what does the work - CPU or GPU?

[mridang_agarwal]

When we encode video, a large portion of the CPU gets hogged up by the conversion process. Dont all those great Nvidia and ATI graphics cards help in this conversion. I mean, those are grpahics cards and should be able to convert video etc? This whole CPU and GPU thing is pretty comfusing for me. Could someone please expain?

[guns1inger]

At the present time, the GPU does very little other than perhaps display a preview during the encoding process. Most cards have some form of playback assist, that smooths artifacts etc, but at the moment, I believe Premiere Pro 2 is the only application to be GPU ready, although what it actually does is something I haven't looked into. Expect GPUs to play a larger part in the future, but not for a little while yet.

The other thing to remember is that most GPUs are designed and optimised to display 3d data. While many of the calculations used in 3D have similarities to those used in processing video, GPUs do not currently 'create video' in the sense you seems to be hoping for.

[Abond]

There is a denoise filter for avisynth that works with GPU. fft3dGPU or something similar.

[guns1inger]

I have been curious about the use of anisotropic filters in video games to bring up detail in scenes, and why a similar feature couldn't be used to enhance detail in video. Unfortunately, the coding and maths required is beyond me, but it seems the prefect application for a GPU based filter.

[edDV]

The good thing in GPU and audio tech has been DirectX that has reduced basic image and audio processing to functions that can be implemented in hardware, but also has software to step in if that hardware function is missing. Display cards have focused on 3D and media decoders (e.g. for DVD playback) but the HTPC is driving the need for internal hardware encoders as well.

[Radixmind]

i believe these guys are working in the area of Graphics card enhanced video editiing applications

http://www.tenomichi.com/index.htm