NLE Speed Expectation on HDV
 

Howdy! I am a newbie, first time posting here at NLE.

I have 4-5 yrs of Pinnacle's Studio experience with DV. There has been no unbearable slowness to DV editing in NLE...at least to me with "current" PC systems.

However, after I got my FX1, I tried cutting HD with Studio10 and Vegas7. Boy, ain't that a crawl!

DV rendering time is 1:1 on both Studio and Vegas. It takes 30-min to render a 30-min cut.

HDV rendering time takes anywhere from 6:1 to 8:1. UNBEARABLE! So, I've been using down-converted DV signals to make DVDs lately. Bad practice!

My PC runs on AthlonX2-5000 with 2GB-RAM. All drives SATA2 XP-Pro. Since this is not a slow computer, I am unwilling to upgrade it before getting definitive answers from you guys.

If I were to upgrade my NLE PC hardware:
- Can Studio11 really take advantage of dual-cores or quad-cores?
- Can Vegas7 take advantage of dual/quad cores?

Even with a really fast PC, do you guys get 1:1 rendering time on HD?

Thanks,
Alex

I use Premiere Pro with Cineform Aspect HD so I don't render much if at all.

Define rendering. You mean HDV to DVD and not during the workflow. I suspect you mean to DVD as that system, depending on your graphics card in Studio, should be pretty good, right? No one gets 1:1 going HDV 1080i to 480i/p DVD as that is reducing the video by 4X and reformatting it completely. I want to see video of those that say they do.

In 1080i, I get snappy speed with working in the timeline, including time warps. The slow stuff is in some old filters and Magic Bullet effects (wholesale color changes). I use Avid Liquid 7.2, which is the core engine for Studio 10/11.

Somehow the figure 1:1 even for DV sounds very suspect. I doubt it.

Vegas 7.0e uses all two, or all four (depending on your CPU) cores when rendering, so quad cores are almost 2x as fast as dual cores, all other things being constant. It's not quite 2x because it doesn't scale perfectly, but it's close.

Definitely get a quad core if you can't bear rendering times. But don't expect any miracles of 1:1. To render out a 5-second .mpg2 1080-60i 8mbps project takes around 2 minutes for some of the fastest quad cores out there with 2gb of DDR2 RAM.

But contrast that to people with powerhouse Pentium 4 machines which might take several hours to render out a project, while the quad core renders the same project in around 30 minutes.

SpeedEDIT gets there much faster than 1:1 rendering HDV down to SD, be it uncompressed SD, speedHQ, DV, or mjpeg. Back in March, I tested a 3 minute clip and it rendered out in 1.5 minutes on a Macbook pro. Rendering out to HD can be a bit slower, around 1:1 to speedHQ ;)