As several other recent posts, begin, I am just getting into dv editting, running with Pinnacle Studio 8 on a Dell P4 1.4. I am looking to upgrade to my own custom computer and would love to hear opinions on what video cards, mother boards, dual processors, and adobe vs. vegas. etc.

Thanks,

Joe

You should decide on Adobe vs Vegas first. Try the demos from the websites to see which program works better for you. Make sure you download the sticky for the Vegas shortcut keys in the Vegas forum.

You can also search old threads discussing which NLE is the best. There should be quite a few of them.

For Vegas, here's what we're using...
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?s=&threadid=24064#post167178

Vegas with this set-up renders your standard movies (titles+soundtrack+speaker w compression&eq + crossfades) to MPEG at 2x realtime..

/magnus

RAM & CPU are important, but in my experience, most bottlenecks are disk speed. My Athlon based PC is always waiting on disk read/write whilst rendering, and I run ATA133 disks in a Raid-0 config for speed !

Magnus,

Thanks that was a lot of good info in that post. Do you in fact use dual screen set-up, would you say that is a necessity or just a level of comfort? Also, how satisfied have you been with Vegas vs. Adobe? What would you say the learning curve is with Vegas? Also a computer whiz friend of man swears by a DVD-RAM for back-ups, what is your opinion.

Thanks,

Joe

Also a computer whiz friend of man swears by a DVD-RAM for back-ups
DVD-RAM is a dying format. On an old Mac DVD-RAM was excruciatingly slow for backing up video since it was 1X. Maybe new ones are faster but DVD-R/DVD+R makes a lot more sense considering the media is ~$1/disc (see meritline.com).

Firewire drives are also great for backups. It's about $1/GB now.

RAM & CPU are important, but in my experience, most bottlenecks are disk speed. My Athlon based PC is always waiting on disk read/write whilst rendering, and I run ATA133 disks in a Raid-0 config for speed !
In Vegas the main bottleneck is CPU speed (for rendering, not copying files) unless you've got your hard drives misconfigured (in PIO mode instead of DMA). Some RAID controllers suck and might actually decrease performance (i.e. VIA RAID controller on the Asus P4P800 boards). RAID isn't necessary for DV.

Joe, did you try the demos? Hopefully you can figure out which one works for YOU. You may not edit the same kind of material as everyone else and one program may make more sense to you. Of course, one NLE might be better once you get past the learning curve. Perhaps you can provide more information on what you want to do and what your budget is.

Glenn,

That settles my brief consideration of DVD-RAM, thanks for saving me from that mistake.... Now I am bugging a friend of mine to see if he will let me test drive his Adobe Premiere. As for Vegas, which it seems like I am leaning to, price, and people in the forum here seem to swear by it. I hope to play with demo over the course of the next week. Budget well that is negotiable around the $2 k range. Use, I am currently doing some video montage retrospectives for my day job company, the occasional wedding, and a lot of experimenting. I would just like a system to that is upgradedable. Thanks for the good advice thus far.

Thanks,

Joe

>Do you in fact use dual screen set-up, would you say that is a necessity or just a level of comfort?

Dual screen a necessity imho - timeline, tracks, FX-controls.. it gets out of hand on a single display, and just the ability to see a lot more of the timeline helps a lot when re-arranging stuff

>Also, how satisfied have you been with Vegas vs. Adobe?
I have been using premier since v 1.0 on a Mac Quadra ;) and I would say it has "legacy problems" - if you're used to doing things the "Premiere" way then it's probably very good.
Case in point: Premiere has the "razor tool" for splitting a clip, in vegas you hit "S" on the keyboard.
- Vegas loads in 4 seconds, premiere has the standard 30 second "loading this, initiating that, reading plugins, etc" during boot.
-Premiere has "nested" timelines, which is very cool/useful, most likely Vegas will have something similar in new v5 out in a month or so...
-Premiere can preview through a TV-out on a graphics card, Vegas does not use "overlay" so you need a video-device on your Firewire to preview on a TV, Canopus ADVC-100/300/etc or your DV camera with TV-out.
- Premiere used A/B roll editing until "Premiere Pro" version.. duh...

>What would you say the learning curve is with Vegas?
The basics one day (import, insert to timeline, adjust/edit, titles, render)
The matting/masking stuff - as they said about the boardgame "Othello", a minute to learn, a lifetime to master ;)

>Also a computer whiz friend of man swears by a DVD-RAM for back-ups, what is your opinion.
The LG-drive can write DVD-ram in 3x, but I think the best solution must be a Firewire dock for standard IDE harddrives.... and then buy a number of cheap 100 GB not-top-of-the-line harddrives for backing up each major project, switching the disk in the dock ... I have yet to try this though...

good luck!

/magnus

We've got a rteally inforamtive article on our website about building a DIY computer for NLE http://www.videoguys.com/DIY.html

Gary

We've got a rteally inforamtive article on our website about building a DIY computer for NLE http://www.videoguys.com/DIY.html
The whole DIY thing gets pretty thrashed out over at this thread at dv.com (registration required)
http://www.dv.com/jive3/thread.jspa?threadID=300000573&start=0 It might be getting dated though.

In my opinion you can do better than the videoguys recommended machine.

Our DIY article is intended aqs a guideline. We also tried to keep the price as close to $1000 as possible. We're planning a DIY NLE KILLER machine for our next article.

We're researching it now. Not sure if we'll go dual Xeon or try for a 64 bit Athlon.

Gary
Videoguys.com

Joe,
I don't live too far from you. I would be glad to build or help you build your new computer if you'd like. I have built many and built the one I use now for less than 1k. (Not including software)


:)

"How easy is the learning curve for Vegas?"

Example: Producing a 1 hour, 7 section video consisting of stills and video clips. My daughter sat down next to me, watched me do the first 2 sections then banged out the rest by herself, including fades and transitions and titles. All I had to do was go back and complete the little details like softening picture edges.

Barry,

Thanks for the offer, I am still researching right now and might take you up on the help depending on where I go from here. I think I am going to go the route of collecting components over the next few months (mainly due to monetary reasons) and then assemble it mid-summer (surviving on Pinnacle until then), or atleast that is my goal. I am putting my software decision off til I see the new version 5 of Vegas.

Harry,

Thanks for the leaning curve insight, I am taking that as a positive as long as your daughter does not have a degree from MIT.

Now I am looking at individual components, so please feel free to comment on ASUS motherboards, Radeon Video Cards, and 3200+ AMD processors. I am looking at a single processor system. So comments gallore are appreciated.

Thanks,

Joe

Based on what I learned here I went with the Intel chip and have not regreted it. I have a ASUS mobo but have also used a A-bit board and can't tell any difference in the two. I do use a Radeon video card (9600 I think) but I am not sure about how much that helps/hurts your machines proformance. I would concentrate on the Mobo/Processor and memory most of all, but that's just my 2 cents...


:P

Is there anyone with experience of editing with the new AMD64 FX and/or Opteron for workstations (I'm confused which is what - will flame AMD marketing department at some point)

/magnus

The FX processors are souped up versions of the AMD64 processors. They can use dual channel memory and have a larger cache if I remember correctly. They are a few to several percent faster than the normal processors. Anyways, they are worth buying only if you have really, really deep pockets since they only add a smidgen of performance (hard to notice) for a lot of extra money.

Opterons can be put in dual/quad/8-way processor setups (200 series for duallies, 400 for 4-way, 800 series for 8-way). They cost a lot more.

The normal AMD64 processors, the FX series processors, and the Opterons have some differences in the memory controllers which I don't know too well.

Dual processor setups don't help too much for Vegas (Vegas isn't that good at taking advantage of dual processor setups), although the MPEG2 encoder that comes with Vegas+DVD will. This might change when network rendering comes around. You might see some bigger performance gains from dual processors by network rendering to your own computers. This works with After Effects, so it might with Vegas 5.

<<<-- Originally posted by Glenn Chan : Anyways, they are worth buying only if you have really, really deep pockets since they only add a smidgen of performance (hard to notice) for a lot of extra money.

-->>>

That is what I couldn't figure out, the Opteron processor is 4x more exensive than standard AMD 64 Athlon, but there is no real performance increase. I read the Mac G5 vs. P4 vs. AMD64 shootout made by pcworld _and_ macworld at

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,112749,pg,8,00.asp

and it just does not make sense, why spend the money?

/magnus

Opterons can be used in multiprocessor setups. Normal AMD64 processors can't.

2- From what I remember of PCWorld and MacWorld, they don't run very good benchmarks. They usually aren't relevant to what you do.