What kinds of computer specs are required for editing HD video from the FX1?

And not necessarily to run at super speeds, but at a decent level.

I've been getting by with my P4 2.8 HT 2gb ram and a external 500gb HD. For HD you need a lot of disc space, RAM and go for the dual processors with a good cooling system.

what are some of your rendering times? i don't know too much about editing HDV, so if you could give me some basic info on that, i'd appreciate it.

Thanks

It depends on what you're layering on the footage. If you're putting on Magic Bullet colour grades on a native m2t stream, then you're in for a hell of along waiting time.

If you're doing any more than basic cutting (grading, keying, compositing, other effects etc) then I would convert it do a Cineform HD AVI and then apply the grading and effects from there before re-encoding it as a m2t.

My Setup is:

Athlon 64 X2 4600 running at 2.41 Ghz
2GB Ram
Maxtor OneTouchII 500GB Firewire external drive
250GB 7200rpm internal
120GB system drive
Only a radeon 9600...I'm sure a new graphics card would help editing though!

Hope this helps!
Cheers,
Richard

Any modern Mac with iMovieHD can edit the footage from the current crop of HDV camcorders. Render times and other processor intensive task speeds are relative to the cost of the machine= the more you spend, the faster the performance.

I have a Dual processor Pentium4. 3.2 gigaherts With 1 Gig ram and 250gigs Hard Drive (I think its 7200rpm) With a basic 128 mb Graphics card.

I'm planning on getting Prem Pro 2, and want to edit with the base m2t files. I know people reccomend 2gig RAM, but I was only able to afford 1 gig RAM. Is that enough to do basic shorts without the headaches of slow processing?

Would you guys prefer building your own system to specs or getting one already built. I noticed at a local retail store have the dual AMD 4200 (I might be wrong don't quote me) for around 1200 but then the OS comes with a lot of stuffs that I won't really need for video so it puts some weight on the system. Richard is dead on correct on the layering of the footages, it does take a toll on your processor.

there is no reply to such question.
What you can do , is to decide for a workflow and application, then read the specs given by the application editor.
for example, native HDV (m2t) is painfull even on an high end machine.
but you better spend 500$ to the cineform codec and be free to chose almost any recent computer.(altough works best in premiere, so if you choose another apps, the choices will be different)
Same for Magic bullet that is painfully slow , except if you buy an NVIDIA 7800 GT card (about 300$) that can give you almost real time on HDV.
Problem, to have good monitoring on HD monitor Matrox has better card, so you cannot get both (but Nvidia can give pretty decent result too)
Same if you go SDI-HD instead Firewire (depends the camera) or wants to capture components at high bandwith, that cost the hell (capture card, RAID disks, fast dual processor).
The specification are not the same.
If you want to stay on the cheap side, a recent processor (intel D930 dual core) on a average motherboard (asus for example) should fit your main needs.
Personnally i edit HDV (sony FX1 1080i50 or JVC HD1 720p30) on an old P4 (northwood) 2.6Ghz, overclocked at 3.2Hhz with 2 gig of ram and standard IDE and SATA disk (7200 rpm), using cineform codec. Videocard are cheap Nvidia 5200 (one AGP, one PCI) driving 2 dell 24" screen at 1920x1200.
I am happy, since updating for a new computer would cost me at least 1500$ and probably not giving twice the speed.

Both Giroud and Fred are on the money in terms of using a codec such as Cineform. Besides, you are woking with such a large GOP with an m2t file that it is nigh on impossible to work with sound, add effects (not to mention the strain on the system) and even viewing it on a standard monitor can become a chore. Go with a codec...it is more than worth the money.

Richard

Hi,

I have an AMD 64 Dual core 3800+, 2gig RAM, 3 250G 7200rpm hard drives, Geforce 6600 LE, and whenever I playback HD footage on the premiere pro 2.0 timeline it is jumpy! I play it with VLC or Media Player Classic and there's no problem. But it gets weirder! Even after I render the footage on premiere, it is still jumpy. And I'm not even using any effects at all. I checked the adobe website and I seem to fullfil all the system requirement for realtime playback (even with magic bullet effects being applied!). It MUST have something to do with my settings. I really don't know what's the deal here. It's a pain in the ass to edit like this. Any advice will be apreciated.

Do you think my graphic card settings might influence this issue? Should I get a 10000rpm hard drive?

cheers

Hi,

I have an AMD 64 Dual core 3800+, 2gig RAM, 3 250G 7200rpm hard drives, Geforce 6600 LE, and whenever I playback HD footage on the premiere pro 2.0 timeline it is jumpy! I play it with VLC or Media Player Classic and there's no problem. But it gets weirder! Even after I render the footage on premiere, it is still jumpy. And I'm not even using any effects at all. I checked the adobe website and I seem to fullfil all the system requirement for realtime playback (even with magic bullet effects being applied!). It MUST have something to do with my settings. I really don't know what's the deal here. It's a pain in the ass to edit like this. Any advice will be apreciated.

Do you think my graphic card settings might influence this issue? Should I get a 10000rpm hard drive?

cheers


editing m2t natively will be "jumpy" thats why there are intermediary formats to use to make the workflow "flow"

editing m2t natively will be "jumpy" thats why there are intermediary formats to use to make the workflow "flow"

What's "jumpy" about it? I've edited a number of HDV projects in Avid Xpress Pro HD with few problems. I can't do realtime multistream effects, but my PC can't handle realtime multistream effects with any HD codec.

The only real issue is that exporting the final movie to DVD or an HD video format takes forever.

With my pc I should have enough "gun power" to playback HD video on premiere pro 2.0s' timeline in REALTIME with no problem. Many people here have "less capable" pcs and they can do it without any type of jitter, "jumpyness", "bumpiness". I even considered changing to another editing software but the integration between after effects, audition, ilustrator, etc is simply amazing. And besides I've been using premiere for ages.

Yeah, my PC is substantially slower than yours, so it must be something specific to Premiere, or some other system setting causing a problem.

Hi,

I have an AMD 64 Dual core 3800+, 2gig RAM, 3 250G 7200rpm hard drives, Geforce 6600 LE, and whenever I playback HD footage on the premiere pro 2.0 timeline it is jumpy! I play it with VLC or Media Player Classic and there's no problem. But it gets weirder! Even after I render the footage on premiere, it is still jumpy. And I'm not even using any effects at all. I checked the adobe website and I seem to fullfil all the system requirement for realtime playback (even with magic bullet effects being applied!). It MUST have something to do with my settings. I really don't know what's the deal here. It's a pain in the ass to edit like this. Any advice will be apreciated.

Do you think my graphic card settings might influence this issue? Should I get a 10000rpm hard drive?

cheers

Rafael:

I have virtually the same setup as you do except for the video card. I am not at my system location now, but I run a 256 mgb video card, off the PCI express slot (only available graphics slot on my system), and I am able to edit and preview unfiltered clips off the time line. If there are transitions, and filters, it will be a bit "choppy", but after a render of the time line, the preview will play fine. I am actually previewing on a second monitor of the DVI output of the video card. The video card ran about $179, a fairly generic brand, and I think it was an ATI Radeon X700 level card. I don't really have any idea for sure, but when I see a card with an extension like LE on the end, I am concerned that it might mean limited edition- a designation that might mean the card does not have the best chips and spead compared with other cards carrying the same memory on board. Again, I don't know this for a fact, and I only bring it up as a point to investigate.

I guess I'll have to find somebody who can land me another card/10000rpm hd to try it out (I won't be too hapy if I buy a new one and the issue remains). Thanks for the input anyway.

I just built my system the other day and it consists of:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400 Dual Core Processor
4GB Ram
Geforce 7600GT Video Card
2 x 250GB 7200rpm SATA internal hard disks set up as RAID0
1 x 200GB SATA system drive
2 x 19" Widescreen monitors
2 x Pioneer 111D DVD RW drives

and Im using Premier Pro2

I dont do this for a living, just a hobby and im loving it.

I guess I'll have to find somebody who can land me another card/10000rpm hd to try it out (I won't be too hapy if I buy a new one and the issue remains). Thanks for the input anyway.Rafael, A 10K RPM hard drive is NOT going to help. I have one and have posted my findings on the HDV page (http://www.johnrofrano.com/hdv.htm) of my web site. The bottom line is they cost 5x more with only a 12% boost in linear read performance. Not worth the money for video editing.

Look at your hard drive light as you play back the footage. Is it on solid or just blinking? My guess is it’s just blinking which shows there is more throughput available. The fact that VLC pays the footage fine on the same hard drive proves it is not the harddrive that is the bottleneck. Your processor and NLE are the bottleneck.

My total system specs for the PC I build are on the PC Equipment (http://www.johnrofrano.com/pcequipment.htm) page of my web site but I’ll repeat the core ones here for you:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ Dual Core
ASUS A8N-SLI Premium motherboard
2GB RAM (CORSAIR XMS Twinx2048-3200c2pt)
HD-1: WD Raptor WD740GD 10,000 RPM SATA150
HD-2: 160GB Western Digital SATA 7200 WD1600JD 8MB
HD-3&4: 2 x WD 250GB WD2500JS SATA II (in a Raid 0 configuration)
MSI Geforce 6800GT 256MB GDDR3 Graphics card

When I playback HDV M2T files from my RAID the hard drive light blinks occasionally. I use Sony Vegas as my NLE and if I display the footage full screen on my secondary monitor in "draft" or "preview" mode it plays back smoothly. If I view the same footage in the preview window it is jerky. This is because it has to be rescaled to play in the smaller window and you are asking your processor to rescale a 1920x1080 image 30 times per second. That’s a lot to ask. So full screen HDV will playback faster than a small preview will because there is no scaling.

My HDV page (http://www.johnrofrano.com/hdv.htm) also has frames per second measurements for HDV footage using DV, M2T, and CineForm codecs in Vegas so you can see how each performs on my system. (note: these measurements were taken using "best" mode, not "preview" mode because preview runs smooth in all cases)

~jr

John, I visited your website and I think I know what the problem might be. If, like you said, only one core is used for previewing the footage then that is the problem, since I have a AMD 64 Dual core 3800+ that might be the issue. Is there anyway I can change this and "force" my pc to use both cores to preview?

Is there anyway I can change this and "force" my pc to use both cores to preview?No. Unfortunately, this has to be done by the software. If the software is not written to be multi-threaded, then the scheduler cannot assign a second thread to the other CPU core. Vegas 6.0 takes advantage of dual core CPU’s. I’m not sure about other NLE’s.

~jr

Darn it! I can't belive it. There's not a freaking way to make it work! Each core has 2.01 GHZ. Do you guys think if I increased it to at 3 GHZ it could solve my problem? Any ideas of how much would that cost? How about RAM? Should I bump it up form 2 gig to 4 gig?

I just built my system the other day and it consists of:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400 Dual Core Processor
4GB Ram
Geforce 7600GT Video Card
2 x 250GB 7200rpm SATA internal hard disks set up as RAID0
1 x 200GB SATA system drive
2 x 19" Widescreen monitors
2 x Pioneer 111D DVD RW drives

and Im using Premier Pro2

I dont do this for a living, just a hobby and im loving it.

Damn..that looks sweet. I wish I knew how to build on my own.

Surprise surprise. I found out that SD footage is jittery too. There's something REALLY wrong with this picture and I don't know why. I have to pin point what it is because I can't afford right now to buy a new graphic card, 3 ghz of dual memory, 2 gig of aditional ram. I just bought a mic and a Brevis35 and that kind of blew my budget a little bit. I HAVE to pin point what's wrong so that I can buy ONLY what I need (even though I wouldn't mind at all doing a massive upgrade).

Oh yes! Finaly! Sweet! I changed the Tranfer mode to "Ultra DMA 6 - Ultra 133" on the device manager. I don't even know if this is the best options that'll make the HD go faster. All I know is that now I can preview HDV real time at maximum quality, baby!!!