My computer okay to edit HDV?

[Mathieu Ghekiere]

Hi,

someone asked me to shoot a play with his Z1.
I only have an Canon XL1s, and did do some shootings with Sony PD170 in the past, but I have no experience with editing HDV - I have to edit the play too.

Now, the specifications of my computer are, as far as I can tell - because I'm not a computer expert - using a program to get this information:

Intel Pentium 4 640, 3200 Mhz (16 x 200)
Asus P5GDC Deluxe
1024 mb RAM (DDR2 - 533 DDR2 SD RAM)
NVIDIA Geforce 6200 (128 mb)

Running Premiere pro 2.0

Am I okay to edit HDV?

Thanks in advance!

[Harm Millaard]

Your PC meets minimum requirements for Premiere Pro 2.0. It will not be fast, but with enough patience it should do the job. Expect significant render times.

[Mathieu Ghekiere]

Originally Posted by Harm Millaard

Your PC meets minimum requirements for Premiere Pro 2.0. It will not be fast, but with enough patience it should do the job. Expect significant render times.

Thanks for the fast answer!
(and to the moderators to move this thread to a better place)

[Ervin Farkas]

Yes, your computer should be fine even for editing native HDV - Cineform would further speed up things. I just started using a similar PC (P4 @ 3GHz w/hyper threading, 1GB RAM, 64MB video card). It plays m2t without any jitters inside Premiere Pro 2.0, rendering is fast enough for my needs. The easiest thing you can do to speed it up: use another two drives in addition to your OS drive, internal or external/USB/firewire. Put your source files on one drive and your project files on another one.

One caveat though: try breaking up your project in smaller pieces (15-30 minutes). PremPro is prone to crashing with long projects.

[Mathieu Ghekiere]

Originally Posted by Ervin Farkas

Yes, your computer should be fine even for editing native HDV - Cineform would further speed up things. I just started using a similar PC (P4 @ 3GHz w/hyper threading, 1GB RAM, 64MB video card). It plays m2t without any jitters inside Premiere Pro 2.0, rendering is fast enough for my needs. The easiest thing you can do to speed it up: use another two drives in addition to your OS drive, internal or external/USB/firewire. Put your source files on one drive and your project files on another one.

One caveat though: try breaking up your project in smaller pieces (15-30 minutes). PremPro is prone to crashing with long projects.

Thanks Evin, nice to read about your experience.
I'm not gonna put extra drives in it, although I do have an external HDD which I could use. This is only for one project, so.
Thanks for the tips about breaking it into shorter sequences, although I must say I once edited a project in Premiere Pro 1.5 with about 10 hours of rushes and the final product was 70 minutes long. I didn't have any problem, BUT it was normal SD Minidv though.

Best regards,

[Ervin Farkas]

Actually I don't have any additional internal drives either (no space in the box to mount any more drives), and using two drives in addition to the OS drive is what I'll do next - on this first project I use a USB drive for the source clips and the existing OS drive for the project itself, including the preview files. It works like a charm.

At first I was also discouraged by what I read here on this forum about editing HDV. Most people use the latest and greatest and that's understandable if you do that for a living, speed is essential. But if you have the time to wait for the renders, you can work just fine with your older PC. I edited my first HDV project on a 1.6 GHz AMD!

I have not experienced any crashes myself, it's just something I read others had to put up with.

[Jon Jaschob]

I used a system like yours for almost a year, but with Aspect HD and 2 gig of ram, it worked but was slow to render FX.
Jon

[Mathieu Ghekiere]

Another question, very related:
I'll shoot this weekend but I shot a tape for a few minutes and captured it in Premiere 2.0 to see how it worked.

I shot with the Sony Z1 in HDV 1080i, in PAL format.
My project settings in Premiere were HDV 1080 25p Sony 50i (something like that)

I captured my footage. Experience:
in Premiere it looked okay, but movement wasn't exactly smooth, sometimes the video juttered a bit.
When I looked at my raw mpeg file on the computer in windows media player, it looked pretty bad, with VERY big interlaced lines, but really, VERY big interlaced lines, and at the minimum of movement you could see them, really didn't look okay.

So my questions:
1. the bit juttered video in Premiere Pro, is it a problem or is it just that the preview files don't go as smooth as regular dv as it's big heavier for the computer?

2. the bad video in windows media player: should I be concerned about this, or is it normal?

My intended workflow is: capture in HDV, edit in HDV, make a dvd copy, but also write a HDV copy back to tape. Okay?
suggestions?

Thanks everyone for all the advice!

ps: not planning to use many fx, just normal basic editing footage.

[Harm Millaard]

Mathieu,

When I did my first HDV project I noticed the same thing, heavy interlacing and I got worried, but the end result, according to your intended work flow did not show any artefacting due to interlacing. The DVD was OK. To be on the safe side you could first use a DVD-RW to inspect the end result.

[Ervin Farkas]

Try using Media Player Classic, a very light but powerful little player (freeware) for playing HDV on computer instead of the clunky Windows Player. Spending a few euros on another gig or RAM would definitely improve on your workflow.

[Mathieu Ghekiere]

Thanks again. I really appreciate it.