Simplest PC SETUP FOR HDV
 

HI,
I am after the simplest PC setup for HDV.

What i need to know is Porcesor speed,Ram,Disc Space, any other hardware.

and ofcourse software.

I have read the forums and there is so much stuff its confusing.

I just want to get started.

please forgive my impatience.

B.Sundry

Re: Simplest PC SETUP FOR HDV
 

<<<-- Originally posted by Brendan Sundry : HI,
I am after the simplest PC setup for HDV.

What i need to know is Porcesor speed,Ram,Disc Space, any other hardware.

and ofcourse software.

I have read the forums and there is so much stuff its confusing.

I just want to get started.

please forgive my impatience.

B.Sundry -->>>

P-IV 2.4Ghz and above.

512Mb RAM minimum (as fast as you can get or afford).

Hard Disks should be as large and fast as you can afford. Try to go with 3 SATA hard drives... 1 for OS (XP Pro with Service Pack 2) and the other 2 set-up as RAID 0 for exclusive video use...

A damn good monitor that's as big as you can manage, or a dual monitor configuration on a good Dual Head Video card either AGP or PCI-Xpress with at least 128Mb of memory on it.

Firewire (ieee-1394) port, or two...

Software... Vegas 5 with ConnectHD is pretty good value, or get the Adobe production bundle that includes Premiere Pro as well as Encore and add AspectHD to give real time editing to Premiere...

Then allow plenty of time to learn it all!!!

HDV is only 3.5MB/second, and my current SATA drive benchmarks at over 50MB/second... I don't see the point of RAID when it can already handle realtime effects with four streams of DV video (e.g. four picture-in-picture effects in one frame) at once: my PC would almost certainly be CPU-limited with multiple HDV streams, not disk-limited.

Mark: the catch is that many HDV editing solutions use special codecs which decompress the source footage from 3.5 MB/sec to roughly 10MB/sec, and in some cases even higher than that. So figure what happens if you have just 2-3 layers of such video material plus some music and graphics, and it's easy to see that you can start to max out the capabilities of a single hard drive. You may be able to get away with one drive for basic to intermediate HDV editing, but a two-drive RAID is a good idea for more demanding projects.

Regarding processors, plan on at least one 3+ GHz processor (or equivalent) for basic HDV editing and encoding, and preferably dual processors if you can afford them.

Brendan,

Do you have a computer now? Do you have the JVC with the included software? I initially used my P3, 900MHz laptop. It wouldn't even play back HDV smoothly - but I was able to mark edits pretty well. Single-stepping video frames worked well, but I was only able to see it in all it's glory after transferring back to the camera.

I have since moved on as I have a 3 GHZ P4 for editing, two DVHS machines ($300 for both), and a home theater PC which has pretty much superceded DVHS.

Right now im on a 1gig p3 320mb ram, looking at upgrading to 3ghz, 1gig ram, 200gb raided hds