We edit in Premiere Pro and use Encore for dvd authoring. In addition, we have Cineform aspect HD for hdv editing. We are dioing more HDV editing and our P3 2.8 system isn't cutting it any more.
We need to build a new system that will let us do real time hdv editing, etc.
We'd REALLY appreciate any component reccomendations for building this system.
Bruce S. Yarock
www.yarock.com

1. Chassis: Supermicro CSE-745TQ-R800
2. Mobo: Supermicro X7DAE
3. CPU: 2 x Intel 5345 Quad core
4. Ram: 4 GB or more
5. Video: PNY Quadro FX1500 or higher
6. Raid: Areca ARC-1231-ML, 1 GB cache
7. Boot: WD Raptor 150 GB
8. Storage: Seagate 7200.10
9. DVD: NEC AD-7173 18x

This should get you along fine.

Thanks, Harm. I also want to be able to output to two monitors, one sd and one hd. Will this card work?
Bruce yarock
www.yarock.com

10. 2 Samsung 214T 21" LCD monitors (1600x1200) with DVI.

Yes, the Quadro 1500 has two DVI ports.

Why would you want one SD and one HD monitor? Why not dual 1600x1200 AND a HDTV for color correction using fire wire?

If you want to purchase a system built...

The Dell Precision 690, 490 or 390 work great

The 690 and 490 will work with multiprocessors (2 ea) so you could put in
double quads if you wanted but thats probably overkill.

The 390 (the one I have) is a single processor MB but I have it loaded with
a Quad. Also went with the PNY 3500 video and it drives my dual 20 inch
wide screens fine. For the HD's I went with the dual raided 160GB 10K's and 4gb memory as I plan on using Vista down the road.

With this setup I can run Encore, Premier and Photoshop all at the same time
and the setup isn't even straining at all.

The chassis is very well built and very easy to work in....

All the reccomendations are good....but seem to be to the extreme. I am editing 24F HDV from my H1 on a much more modest system. I built it just a few months ago for under a grand. Here is what I can recall off-hand.

DFI motherboard $150ish
Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 $200ish
2 GB RAM-$200ish
Nvidia 7900 PCIx $150ish
Nvidia 7300 PCIx $50ish
4x250GB Sata Drives $250ish

I recycled my DVD burner and had a spare case so no cost there.

The way it is configured I have the first NVidia (7900) driving my main LCD screen and the component output is connected to an HDTV CRT for overlay of HD to an actual HD screen.

The 2nd Nvidia card drives my 2nd LCD. So I have 2 20" LCDs for my workspace and a 26" CRT HDTV to monitor out to. Using Cineform presets,
this gets me realimte playback of most effects that are cineform. Unfortunately the Premiere effects are so intensive they need rendering. Adobe has such poor coding that is pales in comparison to other apps on the same system. Both Vegas and Edius smoke premiere as far as realtime effects using native effects. Only Cineform helps lift Premire out of the basement here!

Bruce, as a reference I was doing a similiar setup based on a P4 3 ghz. The new system is 10x faster at just about everything I do. Before a 20 second segment in PPRO that had color correction would take 12-15 minutes to build a preview. Now it takes a minute. Cineform stuff is realtime for preview but still incurs this time penalty when you render the final project.

MAke no mistake....HD is still going to be slow compared to DV editing...at least as far as rendering. On my old system is was not workable......10-12 hours to render 1 hour of HD. Now....more like 2-3 hours....maybe. It still is turtle slow compared to DV editing.

I guess it depends on your budget but I think you will get minimal gains by spending a ton more. I overclocked my e6400 from 2.13 GHZ to 3ghz (stable as can be too) and got a 20-30% performance increase. The difference in cost to buy a 3Ghz dual core (weren't even available when I built this) was like 600-700 dollars. For 20% increase in some cases? Wasn't worth it to me. However, if you have 3-4K to build a system then it may be worth it. Remember that all these systems are going to be outdate in a year or 2 anyway...

IMHO.

I am pleased with mine:

http://www.stevengotz.com/pc.htm

Thanks to everyone fo your feedback. After afew days of research this looks like the system we're going to put together. if anyone has any further ideas, reactions or reccomendations, I'd appreciate hearing.
Bruce S. Yarock
www.yarock.com

CPU - Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 Kentsfield 2.66GHz 2 x 4MB L2 Cache LGA 775 Processor
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16819115011 $985

Thermaltake toughpower W0117RU ATX12V / EPS12V 750W Power Supply - Retail (Power supply combo price $1125)


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Motherboard - ASUS P5WDG2-WS PRO Socket T (LGA 775) Intel 975X ATX Server Motherboard
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813131039&ATT=13-131-039&CMP=OTC-pr1c3watch $325

Seagate Barracuda ES ST3320620NS 320GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM (Combo Price: $379.98 for both, scratch drive)


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Memory - Corsair XMS2 1GB x 4 (ASUS approved)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16820145153 $122 per GB = $488


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Video Card - PNY Quadro FX 1500
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814133179 $529 ($514 at ZipZoom)


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Hard Drives (Western Digital Raptor) - You'll need at least 3 drives
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822136033 - $159 ($139 after rebate)
Western Digital Raptor WD740ADFD 74GB 10,000 RPM 16MB Cache Serial ATA150 Hard Drive - OEM

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822136012 - $220 ($189 after rebate)
Western Digital Raptor WD1500ADFD 150GB 10,000 RPM 16MB Cache Serial ATA150 Hard Drive - OEM

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Case - Full tower
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16811133154 - $150

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DVD burner - Sony
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16827131039 - $46

If you got money to blow that seems like a great system. Unlike others in this thread I don't see the need for a lot of this stuff. The Processor is steep but that can be really justified...however Intel is nptorious for raking you over the coals for their top end processors. The hard drives are nice, but I have no problems at all running Cineform on normal raided sata drives. I can't really see the need for this unless you will doing uncompressed video. The Video card is severe overkill unless your doing some 3d modeling.

I'm sure this system will be great....but it just seems that the cost to performance ratio isn't there....IMHO. In the long run this machine would perform about 20-30% faster than mine "when rendering" yet the cost will end up being 200-300% more. Both machines will be out of date in 2 years also.

Again, if you can fork over that much dinero I am sure it is a great machine. I am just in a different position where I need the most bang for the buck. If I have to wait 2 hours instead of an hour and a half to for a render I will....especially since I save thousands of dollars over a system with all the fastest parts. The only one that contributes significantly to speeding up render times is the CPU. The rest...well they might help previews...but I get great realtime with normal SATA drives, 2GB ram and a $150 video card...previewing 1080i 24F to an HDTV. I don't need anything faster for this.



Peace!

Marty,
Thank for the info. I really don't have the money, but was under the assumption that I needed something this fast and powerfull. I forwarded your reply to my friend who has always built our pc's, and is trying to help me come up with this system.
Almost everyone reccomends that nvidia 1500 card...You don't think it's necessary?
Bruce S. yarock
www.yarock.com

I recently bought a Dell Latitude D820 laptop with the Intel T7400 dual-core processor, and it handles HDV much better than my dual-core Pentium "D" 2.8 GHz desktop - which in turn was noticeably better than my Pentium 4 2.8 GHz single-core system. Using Canopus Edius 4.0 I can handle two layers of native HDV with just a few dropped frames or two layers converted to the Canopus HQ format no sweat...or 8 layers of DV with PIP and color correction without pre-rendering. And that's all running off the internal 5400 RPM laptop hard drive; no separate video drive or RAID or any of that. And with the optional "media bay" battery it runs for around 6-7 hours without connecting to an A/C outlet, so it's both the most powerful and most portable computer I've ever owned.

Bottom line: get the latest dual-core or quad-core processors. 'Nuff said.

Marty,
Almost everyone reccomends that nvidia 1500 card...You don't think it's necessary?
Bruce S. yarock
www.yarock.com

What is it recommended for? If you are doing 3d work inside a modeling program then I could see. But for video editing it is overkill. Perhaps some certain effects might be accelerated by it a little, if they are written to take advantage of the GPU on the card. After Effects does do a little openGL acceleration if you are working in 3d mode. It just seems over the top unless specifically anticipate needing it for 3d modeling apps or you know that a specific application or plugin is written to take advatnage of it (magic bullet?).

The processor seems to be awsome. The performance is tops and I guess I could see paying more for that as you will definitely use it. It seems that most of the boost you will get is in rendering however. And that could save some time. I usually render longer sequences overnight....it doesn't matter to me if it takes 4 hours or 6 hours. I am sleeping anyway! Now shorts renders? 4 minutes versus 6 minutes? 8 minutes versus 12? 16 versus 24...etc? You have to start asking yourself if it's worth 600+ dollars to shave off a a few minutes here and there.

I am basing this on using Cineform also, where almost all effects are realtime. I occasionally use non-realtime effects in short segments and find I can wait for 30 seconds here and there for a short preview to build. But generally I don't wait for much until I export. Then it all has to get crunched. And believe me it takes a long time no matter which processor. But try to figure out if you want to spend the big bucks to save a little time. 2 hours instead 2 hours and 45 minutes? These are the types of numbers that you will see not
20 minutes vs. 2 hours and 45 minutes.

It's not like the $1000 processor is 5 times faster than the $200 one. It is faster.....but more like 30-40%.

Whatever you decide to do you really can't lose. Any new system is going to smoke your current one. But think of the "law of diminishing returns". At a certain pricepoint you start to pay a serious premium for only an incremental increase in actual performance.

Peace!

Marty,
Let me take a step backwrds. Our first real hdv editing projects involve three camera shoots. One was an exercise video and the other a night concert.Before we got Cineform, we couldn't do anything. With our current system, evrything is slow, and a lot of time the footage stutters. Trying to cut to specific rythm of a song is impossible because we can't see what we're doing in real time.We have to experiment, render and then see what we did. Obviously, you can't work this way.
We don't do any fancy stuff, just basic PPro and Cineform FX.We don't do any 3d modeling or anything similar. Basiclly multicamera editing with FX.

Harm(or anyone else),
We had an idea regarding the xeon processor you first reccomended. Instead of going with the "Intel core 2 xtreme 6700"($1000)- What if we went with a cheaper xeon chip($500) with a dual cpu motherboard.The idea being that when we wanted to upgrade, we simply add another cpu and memory.

Thanks
Bruce S. Yarock
www.yarock.com

I believe that you should go with the Dual core. However, the bottleneck for a three camera shoot is more likely the hard drive not the CPU.

I had good luck with Cineform and a 3GHz P4 for a long time. The reason I could not do multicam shoots easily was because I needed RAID0 for my video drive.

I believe that you should go with the Dual core. However, the bottleneck for a three camera shoot is more likely the hard drive not the CPU.

I had good luck with Cineform and a 3GHz P4 for a long time. The reason I could not do multicam shoots easily was because I needed RAID0 for my video drive.

I think we all agree that the dual core is the processor to get. But what variety? Even the 2.13GHZ dual core is way faster than his old P4 2.8ghz.
I am sure Bruce will pick the processor that is at the "sweetest" price point. You know, where the amount of cash invested delivers great returns.

To combat the issues of multi cmaera shoots it is always good to place different camera streams on different physical drives. Camera A is on on hard drive and camera B is on another. In this scenario when there are dissolves or fades between the 2 sequences the PC is accessing 2 different locations and therefore does not exceed the bandwidth of any single drive. Raid0 is still a great option but it is still preferable to have simultaneous A/B camera streams on 2 different arrays.

Update and continued problem-
We setteled on a Dell XPS model, but are still having a problem with the multicam function. Our first real hdv project is a 50 minute, 3 camera concert.
The Dell is a duo 2.4 ghz with 4 gigs of ram, a raid 0 comprised of 2 165 gig drives and a 250 gig c drive. The card is an nvidia gforce 7900, and we're using a gateway 1080p monitor.
We loaded PPro, Encore and Cineform and nothing else. Then we transfered the entire concert project to the new Dell. After some rendering, we opened the project, and the edited section plays smooth and flawlessly. But when we opened up the multi cam function (one with only 2 cameras), the playback was not smooth and in real time. It was a lot better than my old Pc, but seemed to be playing slightly in slo mo (although the audio was fine).After spending $2900 on a new PC, (not including monitor), I was pretty bummed out. The obvious problem with the slow multicam function will be trying to cut video to rythmic audio.
We plan to call Adobe today, and then Dell. Maybe we need a more powerfull chip, or a dual chip set up...I don't know. Marty mentioned having different cameras on different drives, but I have no idea if that would solve the problem, or even how to do that.
Has anyone else experienced the same problem? Is anyone doing multi cam succesfully with PPro? If so, what do we need to make this work.
Thanks
Bruce S. yarock
www.yarock.com

How are the drives attached to the computer? I assume that all three drives are SATA drives and each has its own SATA port on the motherboard.

Are they SATA-II drives?

Have you checked if the drives needed defragmenting?

If you wanted to run a test:

1. Defrag all drives, including the c: drive.
2. Run your multi-cam software test.
3. Move the footage for one camera to your c: drive.
4. Defrag the c: drive.
5. Run your multi-cam software test.

You may have problems geting two steams of Cineform HD footage off of one Raid 0 drive setup fast enough to do the multi-cam in real time.

By spliting the footage from one camera to another drive, you may solve your problem. If this works, then you could consider getting another drive for your computer. I recommend the Seagate 500gb or 750gb drives, but they may have come out with some larger ones by now.

Dan,
The drives are all sata ii and are connected correctly. I haven't had a chance to try the defrag thing, but remember that this is a new system, with only one project and no other software on it.
We will try to move one of the camera streams to the c drive in one of the sequences where we have only two cameras, and see if that works.Hopefully someone here has experienced this same problem and has found a solution.
Bruce S. Yarock
www.yarock.com

Dear Bruce,

Yes, I feel that there is low risk that your 2 drive Raid 0 disks are fragmented. And as such, the drive fragmentation should not affect your multicam software performance.

The fragmentation of Drive C: is generally not an issue once your software is loaded and operating. Note that I said generally. In many cases, your software may load files from Drive C: when you are operating the software, and if these files are fragmented, it will affect your performance.

Also, if any of your directories are fragmented, it will affect you overall system performance.

While It may not help (until you move some of your footage to Drive C:), I do suggest that you defragment Drive C:.

It is most likely that you C: drive is fragmented.

It was probably fragmented when you purchased it. And it should have gotten more fragmented when you installed software on it.

In my opinion, Dell does not defragment their systems before they leave the factory. The process of loading software on any drive usually causes it to be fragmented.

It takes less than 2 minutes to analyze a disk to determine if it is fragmented.

With Windows XP (I do not know what to do in Windows Vista):

Start|All Programs|Accessories|System Tools|Disk Defragmenter then click on the drive you wish to defragment, then click on Analyze.

The Disk Defragmenter in Windows XP is not really very good. While it attempts to defrag most files, it leaves many small gaps between the files. These immediately fill up and cause files that you load in the future to be immediately fragmented.

A better defreagmenter for our purposes (editing video) would move all of the files to one end of the disk, leaving (if possible) one continuous open space.

If you look at the results of any Windows XP defrag, you will find files all over the disk, with many gaps in-between.

I wonder if Windows Vista's defragmenter is any better.

There are better disk defragmenters available and they do not cost very much.

For what it's worth, you might try giving the Edius Pro 4 demo a try and see if the multicam performance in that software is better than the Premiere Pro solution.

Try this benchmark program: http://mysite.verizon.net/wgehrke/ppbm/

It will let you know if you measure up against other similar PCs, or if you have an undetected bottleneck.