I finally put together my modest upgrade to my quadcore in the form of a GTX280 card and installed Win7 64 bit. I've got a Intel 9450 cpu and currently only 4 gigs of 800mhz ram. It can run at least 2 tracks of color corrected 1080i HDV, both w/color correction and one scaled down, moving with drop shadow on top of the other, realtme at 100% quality. I put a HDV clip on top of a 4K .r3d file and it played back in realtime but only at quarter resoulution. Considering how 'ancient' my system is, I'm pretty happy with the performance.

Don't know if more RAM will help performance with the Red footage or not and my current mobo only takes up to 8GB. OTOH, I'll be using Red 3K -not 4K- if my acquistion plans come together. Anyway, for all you folks that haven't got an i5 or i7 cpu and 24 gigs of RAM, CS5 still rocks.

Maybe for the now-ancient HDV. But increasingly, high-definition video is being shot in AVC(HD). And AVCHD requires considerably more CPU horsepower than HDV video did. So, the Q9450 will likely get bogged down by AVCHD video unless that video is transcoded into a less-compressed form such as Cineform AVI.

Hi Eric,

Nice to hear how well CS5 is working for you.

Just want to give you a good tip for rendering R3D footage: be sure to check the 'Maximum Render Quality' in AME. MRQ significantly enhances the quality of scaling; however, it will increase the render times quite a bit. I tested this by rendering to DPX and then importing into AE with each clip/frame side by side. You shouldn't even need to go past 100% in the AE viewer to see the difference in quality.

Thanks for the info. Randall, I'm sure what you say is true, though a bit depressing as I was thinking of getting a Lumix camera.

I hope by the time I'm ingesting .r3d I'll be able to upgrade my computer cpu as well. Anyway Steve, thanks for the AME tip.