Is my computer fast enough?!

[thatdirectorguy]

What would be the recommended computer setting (mainly RAM and Processor speed) to edit HV20 footage?

thanks for all the help,


- Jason

[M43]

To be happy get anything with a dual core and 2 gb of ram and stick with xp

[bitty]

Hi Jason.

As you have not stated your current specs we have no way of giving our opinion if its fast enough or not.

While even a E2xxx processor would be able to edit video (and playback fairly well), you'll find the killer being the rendering time. If your doing mum and dad type videos then I'd say a E2xxx (ok) or E4xxx (better) series processor should be adequate if you don't mind waiting a little time for it to render...

On a Q6600 (quad processor) 1 minute of raw HV20 video with lots of camera movement at the highest setting (HDV res. mpeg2 output 25mbits, 25P, single pass) takes 2 minutes 3 seconds while on default good settings takes 1 minute 14 seconds with Sony Vegas..

Once you start adding effects/filters then the time to render will increase.

In terms of memory, I'd say not to go below 1.5Gb of memory. 2Gb is nice, and the more you have after is like icing on the cake where it will more or less be used for file caching. Unless you get 64bit XP/Vista, windows will not see any more than around 3.4/3.6Gb of Ram so if you get 4Gb you'll find around 400Mb unaccessible.

Memory is relatively cheap right now so its a good time to buy DDR2 (even if it will be phased out with DDR3 as time progresses). I've found no rendering time difference between DDR2-800 4-4-4-10 and 5-5-5-18 timing memory so you don't have to get the fastest memory as the CPU's L2 cache seems to be the bigger factor in rendering time.

Dual DVI videocards are nice as well as with Vegas you can have the video output on one monitor and your timeline on the other...

Hope that helps. If you have any further questions you know where to ask :hv20-smilie03:

[willtape4food]

Jason,

How fast do you want to go ... and how much money do you have?
Speed cost money, but you can build/modify a computer that will give you good performance with a resonable price tag.

RAM= 3 gig. Win XP only "sees" 3 gig. Anything over that is system ram and there's no real cost/benifit over 3gig. Match the RAM chips speed, don't mix. See what your computer or motherboard manufacturer rocogmends. FYI- 1 gig PC2-8500 [ DDR2-1066 ] chips are going for around 45$ a stick.

Hard drives= There's many ways to go here. Optimal would be 4 drives. One drive (1) for Windows programs, another small drive (2) [say 80 to 120 gig] just for windows "Temp", "swap", and "Page files", and then finally two drives of the same size (3 & 4) that are "Striped" and acting like a single drive, these last two drives are where you would capture, edit, and render video files only.
*** edited to add = moving the swap/temp file off the system and render-capture drive will improve system speeds ***

Video Cards= Here it doesn't matter so much for capturing. But viewing and editing is where this could be the bottle neck. Like everything else, faster with more "On card RAM" is better.

Another thing to do, and it cost no money at all, is to shut off as many windows services as you can [task manager] before capturing/editing. PM me if you want to know how to set up a strickly video "hardware profile" [ no windows services, no internet running in the background, just what's needed to dedicate mostly all computer power to video work]

I had an Athlon XP [ 1.8 ghz], 2 gig PC1600 [333 mhz] ddr and 4x 120gig hard drives. It worked well enough. Took about 1 1/2 hours to render 1 hour of video @ 720x480, SD, CBR 5K.
I just put together a new PC with 3 gig 1333mhz FSB DDR2, itel q6600 core 2 quad, 4x 320 SATA-3g/s transfer. 30 minutes of video took just 13 minutes to render [at 720x480, CBR 5k]...but it cost money.