Be positive everyone. I know how difficult is this. There are days that I see everything black.

But we must be positive. This goes from one to the other. It's like a virus but a good one.

Remember that if you didn't want to be here you wouldn't. We hope to something good. 

I guess the next question would be, is will there be a perfromance gain as well. I imagine the re-workings of the render engine will have big benefits even to the nex gen.

 

Good thinking Ed.

Something like a Next Gen preview. 

I do want to stay with Liquid, I've spent considerable time working out my "bugs", and it would make sense
to remain.
The recent posts by Jan and Draske are very welcome, and hopefully are an element of the "New Thinking".

We have to erase secretly from peoples minds, every other thought, for any other NLE.

"We have to erase secretly fron peoples minds, every other thought, for any other NLE"

We have to get James Earl Jones to read that in the Darth Vader voice...

What is left at Newegg for ATI DX9:
GPU
Radeon X1050 (2)
Radeon X1300 (5)
Radeon X1300PRO (1)
Radeon X1550 (21)
Radeon X1600PRO (1)
Radeon X1650 (5)
More
Radeon X1650GT(2)
Radeon X1650PRO(15)
Radeon X1650XT(2)
Radeon X1950PRO(2)

the 2 X1950PRO cards are AGP models...

I was at Micro Center (which also does mail order) within the past few weeks and found lots of Nvidia 6 series cards as well as 7 series cards.  There were AGP and PCIe models.  Those work with Liquid just fine.  Along with those were some Quadro cards.  There were also ATI cards but I didn't pay a lot of attention to them.  I know there were some X1xxx cards and a 9xxx model or two.

It's a lot easier to get the right components for a Liquid system than many people seem to want to believe.  There are stores all over you can walk into or browse online which have good video cards for Liquid.  In case anyone has forgotten, there's Best Buy, Circuit City, Fry's, Staples, Office Depot and others which sell from stores and online.  Newegg isn't the only place to buy computer components, you know. 

Try playing back HDV with those lower cards. I have, and its pretty bad.
My Prime NLE box has an X850XT AGP which works well, the second box has an X700 which gives 10 to 15 frames/ second playback.
AGP cards are of no use to someone building a new box.

HD requires a much better card when what is commonly left over.

In Micro center, I see only one 7600pcie card.

They may be out there here or there, but the supply is dring up.

Trying to order a computer from Dell or HP or one of the other intergrators with a (non Quatro) DX9 should be a hoot.

Hey, we all know this patch should have happened sooner, as people not afraid of opening our pcs and swapping cards, we can work around this for
a while, but how motivated can a reseller be to recommend the product rather than another that will run on hardware currently being sold.
Look at our profiles, most of us are running older machines, a quick breeze thru the Studio forums reveals many there running new boxes a lot hotter than ours.
Simple editing, spitting out a dvd, we could get several more years out of Liquid and our older boxes.

However with HD, and that AVCHD monster, add mercali. boris, and trying to render those fx exceeds a coffee break. People will soon be giving us media
like AVCHD to edit that will choke our older boxes.

Like it or no (At 54 I don't) we live in a right now world.

I own an ATI X1300 Pro and an Nvidia 7600 GT and both play 2-3 layers of HDV RT.  I don't buy all the hype that people have to have the latest cards.  I don't buy it because I know it isn't true.  There are plenty of good cards and plenty of sources from what I saw on the web last night.

And if someone isn't building their own computer but wants someone else to build it, there are places which build systems for Liquid.

My point isn't that the patch is unimportant but that even without the patch, you can still put together an extremely good Liquid system now and for some time to come.  The cards are available and it doesn't take long to find them at multiple sources. 

Scott why wouldn't you bother to check out the ATI cards considering they are the most recommended cards to use with Liquid.  I for one would look for ATI cards first and Nvidia second based on the history Liquid has with ATI cards.

I have walked into every single store I can find in the Milwaukee area and not a single store sells a directx9 card anymore except for maybe a handfull of $30.00 AGP cards at Office Max.  The only place I can still find any decent directx9 cards is online.  It is only a few months away from the reality that directx9 cards will be only found on Ebay unless you want to use a toy for a video card.  A 1950 is not the latest and greatest card either.  This card is tried and true with Liquid and is widely proven to really enhance the performance of Liquid.  I totally understand the concern here as it is one I have been barking about for many months now.

 I understand the issue is hard to fix but somebody who wants a solid system to edit with is not going to take lightly to using an inferior card.  Perhaps if there is a single directx10 card out there that seems to work Pinnacle could tell us so at least we have something to use.

The one thing I am concerned with about the lack of gpu patch is for those of us buying Directx9 cards chances are we will have to upgade to a directx10 card when Nextgen does come out.  This is a shot in the dark but if Nextgen can do what it sas it will do by taping into Vista then chances are it is built around a directx10 core.  It sure would be nice for many of us to be able to get a directx10 card now so when we move to Nextgen we can still use something in our systems.

Smetvid:

Scott why wouldn't you bother to check out the ATI cards considering they are the most recommended cards to use with Liquid.  I for one would look for ATI cards first and Nvidia second based on the history Liquid has with ATI cards.

Because Nvidia cards work with Liquid and also with other products much better.  A great example is how so few ATI cards work with Avid NLEs.

As long as DX9 cards are available whether online or in stores, they're available.  They're not gone yet and they won't be for some time.  If the Dallas Micro Center is stocking as many Nvidia 6 series cards as they are 7 series (and I did not see any 6 series cards about a year ago when I bought the 7 series card I use), then I'd say the 7 series will be there for many months. 

The 7 series and the Quadros (which are also available) are not inferior cards by any stretch of the imagination.   My 7600 GT is doing 2-3 streams of 1080 HDV RT.  What cards are doing better than that and how much more do they cost?  The one I use was about $100 and there are loads of them on the shelves here.

So you are saying that your Microcenter has more Dx9 cards than Mc shows online. ? Thats rather interesting. As I recall we were told to stay away from
Quatro cards.
The X700 128 AGP card in my AMD 3700 cant play one HDV2 stream at full rate. And that box has nothing on it other than Liquid.

Anybody who does this for $$$ is not going to waste time with old slow hardware.

TVJohn:

Anybody who does this for $$$ is not going to waste time with old slow hardware.

You mean like AGP? 

TVJohn:

The X700 128 AGP card in my AMD 3700 cant play one HDV2 stream at full rate. And that box has nothing on it other than Liquid.

AGP and 128MB isn't enough for 1080 HDV.  The minimum is PCIe and 256MB.  That's been in the Liquid spec for a long, long time.

The Dallas MicroCenter has loads of 6 series and loads of 7 series cards.  There are also a few Quadros.  There are ATI cards but I don't look much at them since other software has more problems with ATI than Liquid does with Nvidia.

 

Well I run 3D Studio Max, Lightwave, Blender, After Effects, Combustion, Photoshop, Flash, Director at one point Commotion and a little bit of Shake when you could still get it for the PC and I have always run ATI cards for well over 10 years now.  I work in visual effects and I have always lived by ATI cards.  I'm not sure where you are getting your info from but Lew and many other long time Liquid users swear by ATI and a lot of those people are running some other highend programs other then Liquid.  I do some openGL programming via Python and some directx programming and I see nothing wrong with ATI.  ATI has a few issues with Blender but they have been fixed a long time ago.

I could also care less if one store in the middle of Texas has a few cards for sale.  The point is that not everybody lives in Texas.  Is somebody in France supposed to fly to Texas to buy a video card?  Your store clearly has some older cards in stock while most of the other stores got rid of those cards a long time ago since very few people other then Liquid users would buy those cards.

While a certain Nvidia card may work fine for you that doesn't mean it is going to work equally well for everybody.  Most people are more concerned about getting Liquid to work perfectly and not other tools.

Thomas,

Have you never heard of people buying over the web?  You also missed the fact that numerous stores have them, not just one, and they all sell via the web.

I'm getting my info from personal experience.  I know that Avid's editors hardly work with any ATI cards.  I didn't say there was "anything wrong with ATI."  What I said and will keep saying is that ATI doesn't work as well overall as Nvidia does.  Lew is right that ATI cards work well with Liquid.  I am also right that Nvidia cards work well with Liquid.   The added benefit of Nvidia cards is that they also work with lots of other NLEs and other types of software when ATIs often do not.

The reason for mentioning the 6 series cards was to point out that they weren't there months ago and now they are.  That was to show that the 7 series cards will also be around for months to come.

I know other people care and I'm going to keep on giving them known good info.

Somehow the image of the Liquid user rummaging thru the "bargain bin" doesn't conjure a positive image for me.
Nor should it for Pinnacle.

What bargain bin?  Buy a Quadro if you want to spend more than you need to for Liquid.  At least with a Quadro, you'll be ready to run anything including Media Composer.

Some of you guys will complain no matter how good the news is.  My gosh.

I thought that I read somewhare on this forum that the Quadro cards did not work well with Liquid.  Am I wrong?

I remember reading that too...
something about the drivers not playing nice with the overlays...

Igor,

I've never heard that and I've been saying that they work for almost a year.  If you can find that being said, I'd like to see it. (See this user's profile.)

I personally used a Quadro with Liquid for a while last summer.  The only reason I'm not still using it is that it didn't have enough memory for my needs.  It came from a local store which didn't have any with more memory.  I knew that the memory was low when I bought it but I wanted to know for sure if it would work with Liquid.  It did work quite well except for the memory not allowing for RT HDV.  That was expected.  Everything else worked fine.  I swapped it during the return period for a GeForce 7600 GT with twice as much memory and I'm still using it.  I've had no problems at all.

Another benefit of the Nvidia cards (in addition to being able to run the Avid editors) is that you don't have the Catalyst Control Center which demands .NET to work and you don't have all the extra CCC processes messing with your machine.  Sure, you don't have to install the CCC but to control the card's advanced settings, you have to.  The Nvidia Control Panel doesn't have any of the same side effects.

We've had this GPU thing pounded at us since Edition 5
Use an ATI card
Buy as much card as you can
Onboard sound doesn't have ASIO2  Buy an Audigy
AMD and VIA are no good, buy an Intel Chipset and CPU
Only one NLE should reside on the pc...
Use only approved ATI CAT drivers..
Liquid will be patched for Vista shortly after Studio 10, projected  March 2007

Most of us have followed the cookbook as recommended.

I am curious when Pinnacle actually started serious work on this...

Something I want to clarify before someone goes off in the wrong direction - when I've said Quadro cards work with Liquid, I was not talking about DX10 cards.  I would not expect any DX10 cards to work with Liquid.

In reply, I find it's best to rely on new information when the old is superseded.  Those recommendations are fine but they are more limited than necessary.  I followed some of them and found that I didn't need to.  I've altered my course since then because I learned some things I did not know before.  You guys do whatever you want.

The good news that no one seems to want to acknowledge is that there are lots of working video cards for Liquid available right now and they'll be available for some time to come from all I've seen. 

Let the wailing and gnashing of teeth continue while I go on to something more productive.  Have fun.

Before I go, I want to suggest you all read the document at this link before continuing to bash the Nvidia cards in general as well as the Quadros in particular.  I know they work and so does Pinnacle. 

Before I go, I want to suggest you all read the document at this link .......

= 

Look on the date of the document:      “ date of last update     03.07.2007” !

Not very encouraging, to say the least.

 

Is a DX10 patch really needed?  Well I think not

The fact is that you can keep liquid going for a very long time to come on an existing system. I still have DOS programs that I run from win3.1, but I have to run them on a different and much older machine. The same can be done with liquid. If it's important to you then a dx9 card can be found. There are lots of them on Ebay. I think the PURCHASING of Liquid will diminish without a DX10 patch, if that hasn't started already. But then I do believe Avid is expecting this to happen, after all, they have (unofficially) declared it EOL.

 The real question to all of this is; is it really worth it to ignore the EOL status and keep pushing Liquid as if it was alive and well. From my personal point of view, it is not. As technology advances and Liquid doesn't, there becomes faster, more efficient ways of doing things and new methods or formats that Liquid can't deal with. You sort of get left out of the loop while sitting there behind your now aging box and monitor that Liquid will not allow you to do upgrades on. In other words at some point you become a slave to Liquid instead of the other way around (and you probably won't even notice it happening). And if you happen to have an old box dedicated to liquid, it will then at some point become more and more of a headache getting your old box to communicate with your new one.  But that's only the way that I would answer this question. How you would answer it could be entirely different.

The bottom line is that I think this DX10 patch thing is really just a red herring and you have a much more important decision to make. The DX10 patch (if it even comes out) will only lend to putting off the decision and give opportunity to the next roadblock (which will be Vista). And for those who think that you will be able to jump off Liquid's back, onto the back of NexGen to be off and running again, well, I suppose it's possible, but it rarely works out that way.

 As I said in another post, NexGen is supposed to be out sometime in 2009. It's already close to mid 2008. I'd be willing to bet that 2009 time line gets pushed a little. Combine that with the fact that most new programs are little more than amusement because of all of the bugs that need chasing out, and my guess is that you will not have a dependable NexGen for at least a few years. Not to mention the fact that nobody will know what it will be when it does come out.

But whatever the case maybe, screaming over a DX10 patch will not make it come out any faster, if it comes out at all. Be happy with what you have now and if you can't then maybe it's time to move on. At the very least anyway, I would not hang your future up over liquid. Avid has clearly said there is no future for it.