Will this PC cut it?

[Eagles2k3]

I just purchased an HV20 and I noticed my new Lenovo T60 doesn't have a firewire port. I ordered one up from Dell, so I suspect I should be good to go with that one as soon as that card arrives.

Now I have an older PC that does have a firewire port on it. It's an HP with P4 2.53 GHz with 1 GB of RAM, and I think the video card is a 64MB nVidia card. I just recently upgraded it to Vista. Will I be able to use this machine to at least get the video off the camera. I assume editing wise it probably isn't strong enough. Will I suffer quality issues if I use this PC to export from the HV20?

I also want to thank everyone that has posted sample videos on this forum. They have been awesome and completely sold me on the HV20.

Thanks,
Sean

[pascalbrown]

The only way to find out is to try. You can try capturing on your old PC and if it begins to drop frames then you have a problem. If not, then you're fine. As for editing, well, I wouldn't want to be the man doing it! I would use something a bit more updated for that...

[SenorKaffee]

HDV capture is just as stressing on the PC as DV capture. So your PC doesn´t have to be brand new - in fact it can be a model that is several years old, as long the hard drive is not too slow.

[Lunchbox]

I captured using a laptop to an USB 2.5" drive running 5400rpm. Never have a drop frame .. but i do have to not using the laptop while capturing.

[JoeInBH]

For the moment I'm running a 1.8 ghz Dell desktop with 512 mb RAM. It's obviously not fun to edit (although Vegas will scale down to operate on such specs if you're willing to twiddle your thumbs from time to time and let the rendering run for hours on end). However, even on my PC, with specs significantly slower than yours, capturing off of the HV20 has been a breeze.

[white_2kgt]

It will be fine for capture and LIGHT editing, but I wouldn't want to use it on a regular basis for editing.