HV20 Brass Tacks

[jmorton]

HV20 Brass Tacks

Let's say I am on a tight budget.

I can just barely afford to buy an HV20. (Perhaps in 4 or 5 months I'll have another $2000 to spend but not now.)

Let's also say I have Adobe Production Premium Suite CS3.

Here is my system: Intel E6600, Asus P5W DH Deluxe motherboard with Firewire and USB 2.0, 3GB DDR2 800 RAM, Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB OC2 graphics card, dual SATA II hard drives, LiteOn DVD writer, with Windows XP Pro SP2 32-bit.

No capture card and no other software.

Can I get anything into my computer from my HV20?
What resolutions and framerates?
What can I output?

Thanks for your advice.

JM

[Rocha]

With that screamer of a computer, anything you want, it's yours. Your computer is less than a year old, so I am assuming you hard drives are a minimum 120GB each. That's plenty to start on home movies, small projects, weddings, etc...

[Rikki]

If you have a firewire port then yes you are good to go.

R

[XFR]

All you need is a firewire cable (4pin to 6pin) and you're ready to go. Your computer is fast enough to handle everything.

[JoeInBH]

A PCI firewire card can be had on Amazon or elsewhere for as little as $15. Add another $5-$10 for a cable (if its not included with the card), and you're in business. As the above posters have noted, you've got more than enough computing power to handle all aspects of HDV (capture, playback, editing).

Until I upgrade to a quad-core system around Christmas, I'm currently working with a six-year-old, single-core 1.8 gHz, 512mb RAM, 80 gig single harddrive system. It captures perfectly. Playback is poor. But I can edit in Vegas (although render times are horrible) and then output in HD to tape or output in SD to DVD. Obviously, I'm temporarily working with a far-from-ideal setup, but it's enough for my casual usage.

[jmorton]

Maybe I just don't quite understand. I realize my rig is adequate for the job. What I need to know is whether Adobe Master Collection with all of its programs will recognize the HV20 when I connect it through the motherboard built-in Firewire and will it import all the different resolutions and framerates? I mean, there's all this talk about using Cineform Prospect HD, Blackmagic Intensity Pro, tanscoding, etc. If just Premiere Pro CS3 and After Effects CS3 were all that was necessary then why all the other software and hardware?

[bluegrass]

Maybe I just don't quite understand. I realize my rig is adequate for the job. What I need to know is whether Adobe Master Collection with all of its programs will recognize the HV20 when I connect it through the motherboard built-in Firewire and will it import all the different resolutions and framerates? I mean, there's all this talk about using Cineform Prospect HD, Blackmagic Intensity Pro, tanscoding, etc. If just Premiere Pro CS3 and After Effects CS3 were all that was necessary then why all the other software and hardware?

Practically all the stuff you mentioned is for techheads who want to try and capture uncompressed video via HDMI. That's for the people who don't mind bleeding a little, but I don't think you fit that category with the system you have and you're still worried whether Adobe and your hardware will handshake with the HV20. I'm pretty sure it's going to handshake and than hug one another. If you would have said your system was Vista, I might have been a little hesitant whether you were going to have a rocky road ahead but I believe you stated you have XP-Pro-SP2, which is great. What your asking to do is not going to be a problem. You may have to go through some hoops for 24P pulldown but so does about everyone. Just be sure you keep a ton of diskspace. You're going to use up a half a ton of it just doing a full install of the Adobe wardrobe you bought.