ATI Radeon X700 Pro 256MB Graphics Card (4x/8x AGP)
 

I'm going to buy a ATI Radeon X700 Pro 256MB Graphics Card (8x/4x AGP) very soon. This will be much, much better than my onboard graphics. (32MB)

1. Does anybody have this graphics card?

2. How does it perform with HDV footage? (Decoding)

3. How high quality is the MPEG 2 encoding?

4. Is this a good choice for HDV?

I got a Intel Pentium 4 3.2E Ghz processor last week. Now it's time for a new graphics card. (Next is a new sound card.) I will eventually get a Dell 2405FPW 24 Inch Widescreen monitor.

I think you're seeing the Graphics Card in too important a light when it comes to HDV/HD on computer.

The card you mention should be fine with tackling display of HD/HDV. It's more important to have fast and large Hard Disks (preferably in a RAID array) and powerful enough processor that can pump the video data fast enough to the GPU.

Graphics cards may be important if you are wanting to preview your HD/HDV edits on an external secondary monitor, but that's more to do with connections specifically designed for the monitor you are wanting to preview the video on. That's generally only applicable to those in or producing material for the broadcast industry.

The graphics card doesn't decode HDV, nor does it encode. That's where codecs (code/decode) come into play. With the appropriate codecs installed on your system, you should have no difficulty with watching, editing and rendering HDV/HD material. How fast that happens is up to the CPU and hard disk speed...

As long as the Radeon's refresh rate allows for flicker free (above 75Mhz at the highest supported resolution in 32Bit colour - which for good quality should be at least 1280x1024 for a 4:3 monitor) it should do fine.

I doubt you'll have a problem with the Radeon linked to your proposed Dell 24" WS monitor, though it'll be worth checking that it does support WS display modes of at least 1280x720 at 75Mhz 32bit colour - just in case!

BTW: have a look at what's available in external sound cards... in USB or Firewire flavours. Some have amazing capabilities for the price - such as XLR phantom powered connectors!! Very tasty :)

Ati Card
 

That is not entirly true it depends on the nle you are using. some nle like, edius, medi 100 (new one) liquid, cinegy, and programs like boris, combustion and 3d max need a good powerfull card to preview cause the use open gl. so the better the card the better the editing experience. For this the ati x700 is great.



cheers

ric marty