performance constraints built into it over the SATA interface. Those constraints are usually determined by temperature.

A SATA I interface, in other words, can and often performs up to whatever the interface limit of the drive is, making the speed, durability, and write consistency and performance of the NAND itself the limiting factor.

So, to summarize a lot of verbose blather, what you want is the hardest core business class NAND based drive with the highest durability rating and most consistent read/write performance at any speed no matter how slow, because the limiting factor will be determined by the NAND itself and not the SATA interface.

If you get a nice business class drive with the biggest possible DRAM cache, and highest performing constant read/write performance characteristic of advanced database drives used in business which are inherently slower, you will get the best performance.

This is because drives that are marketed for their speed fall very short in their ability to persistently deliver that speed. So business class drives are designed to be slower but never degrade or bottleneck other area’s of the systems in which they run.

So you’re looking for “the fastest slow business class flash drive with the largest available cache”. The DRAM on that cache will give you back error correction at the highest speed available given the thermals, and the NAND with the most consistent long term random IOPS will prevent the rest of the system from bottle-necking independent of the size and transaction volume of the video you happen to be working on.

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I hear ya…

I do think it would just be a “cool” thing to see Wendell do, especially if it works.

It would give a lot of folks with this sort of hardware laying around with no other purpose for it a new lease on life. I also love seeing folks use old hardware with unique design properties exploit those to their fullest potential, illustrating parity with current generations of what people consider high end hardware.

It reminds me of the time I converted what appeared to be a crappy AMD CPU with “Hypertransport” into a passively cooled domain controller with 4GB of full speed memory operating as if it were all cache. That kind of system was not as useful for general purposes at that time, but was perfect as a domain controller because of the way Hypertransport works. That was pretty fun and b*tchen, lol.

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I think I have a PS3 somewhere with borked networking. If it still works otherwise I can send it to you for the cost of shipping if you want it? It’s a fat model.

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Hmmm… I have a 640GB + 16GB SSHD that I was going to use in my current PS3… Does the dram cache vary all that greatly?

If I’m using it as a processing node I need it to be a slim model. The fat models actually have a pretty large fault in one of the SPE’s that forced sony to have it disabled. Later revisions of the chip fixed this issue. If I can find the final one they released that one is the golden ticked because it has more L2 and L3 cache.

Huh. So its SATA 1 or 1.5? What if I put cooling on the SATA controller?

… hmmmm, got me actually cranking this one over.

So in other words wait for a skull trail SSD to pop up on ebay lol

Now the only thing I’m left thinking about is a cluster, but I don’t think I’ll really need that XD

Is there documentation / do you have documentation on the components on the mobo? I have a dead PS3 motherboard on hand that was fucked up during an update, guess I can look up part numbers on that.

I have a deep seeded love for pentium 4’s and pentium M’s for that exact reason.

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I’m not sure, I haven’t been shopping for one for a while. Mine has 1GB and that’s more than enough for caching video streams.

Whatever caching scheme is used in a given version of Linux as well as the type of video you’re rendering is going to make a difference. That’s why I would say to go with the the largest one you can find, but you’d probably do that anyway, lol.

I’m on Intel’s website and at first glance I’m not seeing that listed in the stats.

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I’ll hopefully be using Void linux as I won’t have to be fucking around with hoping there is a package, I can just build it and not care.

@q66

hmmm, maybe I’ll tweet gamers nexus and see what they say, if anything.

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I don’t have that documentation. I’m sorry. I haven’t done any hardware modifications to the internal components of the system other than the hard drive.

I bet, since it’s been around for a while now, that it’s out there though. The API’s were such a challenge to get folks acclimated to I would think there’s quite a lot floating around that can help dig into particular questions.

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Oh fuck wait what if I did a SATA mounted M.2 drive?

Oh god what about optane

I’m only now realizing how fucking cool this is gunna be if I use a PS3

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I know you said you didn’t want to learn how to use a new video edit program, but if you switch to Olive (Linux only of course) you can use basically every machine you have at your disposal to assign jobs to them in order to speed up the rendering phase.

This is what I’d try before investing any kind of money into further hardware. Also I don’t think a PS3 would perform any good doing general purpose computing because the 256MB of RAM it comes with it’s too low to be multitasking. When it was still possible to side load an OS I tried Ubuntu and it was adismal to say the least.

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Interesting. Does it support PPC and 32 bit X86?

While you would think it would be slow, the PS3’s cell chip is blazing fast for video rendering. As well, the machine is going to run headless for the most part and literally just be a node on the network. Its not going to have anything gaming related left on it if I can help it.

And while, yes, the ram appears to be an issue, thats why we get fast as hell SSD’s with a big cache.

Its not the end all option, I’m still thinking about the accelerator and comparing performance to a 5500XT in OSX, but I don’t think it’ll even be as fast as the PS3, the PCIe card is vastly faster than the PS3 (I’d think at least, being XCell 8i based).

Also the original OtherOS code was a lame use of a hypervisor that didn’t have access to more than 100MB of ram. I wouldn’t expect performance from that at all.

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Right, ARM’s are very well tailored for video rendering if you can get software that supports it. The RAM, you would think, would be an issue. But, because the architecture of this soft of thing is so different it relies on ram a lot less than other sorts of CPU’s for the tasks it performs.

My K620 Quadro card, for example, has nearly the same performance characteristics as the PS3 does, but it needs 2GB of RAM to achieve that.

It’s strange, but true.

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