Instead of going with 3 1TB WD disks in Raid5, I would opt for 6 500GB Samsung T166 disks in Raid5. They are a lot cheaper, they run cooler and quieter and give you a significant performance gain over a 3 disk array. For the controller I would look at a hardware based raid controller from Areca, the best there is.

Re: HDV system
 

Noted. I'll probably switch to a cheaper Seagate drive, then.

I'm a Plextor fan, and my current burner (PX-504A) is single-layer only. I have friends who've used Sony burners and are happy with them, so I might just go that route. I'm just always concerned about compatibility of the media I burn, and the choice of burner seems to have a significant role in that, so that's why I was thinking Plextor.

Understood. I'm mainly doing this for a future Vista upgrade, although I've heard/read elsewhere that uneven RAM pairs (i.e. 2+1 chips) can have issues. The 4-chip configuration is a price thing for me, but is there really that much of a difference with 2 2GB chips?


My bad. I'm getting a 512MB Geforce 8800GT of some variety (They sell out so quickly I don't know what brand will be available). I'm getting this mostly for it's improved video playback features, although After Effects 3D layer acceleration is a bonus too.

I have heard many, many bad things about lower-end LaCie drives, but I do use a 500GB LaCie external that has served me well so far. I'm only going with the Caviar GP because it's been highly rated in tests, as well as being very power efficient (the Raptor is, again, very highly rated), but I agree with you that any other WD drive I would be very cautious about buying. Their external drives especially seem to have ridiculously high failure rates.

Also a good point. It seems like from reviews I've read that you need to pay a fair amount extra for a consistently reliable external drive (G-tech, etc.), and based on the case design, cooling seems to be a big factor. I realize I'm taking a risk with the Fantoms, but again, price comes into play, as well as space/power for external drives is at a premium in my workspace.

I thought about that. The reason I'm looking into fewer drives is threefold: power usage, system noise, and price. My case and power supply are geared at reducing noise and cooling efficiency. I'm sure a RAID controller would be much faster, but I don't know if I want to spend $500+ on a controller as well as an additional $200 for the same capacity. Also, I'm using a codec that is supposed to work on non-RAID systems, so I don't need 130MB/s sustained transfer rates as far as I know (about 13MB/s per video channel is what Online JPEG requires, according to the manual). Still, thanks for the recommendations, it looks like it would make a really sweet uncompressed HD system for a low cost, so I'll definitely look into it for the future.

Note: For a better look at why I'm looking at the Caviar GP as a drive, check out exhaustive reviews here and here. I haven't found any RAID-array reviews of the GP so far, but it looks like seek times are the only significant drawback to the drive.

Thanks for all the great input so far, I think I'm getting a better idea of what I'm facing here.

1- DVD burner:
It might be that you're best off using good media.

2- RAM:
You would get slightly more performance by having all your sticks of RAM being the same model instead of some mixed configuration.

I don't think there'd be any reason to go with 2X2GB chips. (Unless you plan on buying an additional 2 sticks of RAM after you upgrade to Vista.)

You might want to check the hardware recommendations on Premiere Pro and After Effects and look at your needs to figure out how much RAM you want.

With WinXP SP2 I think you'll either have 2GB (if you have 2X1gb) or 3GB (with 4X1GB of RAM).

3- On-board RAID controllers:
It looks like the on-board RAID controller for the Intel ICH7R has some issues... not fun. (But the people in that thread do get the problems fixed.)
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/...0006208731/p/1

4- External drives:
In my opinion, the Prolific chipset drives are pretty sketchy. The old firmwares will have delayed write failures... eventually this will corrupt the MBR and you'll need to use data recovery software. Flashing the drive will fix this, but the drive won't play well with other FW devices on the same bus.

A lot of the enclosures out there with USB2 and firewire have this problem. (Lacie uses the Oxford chipset, so it doesn't have this particular problem.)

Of Bytecc enclosures, their website can be misleading... anything with USB2+firewire has the prolific chipset; if the model is firewire-only, it might have the oxford chipset.

Something to watch out for. You might want to buy the same model drive as your RAID array (if you go that route) and buy a separate enclosure... this way, you have a drive you can use to replace any failed drives in the RAID. Of course you'd need to move data off.

Re: HDV system
 

Agreed. I use Taiyo Yuden TG0004 DVD+Rs at the moment. My main concern is faulty laser power calibration on cheaper drives, as well as the durability of the drive itself, as it will likely see a lot of use.

Very good to know. Can you (or anybody) recommend a cheaper motherboard of similar hardware support (onboard wi-fi not nessicary) without onboard RAID, then? I may just take Harm's advice (partially) and get a $300 4-port Areca controller.

edit: Poking around on Newegg, I found a very highly rated and cheaper motherboard (ABIT IP35 Pro), and have looked into an Areaca ARC-1210 controller card for around $329, which looks like the way to go.

Backing up is still an issue, and I think some sort of external RAID enclosure hooked up via eSATA (JBOD, not RAID, though) might be the way to go.

Glenn mentioned Intel on-board RAID issues and the main prob we seem to have, is the ganged ports with the controller.

We are going to go to a separate Areca controller exactly to address that problem. It gets especially critical when you're trying to do multilayers of HD stuff. You need the speed and onboard just can't cut it. Plus, 4 good Seagate SATA II's 500GB's are cheap and plenty fast enough in a RAID 0.

Seagates have a good reputation. An alternative to suggest is the Samsung Spinpoint range, because they run cooler and with less noise and - at least over here - are significantly cheaper. Take into consideration that Dell switched to Samsung completely, so they can't be bad in comparison to Seagates and in tests come out slightly faster as well.

Allright, Now with the comming holidays Im waiting on the prices to drop I know after Jan 1 everything will be a free for all , Is there any updates on this system build?
Thanks Jon,
C

Sorry to have not chimed in here for some time..

A few points..

#1) It was mentioned earlier that Intel is having difficulties with RAID support on their ICH7R chipsets. Any modern motherboard should be in the ICH9R series. Perhaps they mistyped?

#2) I'm sure the Western Digital GP drive will be fine but the energy savings and noise reduction is probably not going to be that noticeable over most other drives. I know the reviews (i've read them) rave about this drives small eco-footprint but if you really start to add this type of usage up over the span of the year, it's kinda crazy to think that this is going to make a difference of any kind. You could probably car pool just one time throughout the year and do 1000X more for the environment than the minute amount of electrical power difference between the 1Tb WD GP drive and any other comparable. I really believe this is simply just a marketing maneuver by WD to position themselves as an ECO friendly company to the masses and jump on this gravy train first. This is of course an opinion, I'm not against conserving energy by any stretch, but I think we're taking this maybe a bit too far.

#3) 4Gb for preparing for Vista one day is going to leave you disapoitned because Vista doesn't support more than the same amount of memory XP does. They are both 32-bit operating systems, and the limitation of accessing memory is built upon the same premise in both operating systems. XP 64-bit and Vista 64-bit, of course, do not have this limitation. I would love for Vista 64-bit support to start taking a stronger foothold in the computing industry. I'm currently stearing FAR clear from Vista, but I think Vista 64-bit if developed correctly, could be very promising.

Andrew's spec's are pretty much about what a good HDV system is all about today. I was thinking of starting a new thread with a December version of a good Mid to High End Turnkey Editing system but I think anybody who can read this forumn over time has been given enough information to make an informed decision. They've certainly found a good place to ask questions!

Jon

That would be me... I was interested in how the low-cost on-board RAID solutions fare (and I didn't research very thoroughly/hard/thoughtfully). ICH9R would be more relevant, yes. If that is rock solid then it might be worth going for... but if the RAID has issues, then you can be worse off than no RAID.
e.g. Any data corruption is essentially no RAID (and some of the other low-cost built-in RAID solutions might be doing that), and not being able to rebuild a RAID5 volume defeats the purpose of RAID5.

Jon, I would hardly consider workstation level boards like the Intel D975XBX2 not "a modern motherboard"! And it is definitely ICH7R, using the 975X Express Chipset. Where do you get your info?

Though not bleeding edge, boards based on that chipset are very stable, very fast, and still very much "modern". You can pay a premium for 45nm tech, but your cost/benefit may not be as much as you think...yet. Soon maybe, but not yet.

As to the Intel "RAID issues", some of ours were resolved when we discovered Seagate had throttled our Barracuda's (Gen 2) with a jumper...yank that off and some of our thruput probs blew away.

My two bits.

Well, I suppose we could argue back and forth whether a board that has been out in the marketplace for over two years now is really "modern". I'm not really concerned with how new something is, but I suppose if there are issues with the RAID controller on that motherboard, or any 975X motherboard that uses ICH7R, then that would contradict your point of them being stable and reliable.

I'm certainly not advocating to jump on something like X48 because it's "modern". I'm merely advocating that somebody purchase a board with a chipset that is maybe a little more current like the P35.

Jon

The cost/benefit target area is surely a moving target. If the funds are available, someone is always wise to shoot for the nex gen of chipsets these days.

But that Intel board I mentioned has been out only slightly over 1 yr, as I believe it was only announced last October...hardly "old tech". It is an entry level workstation/server board with a proven track record and certainly viable for a good time down the road.

I've been a "bleeding edger" for over 20 yrs, so I guess I'm getting a little more skeptical in my old age. Stability in video editing is pretty important and the referred to prob's with the Intel RAID's seem to be mostly taken care of. Intel has a good record for stability, and though we also have several other boards, the Intels have been like rocks...(not boat anchors... :) .

Having said all that, if we had the $$, we'd probably jump to the 5400 (or even 7000 series, ha!)...and really fly high! For an editor/film hyphenate, there is never enough power to satisfy, and things can never happen as fast as the thoughts/ideas appear in our brains.

Now if we could just hook them up directly to a screen...

Cluster Size?
 

Okay, so I have my new box up and running, with a 150GB Raptor 10,000 RPM system disk, and a Hitachi 1TB for data... before I format that hog, the question is:

What is the optimum cluster size for this kind of work? Maximum size?

I'd go with the default cluster size for that NTFS partition.

I second that. If you start using a raid, it may be worthwhile for video editing to use a stripe size of 128K, but otherwise use the defaults.

Harm, why would that be beneficial? You have any useful info on that?

This is an informative page: http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/...fStripe-c.html

But it is a matter of testing it for yourself. The problem is of course the time it takes. Can you imagine the formatting of an 8 disk array and getting typical files on the array, running some benchmarks and starting again with a different stripe size?

I found on a 6 disk array that 128 was slightly better than 64, but YMMV.

back for more....
 

Hey guys....

Ok after my precious post many moons ago, i'm finally getting to build my new editing system. As I haven't decided what HD camera system to upgrade to yet (and probably won't til late 08) I wanted to make a system that is HD ready for when the time comes...

building upon this thread and my previously posted system; this is what i'm thinking....

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Kentsfield 2.4GHz LGA 775 Processor
ASUS P5K DELUXE/WIFI-AP LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX Intel Motherboard
Microsoft Windows XP Professional With SP2C
2x Crucial Ballistix 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500) - (i know XP will only see 3GB)
XFX PVT71JYPF4 GeForce 7950GT 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 SLI Supported Video Card
2x Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD2500KS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - 1 as system drive and 1 as scratch
2 x Seagate Barracuda ES.2 ST31000340NS 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive (not in an array as i'm still in SD)
Pioneer 18X DVD±R DVD Burner Black SATA Model DVR-212DBK
2x SAMSUNG 226BW Black 22" 2 ms (GTG) DVI Widescreen LCD Monitor
Creative SB X-Fi Xtreme Audio 70SB104000000 7.1 Channels PCI Express
Koutech 3+1 Port FireWire/1394b & 1394a PCI Host Controller Model 1314
Thermaltake W0093RU ATX 12V 2.0 Version 500W Power Supply
Antec Nine Hundred Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case
Set of BX5a's for speakers

Soup to nuts about $3100ish

Just for further fodder....i am currently running Premiere Pro 2.0.....I am thinking about upgrading to CS3 in the future. I am currently an XL-1s user and I am torn upgrading to XL-H1 or switching over to the JVC GY-HD200. So i do realize that a blackmagic card and cineform are probably in my future as well, but as i'm not upgrading camera gear just yet, I'll hold off on these items until i can get some good deals on a certain auction site...

besides the standard keyboard and mouse....is there anything that i'm missing?
~Mike

Looks good to me, Mike. Do you already have a good CRT monitor for color correction?

It's not so much about conserving energy in that sense, it's more about trying to reduce heat and system noise. Granted, much of the system noise comes from power fans, but I'd rather scale back on the power requirements where I can and use a smaller, cheaper power supply (that's still rock solid and efficient).

I couldn't use any version of Vista currently, just because my audio card wouldn't support it. I too would love 64-bit Vista, though.

I'm about to start placing orders, and I'd like to thank everybody for their help. I'll let you know when I start getting stuff in how the setup goes. This is looking like it will be my general-purpose machine as well as work, so I may do some dual-booting to keep my personal crud seperate (either XP and Vista if I can work around the audio driver limitation, or XP and Ubuntu Linux, which I'm using quite nicely on my current system).

System Build - 1st round
 

Okay, system is here, and I've spent about the last week setting it up. I ordered the wrong upgrade for Adobe CS3 Production Premium, so that hasn't been fully set up, but everything else has. Some notes:

-It might be obvious, but the (3xWestern Digital Caviar GP 1TB) RAID-5 I have set up cannot handle uncompressed HD without dropping frames unless it's at the very beginning of the drive. My HDTune benchmark is attached, to give you a rough idea of the array's performance.

- The Antec P180 case has a lot of very nice features, but it's really cramped with all the stuff I've been putting in. Combined with the power supply I'm using (Seasonic S12 650W), which has thick, wrapped cables, the system was a challenge to set up.

- Windows XP may be a better choice for a lot of hardware/software reasons, but AHCI support (which lets you use all the nifty features of full SATA) isn't one of them. You need to either use a floppy disk to load the drivers at installation time, or slipstream XP with the drivers installed. I recommend using the LAN, Mass Storage, and Chipset driver packs from http://www.driverpacks.net/DriverPac...p/DriverPacks/ (which will help you with most of the slipstreaming once you copy your xp cd into a directory on your hard drive) then finishing up with Nlite http://www.nliteos.com/download.html to make the slipstreamed data into a bootable ISO image.

-I think I'm pretty much using the maximum amount of equiptment for the power supply/motherboard combo. The system ran a lot better after disabling one of the two (!) Gigabit LAN ports, as well as removing the old IDE drive I was planning to use for standard DV footage (with it installed, the computer wouldn't see it, and would occasionally lock on boot).

-The Intensity Pro is a great card, but you need to install the software and driver *after* you install Premiere Pro, or the option to use it will not show up. Also, the driver install dialog for the audio outputs of the card popped up after the installer asked me to reboot, so I missed it the first time around, then wondered why there was a device not recognized in the Windows device manager.

-You can keep the onboard audio enabled at the same time as the M-Audio 1010LT *and* the Intensity's audio, but only if you keep it as the Windows system-wide audio and set the other sources in individual programs. Setting the system-wide audio to the other two results in the audio system crashing with a pop-up window that won't go away unless you restart.

-The Mackie HR824s are perfect studio speakers, but their frequency response is *flat*. If you are used to most other speakers that overemphasize the lower and higher frequencys, be prepared to adjust. One downside of the M-Audio 1010LT is that it has no balanced outputs. There are XLR ins, and digital connectors both ways, but all analog outs are unbalanced RCA. I'm currently running Monster Cable THX 400 cables to the Mackies, and it works very well, but it's something to note.

-I ended up getting the EVGA Geforce 8800GT. It's a fabulous card because of relatively low power usage for great performance, but be aware of two things: In this case/motherboard combo, it's a *very* tight fit. It's probably best to install all your hard drives and cables, and then put the card in, although the power cable running to the end of it was still very tight against the SATA cable from my system drive. It's also a really good gaming card, so be careful not to get sucked in to playing the Crysis demo when you should be working :).

I'll post more once I get the replacement CS3 Production Premium Suite in and installed.

Okay, Adobe software set up, and some further notes:

- ***Very important*** My RAID array as configured is not appropriate for capturing *or* playing back HD video. As near as I can figure it, the time to spin up when the drive switches from one to the other is what causes the issues, but even using the Online JPEG codec, captures would freeze up and drop frames. Now, I've reconfigured the RAID array to JBOD, which works fine for *playing back* Online JPEG files (plus I now have another 936 gigs to work with, which it turns out I may need. See below for why.), but I have to capture to my system drive first, and then copy the file over. As a side note, I don't regret getting the Areca card, because having a dedicated controller card for the video drives keeps them running smoothly and without a lot of CPU usage.

- To use the video preview out of the Blackmagic Intensity Pro, you have to set the project up to use one of their codecs, either one of their uncompressed codecs, or Online JPEG. Thankfully, all of the codecs work in other programs (After Effects, Virtualdub, etc).

- If you shoot in HDV, Online JPEG adds another compression level that is noticeable. I'm locked into using it because of storage constraints (it's the only codec on my system that will work at 1080i HD, which is what I need to design titles/animations/etc and edit at for the final output. Cineform's built-in HDV codec seems to provide better quality, but it captures HDV at HDV resolution [1440 x 1080 vs. 1920 x 1080]). I could drop it in an uncompressed HD project, but I'd have to pre-render the whole thing just to watch the footage playback smoothly, plus I cannot use the video output of the Intensity when editing in it natively (I could get the more expensive HD codec from Cineform, which would support 1080i HD, but I still couldn't watch/preview anything on my video monitor without re-rendering). At the moment, I'm going to do my editing work in Online JPEG, but all animations will be uncompressed HD. When I want to render out the project at the end, I'll open up an uncompressed HD project, import the Online JPEG project, and render from there, as that will mean all titles, animation, and effects will render uncompressed. This is where the extra terabyte of storage comes in handy.

- In order to smooth over the double nasty compression from going from HDV to Online JPEG, I'm using Magic Bullet Looks to do some very mild lens effects (as well as color/gamma/brightness/contrast correction), and some judicious use of added grain in some scenes. In previous versions of Magic Bullet, grain quite frankly never worked for me. In this version, there's enough options to get the grain to look just right. Yes, the render times are a pain, but the quality difference is amazing, and will quite frankly save the documentary I'm editing.

- The real pain in the ass, however, is making a DVD out of all of this. While I can now render to DVD straight out of Premiere into Encore, neither Premiere Pro nor Encore can successfully downconvert from the original project (or even a rendered file) without introducing interlacing artifacts. The artifacts don't go away by swapping field order or even switching to progressive scan in the Adobe Media Encoder (don't even get me started on the native deinterlacing in Premiere Pro. Suffice to say, you would have to turn it on for every clip before rendering, and it *still* might not solve the problem. Personally, I think it's too much of a hassle to try). The only way to get rid of the interlacing artifacts appears to be rendering out the project to Blackmagic's uncompressed HD codec (note: Trying to output to the standard Windows uncompressed codec caused Premiere Pro to lock up *hard*, and upon reboot, my system was sllllooooow. I had to defragment my system drive before it would work well again), then importing the file into After Effects, creating a DV resolution composition of the same length as the file, dragging the file into the composition, then doing a "fit to comp" on the file and rendering it out to uncompressed SD (depending on how sharp your source image is, you may need to add a sharpen effect, too). According to the website I found the above trick out from, you can do the same thing with a Premiere Pro project file so long as you don't get too fancy with effects or odd transitions. Either way, you can then import the SD uncompressed file into Encore, interpret the footage to D1/DV NTSC Widescreen aspect ratio, and you're good to go. I would use Lagarith as an intermediary codec for all of this, but it seems to crash Premiere Pro when I use it, so instead I'm just glad I have the extra storage.

- One final note: My on-board audio has sync issues with some of the footage in Premiere Pro. The isusses are not present in the actual source footage, and switching to either the audio outs from the Intensity Pro or the M-Audio 1010LT solves the problem, as they are both have low latency ASIO-compliant drivers.

With that, I think I've (mostly) got a handle on this system, although I should say this is the last time I set a system up like this. Next time, I'm saving up some money and getting at least a pre-built computer, if not a turnkey system. Still, I've learned a lot, and if I learn anything more, I'll be sure to put it up on DVinfo.net. Thanks for all the help and advice!

P.S.: Please excuse my occasional run-on sentences and other grammar issues, as i'm writing this at 2 in the morning. :)

Great thread Jon!
One quick question... What is ideal motherboard to go with Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600?

Jon, many motherboards now tout "SLI ready" or "Crossfire ready." As I understand it, these technologies allow adding a second video card to speed up the frame rate on games. But from your comment, I gather that SLI or Crossfire offer no benefit to someone doing NLE editing on Vegas, even with two monitors. In other words, when people report dropped frames, the bottleneck is somewhere other than in the video card. Is my understanding correct? Thanks for your informative thread.

newbee post
 

hi,

I am Patrick, and I AM A BIG NOOBSTER.

Now that thats out of the way, would liek to ask you all some things. I got a system up which I intend for mostly afterFX 7 & 3d studio max 9, but I ain't even close to semi-pro. I do find though the fact that when I go make something more "require-y", I feel that my PC ain't that finely tuned, no matter the not-so-bad hardware in it.

A regular clean OS install is definitely required just to keep things tidy, and that time is approaching, will look into it.

Seeing my config, I do believe I need a stronger graphic card, and of course anticipating the Tb HDDs price to fall a teeny bit more, and off I go.

I have been reading abt GF8800GTS wz g92 chipset, so since I cannot afford, or most possibly even take full advantage of a QuadroFX, I do find myself wondering if I should upgrade to a card like this. I have been looking into a card, namely, SPARKLE 8800gts Calibre, which is a tweaked card. I came to understand that accelleration aint the answer to bottlenecking, but I still wonder if this would affect me positively regarding the fact that my graphic card has less memory and less of a chip.

On the other hand, the Tb drive will be used both on the pc and over the Gbit-network for the editing material, as editing is done on a Mac. Tb wrestling matches are taking place out there, and I am very NOT sure on which Tb drive to go for. I have been reading good & bad reviews on SEAGATEs & HITACHIs, and WD falling badly behind on this rat race. I will not stripe the drive eventually, but will probably buy a brother for RAID1...just to be sure.

yeah, I know this is all amateur, but would appreciate some suggestions,


Cheers to all,

Patrick

Asus P5K-Deluxe | Intel Core2 Quad Q6600 2.40Ghz | Asus 8600GTS | OCZ Reaper DDR2 1Gb x4 800Mhz |WD Sata2 250Gb x2 | WD eSata 500 GB x2 Corsair HX620W

I am thrilled at all the answers i got, LOL.

In any case, if anyone finally reads my post, I am into this pickle :

In the world of graphic cards, I presume that the zen spot is quadro fx, for people of course who can harness that raw power, but for me, the mid to low, non pro, keyboard jammer wanna-be, by reading in this forum i came to understand that a good gaming card can do the trick.

Now, I have been looking into them extensively, and I still find myself unable to decide.

The new GF9800x2 series looked appealing & delicious, but by reading here & there, including Toms Hardware, it comes not to be a good investment in regard to the price per performance ratio.

So my list has narrowed down (again) to this short one :

ASUS Geforce 8800 GTX 768mb

or

Sparkle 8800GTS 512MB Calibre
(a tweaked card with higher frequencies than the asus one above)

If any one has any idea or proposition, I would rather appreciate a comment and/or suggestion!

Cheers,

Patrick

Motherboard Advice
 

Can anyone tell me the difference betweent the board in DIY06 and the ASUS P5E3 as far as features and pros and cons. Looking for the most bang for the buck.

I'm using Liquid 7, and want to have a system that will be the best bang for the buck, but also some degree of longevity that will allow me future upgrades to the newer technology, i.e. 45n