Dump Pinnacle for Vegas 8?

[DoyleIII]

Picked up the HV20 to capture the birth of our first child (son) in all it's HD glory. Then I realized I'd need some editing software to capture and edit the video properly.

Did some research and picked up Pinnacle Studio 11 for ease of HDV editing and such. Got it home and realize my graphics card is too old and busted to edit HDV (64MB memory.) I'm taping in HD, then editing and creating in SD.

So, either I buy a new laptop with better processor and video card - or -
I buy a different editing program.

Processor 2.9Ghz
RAM - 1.5GB
Video Card - Busted

Am I stuck with the whole new laptop direction?

[fis]

HD video rendering is the most processor-intensive thing you could ever ask a home PC to do. I know a lot of people do it on Windows laptops, but frankly I wouldn't wish that on anybody.

DV is processor-intensive and it's best to have a minimum of competing apps running, plus requires tons of hard drive space, fast hard drive throughput, and fast video rendering.

Laptops are designed for low energy consumption, with slower hard drives and tons of resident applications designed to maximize battery performance.

This is a long way of saying I don't know if switching software will make you happy.

[pitonyak]

If you do opt to change. You can purchase Vegas version 6 for $79 and the upgrade to Vegas 8 PRO for another $99 from B & H. This is discussed in another link that I found here (so I ordered...).

[Terfyn]

Pinnacle Studio 11 is very sensitive to hardware. I have run Studio 11+ seven months now with no trouble but my computer was a new Media Player in 2006. I like Studio and find it easy to use and it handles HDV OK.

[skiltrip]

Picked up the HV20 to capture the birth of our first child (son) in all it's HD glory. Then I realized I'd need some editing software to capture and edit the video properly.

Did some research and picked up Pinnacle Studio 11 for ease of HDV editing and such. Got it home and realize my graphics card is too old and busted to edit HDV (64MB memory.) I'm taping in HD, then editing and creating in SD.

So, either I buy a new laptop with better processor and video card - or -
I buy a different editing program.

Processor 2.9Ghz
RAM - 1.5GB
Video Card - Busted

Am I stuck with the whole new laptop direction?

2.9GHz isn't THAT bad for a cpu. there is faster and dual-core stuff obviously. what kind of processor/model is it? AMD? Intel?
Your RAM is decent too (what speed it is? PC2100? PC2700? etc.)
Video cards are cheap. look on www.newegg.com
And, I don't know about Pinnacle, but I use Vegas and it doesn't use the video card for any processing. I was editing HDV with a Voodoo3 16MB PCI video card, (with Athlon 3700+ and 2GB ram).

[DoyleIII]

Pinnacle does require dedicated 128MB memory on the video card to process hd video.

I have only briefly researched, but I think it's near impossible to replace a video card in a laptop. Anyone know if that's true?

[roblavender]

Pinnacle does require dedicated 128MB memory on the video card to process hd video.

I have only briefly researched, but I think it's near impossible to replace a video card in a laptop. Anyone know if that's true?

You are correct sir!... There are a few (very few) high end laptops that make swapping out the graphics card easy, and then there are a few more where you can have the option to choose between a couple models designed to fit that small space.. A standard graphics card will not work in a laptop sorry to say. So for most people that is not an option. with most laptops what you have is all you're ever gonna get.

That said. With a little effort you can build a nice editing computer for around $600 to $800 (I'd never buy an off the shelf machine for video editing, not if you're serious) A more serious machine you can easily double that.

check at newegg.com and tigerdirect.com

Look at AMD motherboards, Athlon 64 X2 5000 or higher, get a couple of Seagate SATA 250GB hard drives (the one with 16Mb cache) $69 each.

Radeon or GeForce PCIE graphics card, and get a decent PCI sound card, video and audio will stay locked together better if you don't use onboard sound.

For a laptop, there are plenty of powerful ones out there now, but for video editing, you need power properly applied and few laptops actually do that.

The main thing to look for when buying a laptop is how much ram can be set aside for the graphics.. 256Mb would be minimum for me. And then up the system ram to 2Gb. Many new laptops available with HD widescreen monitors.

Software, I have tried several versions of Pinnacle Studio and love the ease of workflow, and features, but absolutely hate the fact that you really need to dedicate the computer for Studio ONLY... It is a very unstable and finicky piece of software, and I kept buying newer version hoping they fixed it, only to find I waste time and money messing with it. When it works Pinnacle works best on Intel based computers. So keep that in mind.

Sony Vegas on the other hand takes a bit more time to learn, but has much better color correction capabilities and is quite stable, living happily on a family style computer (Not sure why Pinnacle can't figure out how to do that)

A bit of research and will will find a lot of possibilities.

[Arla]

I'd agree with Rob, Pinnacle is a really nice, easy to use piece of software, that absolutely refuses to play nice with anything else on your PC, I've had to do entire reformats of computers to wipe all traces of pinnacle software off of a PC to get it to enable other software to work, NOT FUN!

Vegas took me a while to get used to, but now I am used to it, have to say I love it. Works really well, and at least at present my 2 year old laptop (Core Duo with 2GB of Ram and I think it's 128MB Graphics card) works really nicely and doesn't have any issues with it.

[DoyleIII]

Thanks for the feedback. From what I'm reading it sounds like I either need to build a dedicated media editing PC or consider Vegas 8.

Given that my current lappie only has 64MB memory on the video card, could I edit HD in Vegas 8 or does that require a better video card as well?

[cypherkin]

Given that my current lappie only has 64MB memory on the video card, could I edit HD in Vegas 8 or does that require a better video card as well?

I have a 2.8ghz intel with 1gb ram, using a external HD 320gig via usb. It works well (for my specs). I do wish i had a little more power and memory to make the editing alot more smoother - and the rendering alot quicker. (4min 30 seconds video was a 2hr 30min process). 1080i video was smooth when editing, but 24p was a little bit choppy - but render still came out nicely, so its basically previewing and editing a little difficult with my comp.

here are requirements for Sony Vegas Pro 8.

System Requirements

    * Microsoft® Windows® XP SP2 or Windows Vista™
    * 1 GHz processor (2.8 GHz recommended for HDV)
    * 200 MB hard-disk space for program installation
    * 600 MB hard-disk space for optional Sony Sound Series Loops & Samples reference library
    * 1 GB RAM
    * OHCI-compatible i.LINK® connector1/IEEE-1394DV card
      (for DV and HDV capture and print-to-tape)
    * Windows-compatible sound card
    * DVD-ROM drive (for installation from a DVD only)
    * Supported CD-recordable drive (for CD burning only)
    * Supported DVD-recordable drive (for DVD burning only)
    * Supported Blu-ray recordable drive (for Blu-ray burning only)
    * Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0
    * QuickTime 7.1.6 or later

You must provide your registration information to Sony Creative Software Inc., a US company, in order to activate the software. Product requires online registration within 30 days.

If you ask me, I say download the demo of Sony Vegas Platinum - give it a run, and then decide whether you want to buy it. I personally am happy, and am about to purchase the Platinum version - since i do not need the pro.

here is the link to check out Vegas (3 versions):: Sony Vegas Movie Studio / Movie Studio Platinum / Pro

[nolonemo]

Thanks for the feedback. From what I'm reading it sounds like I either need to build a dedicated media editing PC or consider Vegas 8.

Given that my current lappie only has 64MB memory on the video card, could I edit HD in Vegas 8 or does that require a better video card as well?

Nope. I have done simple edits to HDV on my IBM T23. That has a PIII 1.2Ghz processor. The laptop doesn't have enough juice to play the video back without stuttering, but it can handle the editing part. The T23 has a 64MB video card.

Vegas will let you use proxy editing for complex editing where you want to be able to get a good look at the effects. In essence, Vegas renders the HDV to a temp SD file, the edits and previewing is done on that, and when the project is ready for the final render out, all the editing stuff is applied to the HDV. There's a $50 plug-in called Gearshift that automates this process. Using Gearshift, I could edit HDV even on my T23 and get smooth preview (at the "preview" setting). One other good thing about Vegas is that it will smart render the parts of the video which have not been edited or had effects added, so you don't lose generational quality on those parts.

The B&H combo deal is an insanely good price for a pro-level NLE editor, IMO.