Minimum PC Specs for HF100?
 

Can anyone recommend? I am a current HV20 owner who just hours ago fondled an HF100 at a local retailer. I LOVE the form factor-smaller than HV20. Anyway, I am editing in Prem Pro CS3 with AspectHD. I am a bit apprehensive about my editing configuration for AVCHD. My machine specs are:
P4 (Solo Core) 3.3 GHz
4GB DDR2-400 (PC2-3200) RAM
Plenty of disk space (not RAID)
(Black Magic Intensity Pro for HDMI and anaolg capture)
Am I HF100 ready?

I am a bit concerned of your CPU speed. Your CPU is fine for HV20 HDV editing, but AVCHD requires a lot of CPU speed, so you might need to get a fast new CPU and motherboard if editing in non-real time bothers you. Everything else is fine.

Thanks, Eugenia. I suspected as much. I may just get the HF100 (and sell the HV20) and use the Firestore FS-4 to capture to HDV until I can upgrade my machine.

Does your software do AVCHD? I'm not aware of Adobe handling it yet -you'd need to convert or something (some threads here about doing that).

Are you windows or Mac?

My amd x2 athlon 4400+ struggles with avchd..but i deal with it on win xp2. I have 4 gigs too.. Most I've seen in Task Mgr is ~2.35 gigs used.

20 minutes to convert 1 minute of footage to wmv 1280x720/60p in pinnacle studio 11+.. preview in studio 11 is jittery..need to wait for it to catch up usually.. but I'm not micro editing, so its ok.

I was afraid this might happen. I've been following the discussions for a while now as my Dad and I have been looking into getting a video camera. He will be using it for family vacations and I will be using it for some school projects.

The problem is that we are both running fairly old systems. Single-core... 1GB of RAM. I'm struggling to deal with footage from MiniDV and I doubt AVCHD will even run on either of our machines. Neither of us have the money to upgrade, otherwise we would be out upgrading to eight-core machines. *drools* Neither of us want an older format ie. MiniDV

Just out of curiosity... is there anything we can do to use this format or convert it to something else which would run on our machines? The way I see it... there isn't much we can do if we were to get a video camera with the AVCHD format, but I have to ask anyways.

Thanks!!

First post btw! :)

you can use cinform neohdv or neohd as an option or perhaps sd proxy files.

You will need to convert to either, and while cineform is great its also a huge file and using a SD Proxy will be the easiest of all to work on on any machine.

I'm a bit confused by that... it sounds like you plan to capture HDV off the HF100 using a Firestore? In case that's what you meant, I don't think that's an option. The Firestore simply looks for the HDV stream coming through the firewire interface and writes that data to disc. No HDV = No video on the hard drive.

If you meant something totally different, then never mind :)

I suggest you not sell the HV20. The HF100 has no firewire port, it has almost everything but...

I have the HV20 and just picked up an HF100...There is going to be quite a learning curve on the editing to anyone used to DV or HDV editing. I'm glad I kept the HV20 to be able to continue working with and have a workflow I can count on while I learn to deal with AVCHD issues.

To get HF100 ready I ordered the following:

From Dell's "refurbs" (classified as a scratch 'n dent return by Dell, but not a mark on it when it got here):

XPS 420 with Intel quad core Q6600 processor, 4GB fast RAM, & ATI Radeon 256MB graphics card.

First try at editing full quality (FXP) files, Pinnacle Studio 11.1.2 plus told me I didn't have enough graphics memory to edit 1920x1080 HD. Sure enough although I could see it on the timeline I couldn't render to anything but garbage. (Near future plans are to replace that card with something that has 512MB dedicated on board).

Second try: Reset the HF100 to FX+ (1440x1080) and tried to render to WMV various hi def files and again no dice, but rendering to a hi def MP4 produced a file that played in both VLC and QuickTime 7 and looked pretty good in both.

So I know I can use this cam on UWOL challenges where we have to convert to a 60MB or less .mov file for submission (QT 7 Pro will work with hi def MP4 files to get there). and I can continue to edit and burn standard def DVD's.

I have no BluRay player nor PS3 so have to wait a bit to output any hi def disks.

Pinnacle Studio 11 plus will also burn AVCHD disks but I have nothing that will play those back either.

I recommend you keep the HV20. I believe HD tape based workflow will be with us for a few more years. But the little HF100 is going to be fun to work with also.

Another hint: The HF100 does NOT come with an HDMI cable, and it takes a cable with a "mini HDMI" connector on one end and a standard HDMI connector on the other. I don't know what Canon prices this at but Best Buy has it for (GASP!) $79.97! I found a vendor on Amazon.com that has them for $20.99 or so, one is on the way.

I didn't even know there's a "mini" HDMI spec. Is it like this one?
http://www.monoprice.com/products/pr...seq=1&format=2

Here are my experiences with computer power needed... I've played a bit on two machines:

(1) P4 2.8G (single-core), 1GB ram, Radeon 9600
(2) XP 6000+ (dual core), 4GB ram, Radeon X1950

Machine (1) couldn't play a full-resolution .m2ts file smoothly with ffdshow decoder -- the playback was choppy, although somewhat watchable. I didn't have CoreAVC on this one to try, it might've done better (it probably would've).

Machine (2) has no problems handling anything, it seems. I tried playing a 1920x1080 .m2ts file *while* rendering one in the background, and there was hardly a stutter to be seen in playback. CoreAVC was installed on that machine.

My conclusion is that you probably don't need something as fast as (2), which itself isn't a particularly high-end machine today. So, that's pretty encouraging for those of you looking to do avchd editing on "older" machines. Clearly, anything as old as (1) will not do, though.

That's right.

No Firewire support, no standard definition recording and as far as I can find, no support to use it as a USB webcam. I was also hoping that it might record to 480p or 720p, but it's a 1080 only camcorder.

Except for the USB webcam use, none of the rest is really necessary.

Copying the files from the card (in a reader) is much faster than firewire capture and there is no dropped frame(s) issue.

My main output so far remains SD on DVD and I can render from the Pinnacle Studio 11 timeline to standard def DVD as well as to AVCHD on disk (supposedly readable in bluray players) or to a bluray compliant file on standard DVD discs, or to a variety of definition settings in file formats (so far in testing I get excellent results rendering to hi def MPEG4 files).

Of course if you need those other recording choices then it becomes an issue for you. I don't and for the $804 I paid for it, it's a great cam.

Why not capture through HDMI into the Intensity card using their MJPEG codec? This would lessen the requirements for your PC by not having to edit native AVCHD. Besides, Premiere doesn't handle AVC yet.