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November 18th, 2008, 12:26 PM | #1 |
Tourist
Join Date: May 2008
Location: Lowestoft, Suffolk, UK
Posts: 4
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Time to upgrade?
I would say this year I have had an average job of 1 event to film, edit & produce to DVD per month. I use SD video, usually 3 cameras, sometimes 4x
I use Adobe Photoshop CS3, Premiere CS3, After Effects CS3, Encore CS3 for most editing. My machine: AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5600+ 2.80GHz 2Gb Memory Nvidia Geforce 8800GTS 320Mb Western Digital Raptor 74GB SATA 250GB Internal SATA 500GB External USB2 Is it worth upgrading this? If so what sorts of things should I be looking at? I was thinking it would probably be worth using the 500gb as backup or portable storage and possibly making a raid array for quick HD access? Are quad cores the standard these days? Do I need at least 1Gb memory per core? Please make any suggestions / offer advice. Thanks very much. Tom |
November 18th, 2008, 02:27 PM | #2 |
Inner Circle
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Atlanta/USA
Posts: 2,515
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As we say here on the other side of the pond: if it ain't broken, don't fix it! If the present setup works fine, why would you want to spend money?
The only thing I would upgrade is the external hard drive - replace it with a RAID 1 at least, so your data is never lost. |
November 18th, 2008, 05:35 PM | #3 |
Tourist
Join Date: May 2008
Location: Lowestoft, Suffolk, UK
Posts: 4
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I suppose it works yes. I generally dont have to sit and edit the camera angles... my friend does that.
Im sure it would speed things up with Encore / After Effects =P but is an unnecessary spend. I'm very impulsive at times which is probably why I came on here asking "what pootah bits should I get"... well that's a little insight about me, how about you? ASL? jk lol |
November 18th, 2008, 05:55 PM | #4 |
Trustee
Join Date: Jan 2008
Location: North Conway, NH
Posts: 1,745
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If it works fast enough for you then there's probably no reason to upgrade. You might want to add a big internal drive rather than adding an external RAID. It would be quite a bit less dear and you could move it to another machine when the time comes to replace your system.
If you're a stickler for either speed or data protection then RAID 0 or RAID 1 (respectively) would be good options. There are a couple of precautions you can take to get a bit more protection: 1. Keep your projects and media files on different disks-if you lose the media drive, you can re-capture 2. Make periodic backup copies of your project files to another disk-if you lose the project drive, you have a backup 3. Make a copy of project, media and other components to your USB drive at the end of each day. Each of these is really more backup than data resiliency . There are real and significant differences between the two that I won't bore you with here... unless you need a good kip. |
November 18th, 2008, 06:44 PM | #5 |
Major Player
Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: Estes Park, CO USA
Posts: 426
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Since you're editing SD, a CPU upgrade won't significantly improve anything other than your rendering times. A new-ish desktop Intel quad-core would likely cut your rendering times in half. If this is something of importance to you, consider it. If you were editing HDV or esp. AVCHD, a CPU upgrade would be worth the $ with improved previews and processing speed.
Another upgrade to consider is moving up to XP or Vista 64-bit OS. This won't speed up either previews or renders, but allows you to address more RAM (which you'd have to purchase, as well), and multi-task amongst your apps much more robustly. The caveat with a 64-bit upgrade is to be certain that all of your hardware, peripherals, and software have drivers and patches to work with the new OS. I ran the CS3 on Vista 64 with 8GB of RAM for over a year and had no significant issues... but YMMV. Lastly, you could upgrade your software to CS4 and improve quite a few day-to-day aspects of editing and workflow. I highlighted a bunch of new features that I find useful to my particular workflow in this post: http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/attend-wo...bout-time.html Cheers, Brian Brown BrownCow Productions |
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