Editing PC: State of the art for Circa 9/13/2007??

[DougH 270]

Now that I am shooting some video I want to purchase a new pc to edit on.

What is minimum pc components and specs I should be looking for? I haven't shopped for a performance PC's since the late 90's so I am a little behind the curve.

I built one on HP.com since I get a small discount from work to get a rough idea of price.

By the time I was done with quad processors, 4gigs for ram, Raid, and a good video card I was down 2k.

Is it worth it or can I edit video and be happy with something a little more detuned?

"The restraining order says you're only allowed to touch me in freefall"
=P

[indyz 1]

What kind of editing are you doing? For most of the stuff fun jumpers edit (tandem videos, short films), a single fast dual core processor, 2GB RAM, and a dedicated fast SATA drive for the video files is plenty. The graphics card doesn't really affect much. You probably won't notice a difference between whatever $100 GeForce or Radeon Best Buy has on the shelf and a $400 top-of-the-line card. And forget about RAID; the disk is almost never the bottleneck.

I would take the money saved on quad processors and RAID and invest it in as much RAM as you can cram in and at least one really nice monitor (I prefer 2x21.5" Dell LCDs, myself).

My desktop with an Core 2 Duo E6400 and 2GB RAM still renders at better than 2x realtime with most projects (no complicated compositing or effects). It isn't a hot machine, but it's no slouch either.

I am assuming that you will be editing standard definition video. HD really requires some serious horsepower, but I'm still trying to get my hands on a few gigs of AVCHD sample footage to see how my machine handles it, so I can't offer any opinion on that.

[dragon2 2]

I use/have used 2 laptops for editing:
dual core 1.83 ghz/2 gb ram/sata harddrives/usb2 ext harddrive/gefprce go 7400/17" widescreen
amdx2 2ghz/2 gb ram/sata harddrive/usb2 ext harddrive/geforce go 6150/12" widescreen

Both not really good videocards but both render video just fine - tandem vids and daily vids etc. The 17" laptop is 1 1/2 yrs old but I like the 17"screen better for editing and the dualcore seems better than the amd even though that laptop is brand new.

For a desktop system I'd buy something similar: core2duo processor (= newer than dualcore) with loads of harddrive space and a 17"/19" widescreen monitor and a decent (100-ish) videocard. 2 gb ram or more (3 or 4 gb), esp if you're going to run vista more = better.

ciel bleu,
Saskia

[DougH 270]

Yeah I would be using it for fun jump videos, and tandems a couple hundred more video jumps down the line.
Is the price upgrade worth it for a quad core? It wasn't much more as far as I can tell, and once I back the video card and hard drives back down the PC might actually be affordable.

Thanks for the info so far!

"The restraining order says you're only allowed to touch me in freefall"
=P

[dragon2 2]

Right now a quad core is pretty useless, as software doesn't take advantage of it yet. Next versions, who knows. Right now a 2x is often not used 100%. I'd rather have more RAM i think.

ciel bleu,
Saskia

[DougH 270]

I have the RAM maxed out at 4 gigs, the big price difference was between 600mhz ram and 800mhz ram.

"The restraining order says you're only allowed to touch me in freefall"
=P

[AndyMan 7]

Quote

For most of the stuff fun jumpers edit (tandem videos, short films), a single fast dual core processor, 2GB RAM, and a dedicated fast SATA drive for the video files is plenty.

This is all changing with HDV.

I don't know what the hardware requirements are to capture and edit HDV, but it's clear to me that CPU and memory requirements are much higher than standard DV.

Thankfully, you can have the camera downgrade to DV.

_Am

__

You put the fun in "funnel" - craichead.

[DougH 270]

Since I just bought my pc350 I don't think I am going to HD for some time. At least not for another year or two, I can't afford it.

I guess it would be more economical to buy a pc that is going to be fast for working on my DV camera footage, and down the road in a couple of years look at another pc, instead of buying some smoking fast machine that is going to be outdated by the time I move to HD.

"The restraining order says you're only allowed to touch me in freefall"
=P

[DSE 5]

HDV vs DV with the right app makes zero difference to the editing system.
DV=25Mbps
HDV=25Mbps
Decoding HDV is app-dependent and if the app isn't efficiently written, then it can't decode quickly. Edius, Sony Vegas, Avid Liquid are all incredibly efficient, and editing HDV is just like editing DV.

I wouldn't worry too much about most of the issues mentioned above either, it's great advice, but I'd sneak in a comment that Adobe Premiere and Sony Vegas both take advantage of quads, multi-quads, etc. Remember that XP can't address more than 2GB at a time (RAM).
Fast CPU, reasonable RAM, fasst/large HDD will set you up nicely.

[AndyMan 7]

Both Premiere Pro 1.5.1, and the crapware Sony thing that came with my HC5 have serious frame dropping issues with my current setup when importing HDV. Both work fine if I have the camera downconvert to DV.

Admittedly my current setup is a little weak: 3 year old AMD Sempron, but with 2 BM ram and gobs of disk. I assume the problem is my processor.

_Am

__

You put the fun in "funnel" - craichead.

[DSE 5]

the problem is absolutely your proc. Even tho HDV carries an identical bitrate to DV, it is significantly more compressed (20:1 vs 5:1) and requires a lot of CPU to decode it. System configuration on older machines is hyper critical, but an old Sempron is gonna push the limits for HDV anyway.
It's somewhat difficult to have a discussion that contains quads and Semprons in the same paragraph with regard to speed.
Additionally, Premiere Pro 2.0 and later are significantly better optimized for HDV, whereas PP1.5 is not.

[The111 1]

Quote

HDV vs DV with the right app makes zero difference to the editing system.
DV=25Mbps
HDV=25Mbps
Decoding HDV is app-dependent and if the app isn't efficiently written, then it can't decode quickly. Edius, Sony Vegas, Avid Liquid are all incredibly efficient, and editing HDV is just like editing DV.

I wouldn't worry too much about most of the issues mentioned above either, it's great advice, but I'd sneak in a comment that Adobe Premiere and Sony Vegas both take advantage of quads, multi-quads, etc. Remember that XP can't address more than 2GB at a time (RAM).
Fast CPU, reasonable RAM, fasst/large HDD will set you up nicely.

Interesting info Spot. I got my HC5 a few days ago but haven't got any footage to edit yet. Are you saying that using Vegas 7, C2D 6400, 2GB RAM, 512MB XTX1900, my HDV editing experience should not be any more cumbersome than my DV editing? What about rendering times?

www.WingsuitPhotos.com