Editing HD - What needs to be improved?

[Jordan Berry]

Hello,
I built this computer my self around May last year, here are the specs.

Motherboard: ASUS A8N-SLI 939 NVIDIA nForce4 SLI ATX AMD Motherboard
Processor: AMD Opteron 175 Denmark 2.2GHz Socket 939 Dual Core Processor
Memory: CORSAIR XMS 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200)
Graphics Card: ATI 100-435705 Radeon X1800XT 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Video Card
Hard Drives: 2x Seagate Barracuda 320GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive
Power Supply: ENERMAX Liberty ELT500AWT ATX12V 500W Power Supply

That alone was like $1,800 then. At the time i had checked all the benchmarks and found this to be the best setup for my money.

I've tried playing 1080i 24fps HD and I can't. If i encode with Aspect HD it plays alright.

While rendering I checked my CPU usage and my memory. My memory stayed at 1.5GB/2GB and the each CPU stayed at like 50%-70%. I'm not sure how to check how my graphics card is running.. I'm not sure where the bottleneck is, if someone could locate it and then I could update that part maybe I can avoid doing any serious upgrades.

[Kenny Shem]

sorry to jump onto your wagon, I have not tried editing HDV as my camera is not here yet. Is my current setup good enough to edit HDV smoothly in Vegas 6?

AMD Athlon 64 3000
Kingston 1.5G DDR 400 cl3 rams
Nvidia GeForce 7600GT
IDE HD

Thanks.

[Jiri Fiala]

Kenny, this is almost exactly like my home computer (except I have older GF 6600 card). I am ABLE to edit HDV 720p in Vegas, but not so smoothly. Even one HDV track with color correction will make your playback choppy.

You can either invest into some flavour of Cineform (which is great for any work and rig), or update your system to at least Core Duo CPU. 1,5 GB RAM is sufficient. You will end up buying a whole new system anyway (you cannot upgrade A64 to any dualcore CPU).

Hope this helps.

[Kenny Shem]

I tried to drag 1 clip of 720p movie into vegas and it is choppy when I playback it. I am starting to worry how am I going to edit HDV with multiple track and effects. Seems like its time for a new PC. Am I right to say that CPU is more important than having say 4G of rams?
I do a bit of research of Cineform but I still don't understand what is Cineform. Its a codec right? What it does actually?

Originally Posted by Jiri Fiala

Kenny, this is almost exactly like my home computer (except I have older GF 6600 card). I am ABLE to edit HDV 720p in Vegas, but not so smoothly. Even one HDV track with color correction will make your playback choppy.

You can either invest into some flavour of Cineform (which is great for any work and rig), or update your system to at least Core Duo CPU. 1,5 GB RAM is sufficient. You will end up buying a whole new system anyway (you cannot upgrade A64 to any dualcore CPU).

Hope this helps.

[Jordan Berry]

Haha, well my thread got jacked, at least someone is getting some use out of it.

When it comes to video editing CPU power is going to be more important then ram once you have 2gb. You will need at least 2gb though. When i'm rendering HD it says i'm using 1.5gb, so 2 is just perfect, give you a little head room.

The CPU is really important like i said. You also want to make sure that you're reading from one hard drive and writing to the other, that will make a big difference.

Cineform is simply method of encoding your HD, so that way it runs MUCH smoother without any noticeable quality loss. My computer can't play straight HD, but it plays ASPECT HD encoded HD just fine. (You will want Aspect HD if you're doing HD up to 1400,1080)

Hope that helps, i'm new to this as well, so watch out, i could be wrong ;)

[Kenny Shem]

I guess I'll be getting a quad core pc with 4G of ram soon. Another question, is it good enough to get a GeForce 8800GTS graphic card rather than a Nvidia Quadro FX series card etc?

[Glenn Chan]

Jordan,
If you had to improve your computer it's usually the CPU that bottlenecks you with Vegas. (Though it depends on what type of work you do.) There is a rendertest-HDV.veg test showing benchmarks for various CPUs... right now the Intel CPUs are on top.

If you are working with not-very-compressed HD files, then your hard drives will bottleneck you (e.g. 4:2:2 SonyYUV, or HD image sequences).

The graphics card doesn't really do anything at all for Vegas. Neither does lower latency RAM.

2- As far as why your media doesn't play back in real-time... try matching the project properties to your media clip (one of the icons in the project properties page will do this).

Your HD material also needs to be compressed, otherwise your hard drive(s) cannot play them back fast enough.

3-

I guess I'll be getting a quad core pc with 4G of ram soon. Another question, is it good enough to get a GeForce 8800GTS graphic card rather than a Nvidia Quadro FX series card etc?

Kenny... you will get better responses to your question if you start your own thread since it's different than the original topic.