Help with Premiere CS5 setup and multi-cam edit window feature.

[Scott McLeod]

Hi all, I have a few questions on optimizing my home computer setup up to use Premier CS5 for basic editing and preserving video clips to Blue Ray and DVD. I've looked through some of the forum's storage guides and have a good idea of where to start, but I want to be sure that I don't overlook anything when it comes to combining different video formats and the bottlenecks they might cause. Here's a brief description of my current and future workflows. The CS5 has just replaced my Premiere 6.5 and Matrox RTx10 card.


My current computer setup is:

Win 7 pro 64bit
i7 920 cpu
P6T Deluxe V2 motherboard
12 gigs Corsair memory
Sync Master 25-inch monitor
ATI 4890 video card (plugged into a 42" HDTV for slow motion playback)
8 bay mid tower case


(B:) Drive: WD640-BLACK (Storage and media cache file)
(C:) Drive: WD640-BLACK (operating system and pagefile.sys)
(D:) Drive: Pioneer BDR-205 blue ray
(E:) Drive: IDE Mobile rack for various older hard drives
(V:) Drive: esata G-RAID 1TB (Video capture)



This week I will be swapping out the (C:) Drive with a Patriot Inferno SSD drive and the video card gets upgraded to a GTX-470. This will hopefully solve my first problem which is windows won’t release the pagefile on the (C:) Drive. Windows will let me install a pagefile on the scratch drive but when I reboot the computer, windows gives me a non descriptive error message about a problem it detected and then Windows 7 combines both pagefiles together. The SSD drive will get a fresh windows install. This leads me to my first questions.


1. Is moving of the pagefile off of the SSD drive still going to be a big benefit in my case?
2. What's my best hard drive configuration with the drives I already have. Am I already using it?



I'm finally getting around to capturing all my old camcorder tapes to the hard drive. The family Hi8 and Digital8 tapes are on the G-RAID now, which leaves me with about two dozen mini DV tapes of drag racing clips to organize and store. All the current tapes are being captured via firewire. My plan is to copy the original family AVI’s to Blue Ray for preservation and then make some simple DVDs to hand out to relatives sometime in the near future when I have a creative moment. The other day while playing with CS5, I captured a mini DV tape in scene detection mode, the next thing I see is 150 separate video files in the project bin. This is a really cool feature, it has saved me a whole bunch of time razoring the timeline. This generates a few more questions.



3. Since I reference all my recorded material by date and time, is there a way to have CS5 read the imbedded date and time stamp when capturing in “scene detection mode” and include the date and time as part of the file names ? It will save me from having to relabel many many video clips.
4. In Premier is there any performance difference when working with hundreds of small video clips in the timeline vs. several large video clips. Most of my drag racing clips are 10 to 20 seconds long.


For 2011 I will be phasing out the mini DV camera and start using several POV cameras using AVCHD and H.264 recording formats, most of the recordings will probably be 720P @ 60fps. I will be using the multi-cam edit window in CS5 to analyze suspension movement with a shuttle jog dial. I would like to output the multi-cam edit window to the HDTV so I can see more detail but I’m not sure if the GTX-470 card can do this via the HDMI cable. My last question for now is:

5. Can CS5 render the multi-cam edit window to a video clip? If so, how would I do it. I would like to record split screen and quad screen clips .


Thanks for any info you can throw my way,

Scott