Let's say you've got two mobo/vidcard cobmbinations. One of them is AGP 1x and the other is AGP 8x.

We know that the 8x rig will be great for games. But all other things being equal, will the 8x card be any better for video editing and playback, using tools like Premiere?

I don't know a lot about video editing. The only thing I know for sure the AGP bus is good for is squrting 3D textures into the video RAM. Does it also get used for frame buffers and such?

Surely an AGP 1x bus has all the bandwidth it needs to get the frames to the video card quick enough already ? What benefit could you possibly gain by getting them there any quicker (given that the max refresh rate it controlled by the monitor) ?

I would imagine processor speed, memory bandwidth and hard disk speed have more to do with it than an AGP card. Unless you're watching footage at full size you could probably use a PCI graphics card. My laptop must have the crappiest video chipset, you can't play 3D games on it, but it's perfectly good for DV editing.

While not directly tied to the AGP speed, the 8x card is likely to be better for video editing if it has features the editing program will use. Cards from both ATI and NVidia commonly include video decoders on the chip now, and some even have encoders in there that can take load off the CPU. It's also becoming more and more common that 3d effects are added to 2d video to modify it.

Core Image is a quick overview of how OS X Tiger will be using the GPU for video effects. A video demonstration can be seen here, at the 1:06:50 mark.

It's also likely the AGP 1x board and card is going to be slower overall due to the older memory and bus subsystems it is likely to have.

I'm not sure progs like Premiere in Windows would necessarily take advantage of the hardware encoding caps of these cards and I'm pretty sure the 3d wouldn't be done by these cards either.

However after looking at that video I can see that Apple seem to be moving in a very interesting direction. In fact, it makes me want to buy a mac.

Holy Schneikies! Sure beats After Effects.

I also don't know much about the hardware side, but when I'm using Premiere, it's the processor that's doing all the work.

Oh, and I don't know how the latest Premiere works, but on mine the default is to completely render the video before previewing, instead of doing it real-time. I have no idea why this is the default.

I really dislike Premiere...and Adobe.

Apple don't intend Motion to be an After Effects killer. It can't do everything AF can. At least not right now. And impressive is running Final Cut and motion on the new 30" Display. I just showed this at the DigitalLife show in NYC this weekend. I just wish I knew more about using Motion to have made the editing/effects aspects more impressive.

I'm pretty sure you can get 3D acceleration with the latest version(s) of After Effects. At least some show antendees said that was so. We were also showing Premier running on a PCIe system with our new mainstream X600 AIW card.

Bruno