Hey all, got my fx1 over the weekend and absolutly love the image quality, captured no problem at all but any colour correction/de interlacing/after effects takes a long time on my pc... i know hdv contains much more information than dv but i am hoping to speed up the process... ive tried using cineform aspect and its a great improvement but still rather sluggish

im running

pentium 3.4ghz
2gb of ram
128mb gecube x700 radeon graphics card

would i be best to upgrade?

thanks

Stick

i dont really know all that much about HDV but to help speed up XP, i recommend this.

http://www.computerforum.com/54420-tips-speeding-up-windows-xp.html

it really makes a difference. it may only be a little but its made a big difference to the performance of computer.

AspectHD will run fine with this specs, provided you have 7200rpm drives with plenty of space.

Without some numbers its hard to say if its more "sluggish" than it should be with those specs. Rendering is never speedy, but you should have real-time scrubbing and preview...

with that pc - you should have an advantage on many of us anyway - perhaps you're just expecting a little too much?

Now, honestly...


How good are Aspect HD's cineform files compared to real MT2's?

I see that when I pause a Cineform file, the colour space reverts back to HD and it looks so much better...

Get yourself a big and fast firewire 800 extenal drive, store your footage on this and not on your internal drive.

When you play the file, you are probably seeing it displayed via the graphics card's "overlay" surface. Nvidia cards in particular often have a mismatch in color settings between overlay and non-overlay display. The Cineform website has information on how to get them matching.

...any colour correction/de interlacing/after effects takes a long time on my pc...

Are you talking about editing itself being sluggish, or the render time back out to a finished video file? The latter can be time-consuming even on today's fastest computers depending on what you're doing, because there's a huge number of calculations involved. In the long run it would be best to upgrade to at least a dual-core processor and maybe even a quad-core setup, and make sure other components (e.g. hard drives) are also current.

Whatever performance you got on your computer with DV, expect 1/4 of that or less in HDV (1080i) because there's over 4 times as much data. That's a big performance hit.

First, switch out whatever hard drive you are running and instead, run a pair of Western Digital 10,000 RPM Raptors, and put them in a RAID 0.

Second, switch out your processor and get the new Intel Core 2 Duo 6600 or 6700. (you will need a motherboard upgrade)

Doesn't hurt to upgrade RAM, especially when you are working with file sizes that large, but don't expect much of a performance increase. Video card upgrade won't help either because it's CPU intensive.

Lastly, upgrade your OS to XP Pro 64 bit edition. I've heard of increases of RAM performance which will give you a slight edge.

Doing these things will probably halve your rendering time. CPU increases will give decent improvements to games, but in number crunching scenarios such as rendering, it's almost always the most performance increase you can get.

All in all this will cost 1200-1300. Not the most efficiant increase you can do with your money since you're coming off a P4 3.4, but if you want to increase it, thats what you do.

Jon

It is true that quad cores are coming out this month (in theory, next year in practice), however it will take software copanies a few months AT LEAST to offer patches to utilize it. Factor in 6-9 month drop of prices to become reasonable and you're waiting a full year - not worth it.

First, switch out whatever hard drive you are running and instead, run a pair of Western Digital 10,000 RPM Raptors, and put them in a RAID 0.

Why would that help? HDV has essentially the same datarate as DV.

Thanks for all your help people... i turned off open gl in after effects and its all running much better now

£1200 would be a lot for an upgrade so i'll stick with what ive got for now
thankyou again

Stick

Yes Graham, I would also question some of the logic offered here.
Dual Raptors will not offer any substantial benefits over two standard 7200rpm drives. Only a much, much bigger price tag. As well I have difficulties understanding the recommendation for a big external firewire 800 drive. Sure an external drive is nice to have if one has a need for portability, but doesn't have any advantage over simply adding another internal drive, which will cost a lot less.
Having a separate physical drive(Not simply a partition) for O/S and programs, and one(or preferred a RAID) for video files, and one or more as needed for storage. De-frag often. Second is learn what Stick has already done, learn to tweak the software for better performance.

Yes Graham, I would also question some of the logic offered here.
Dual Raptors will not offer any substantial benefits over two standard 7200rpm drives. Only a much, much bigger price tag. As well I have difficulties understanding the recommendation for a big external firewire 800 drive. Sure an external drive is nice to have if one has a need for portability, but doesn't have any advantage over simply adding another internal drive, which will cost a lot less.
Having a separate physical drive(Not simply a partition) for O/S and programs, and one(or preferred a RAID) for video files, and one or more as needed for storage. De-frag often. Second is learn what Stick has already done, learn to tweak the software for better performance.
I second this advice. Your motherboard may not support a Core Duo either. OS, storage, and render drives are probably the biggest benefit for your configuration. Watch the prices too. New dual cores that would be good for editing are rapidly approaching the $1000 mark.

My understanding is that if you are going to edit in the original "native" m2t file format you need max processing power, but the data rate is about the same as DV.
If you are editing in the Cineform CFHD intermediate format, it is not as processor intensive, but the data rate is about 4X that of DV- so you need bigger and faster drives (DV 1 hr = about 12 Gig, CFHD 1 hr = about 40 Gig.). Internal 7,200 RPM SATA RAID 0 seems to be quite adequate.

I went with a 10K rpm System Drive and twin 250GB SATA 7200 in RAID0 for video. I threw in an extra 250GB SATA for a scratch disk. It is hard to tell just how much faster the system drive is, but I believe I will be happy that I spent the extra few dollars.

pentium 3.4ghz
2gb of ram
128mb gecube x700 radeon graphics card

would i be best to upgrade? Stick

If you can upgrade the MB you can get a great results from a simple upgrade with a new Core Duo CPU. I bought at Fry's a core duo MB+CPU for just $170. It was the entry level E6300 but the results are phenomenal. THe board is using VIA chip set. I picked them intentionally for the price but also because they support DDR so I didn't have to buy new memory (I do have 2G too). So with $170 I gave to my flimsy PC a new lease on life. I do have also a 4P Opteron but it is too hot and noisy.
A second option could be to buy the MainConcept HDV module for Premiere. It is really cool because it has "smart-rendering". What it does is to recognize all these parts were you don't put effects of any sort and it bypass them avoiding unnecessary rendering. It is good for the quality too since these parts will not be recompressed. You then get back HDV material with all the rendered parts. Consider this, if you edit 10% of your movie (cuts don't count) you have an incredible increase in speed vs. conventional methods. THis and the previous mods can give you a huge advantage over your current configuration.
I don't know why nobody talks about this mainconcept module. It is really fantastic.
http://www.mainconcept.com/site/index.php?id=7862

I blew the budget and went with the 6800, the Extreme Edition at 2.93GHz and 4GB of fast RAM. I use Aspect HD because it makes editing much easier than editing native MPEG. And while MainConcept did a good job, Cineform Aspect HD makes it possible to work with HDV in After Effects.

Of course, the fact that everything is blindingly fast just encourages me to do more, which means color correction and too many minor other corrections, which means everything takes forever again. But it all looks better.

I blew the budget and went with the 6800, the Extreme Edition at 2.93GHz and 4GB of fast RAM. I use Aspect HD because it makes editing much easier than editing native MPEG.

WOW!!! That is a SWEEEET HDV editing studio imo!

I was just providing the best system he could reasonably build, not necessarily the best bang for the buck :P I could have recommended a 15k RPM SCSI 320 Raid array but that would require about 5000 bucks.

Steven, make sure your hard drives are good because if not your system will bottleneck on them. Have at minimum a single 7200 RPM drive, 16 meg cache flavor with Native command queieng. If possible run your system partition different than your "Scratch disks".

Again, these are all recommendations to speed up and eliminate bottlenecks, not the absolute best bang for the buck.

I went with the 6400 cpu because according to www.tomshardware.com you can overclock them nicely on the stock fan.

Sorry, video was really my second hobby, computers was my first :(

jon

Jon,

I had some initial problems getting the drives set up properly, but after a little tweaking, I was able to get the best score ever on the Premiere Pro 2.0 benchmark for a single dual-core processor. I only lost to a couple of 2 Dual-core systems.

Having a 10,000 rpm system drive helps a little. Having RAID0 for video helps, and an extra drive for a scratch disk is helpful. I have all three.

The benchmark program points out the bottleneck. Rendering is almost all CPU, and exporting a new AVI is almost all disk drives. I was writing too slow. Unfortunately, I tweaked this and that and I didn't keep track, so I don't know what worked.

If anyone who uses Premiere Pro 1.5 or 2.0 wants to check out how their system compares to others, check this out: http://mysite.verizon.net/wgehrke/ppbm/