Hi all!

I'm a newbie and a regular lurker and now I need some help. I have an old athlon xp 2500 with 512 meg ram and I'm not able to edit HDV with it (even with cineform). I want to put off the purchase of a new cpu for as long as possible (I really wanna wait for the 4ghz+ dual to be affordable. Meanwhile I can concentrate my $ on getting better lighting and gear like lenses etc.) so I'm wondering if the following is possible:

- convert hdv footage in-camera (sony hdr-fx1) to DV
- batch capture DV footage and edit that
- (later in the year) buy a new cpu
- batch recapture the same footage but this time in HDV
- no need to re-edit the movie, just re-capture it
- make final color correction and effects in hdv

is that possible at all? The reason I'm asking is that most people I've talked to use hd link to batch capture and I'm affraid it will screw the re-capture step. I tried to batch capture hdv within ppro and it failed even more than with hdlink. With a new top of the line cpu would I be able to re-capture within ppro without cineform? Or will I be able to re-capture with cineform within ppro (no hd link) so the recapture process is compatible?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

PS.: I know the sys requirement claim a 3.2 ghz is engouh to edit hdv correctly but I'm wondering what the "real" requirements are. With a 4200 athlon x2 (similar to this one: http://www.futureshop.ca/catalog/proddetail.asp?logon=&langid=EN&sku_id=0665000FS10070681&catid= with 1 gig ram added) will I be able to edit smoothly as if it was DV? Or will I absolutely need a better video card and Raid 0? Again, thanks for the help...

Sorry, I don't know the answer to your question. It sounds like a good scheme, but one that could potentially come unstuck.....

Just my 2 cents here - I started my HDV phase with an AthlonXP2500 that I overclocked a little. With that overclocking, it was enough to support capture with HDLink (though not with Premiere itself). I then batch-converted all the HDV to DV proxies, edited with that, and linked back to the HDV for final render.

I just checked on EBay and an XP3000+ 333FSB sells for as little as $80, and you could resell your XP2500+ for about $50. So as a possible interim measure, a XP3000+, perhaps with mild overclocking, should capture reliably, and might only set you back $30ish in net cost.

Just a thought.

Oops - I forgot your p.s.

If you are using AspectHD, even a 3.2GHz is enough for editing to be like DV on the timeline - although final render times are considerably longer. A 4200 X2 flies - thats what I have now.

Can't comment on native HDV editing as I don't bother.

Raid0 is mainly useful when your editing involves multiple streams. A non-RAID 7200rpm drive worked fine for me for simple single-stream editing.

Regarding videocards, worked fine for me with a $50 dualhead Nvidia 5200. However, if you can afford $100 for a 6600 then you can make use of NVidia's Purevideo decoder - this takes most of the effort to decoding the HDV stream off the CPU and uses the graphic card hardware instead. On my 4200 X2, it drops the processor load for HDV playback from 65% to 15%.

i tried out editing on a AMD 4200 dual core ( so so graphic's card) several times (vegas6) .. sometimes it plays back at 29.97 and other times it's 6-7 fps BUT the audio is clean at any speed so at least you can decide what you want to keep or delete ( documentary) ... for me it just doesn't handle native m2t editing .. so i convert to cineform and no problem playing back/editing

i tried out editing on a AMD 4200 dual core ( so so graphic's card) several times (vegas6) .. sometimes it plays back at 29.97 and other times it's 6-7 fps BUT the audio is clean at any speed so at least you can decide what you want to keep or delete ( documentary) ... for me it just doesn't handle native m2t editing .. so i convert to cineform and no problem playing back/editing

It is probably the video card. I seem to have pretty good results direct HDV editing in Premiere Pro 2.0, using an X700 256 mgb PCI Express card. I don"t know for sure, but I have heard PPro uses the video card extensively for renders-- but I don't know. It all plays fine too in the outputted .m2t files-- media player. I am using a bargain combo board/cpu bought at FRYs -- 3800+ dual core.

Well forget my Q guys. I ran out and bought a intel pentium dual core 805 and an additional gig of ram.

Should do the trick :)