Computer for editing HD footage?

[Tony Coleman]

Well my 1 Gig 4 year old cpu doesn't look like it's gonna cut it when it comes to editing in HD, so I was wondering what some of you have found successful. Mac or PC? Specs if possible. Also what editing programs are working well. I've been using Vegas 5. What works for you? Thanks, Tony

[Danny Aldaca]

I built my own PC, I have 4 gig of memory, Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700, Nvidia 8800 768MB, EVGA NVIDIA nForce 680i SLi, Adobe Production Studio Premium, and Raid 0 1TB hard drive for video storage and it really runs smooth in editing HD. I recomend having Raid 0 drive for editing HD it makes your computer runs faster to access your video files no matter what editing programs you use. Some people like me like to build their own PC but in the long run you might come out with the same spec. and price buying manufactured PC and better warrantee so it is your chioce.

[Maksim Yankovskiy]

My 3.5 years old laptop with 3GHz CPU and 1G of ram works ok for HDV editing. It's the final encoding when downconverting for DVD authoring that kills it. For the time being, I get around the problem by running rendering overnight and early morning before I go to work. This way I edit in the evening and don't notice much of a slowdown in my workflow. The computer works N-times longer, though.

As far as software, I am pretty much an all-Adobe shop. I edit in Premier Pro 2 and After Effects 7, and author DVDs in Encore 2. What I like about Adobe products is their integrated workflow, among other things.

Originally Posted by Tony Coleman

Well my 1 Gig 4 year old cpu doesn't look like it's gonna cut it when it comes to editing in HD, so I was wondering what some of you have found successful. Mac or PC? Specs if possible. Also what editing programs are working well. I've been using Vegas 5. What works for you? Thanks, Tony

[Jerrod Cordell]

Well I haven't edited HDV yet (I should be getting my XH-A1 somewhere between tomorrow and Monday, XDXDXD) but I would personally go with a Mac. I have an Intel Core2 Duo iMac with 2 GB of RAM and a 250 GB hard drive, and it's worked fine for me. I'm still trying to figure out Final Cut Pro, but it's pretty easy. Hell, even iMovie can edit HDV. Not 24p, but it can edit HDV if you want simple cuts and transitions. But for more professional editing software I'd suggest Final Cut Pro. Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 is also coming out in July (and it'll finally be for Mac) and the Preview seems to work great, even though I have a lot of dropped frame issues with Adobe, but I'm sure it's an easy fix, I just gotta find it.

[Art Willig]

if this is a desktop, all you have to really do is plug in a faster processor and more ram

[Alastair Brown]

I'm another home built Quad Core/4Gb/1tb Raid Happy user. Also using Vegas which you will know by now, is ULTRA stable and handles HDV with no fuss (ver 7). The Quad core really helps with rendering and also mean I can open another instance of Vegas and happily edit away/playback from the timeline whilst the other video renders and you'd never know it was going on.

[Piotr Wozniacki]

Originally Posted by Alastair Brown

I'm another home built Quad Core/4Gb/1tb Raid Happy user. Also using Vegas which you will know by now, is ULTRA stable and handles HDV with no fuss (ver 7). The Quad core really helps with rendering and also mean I can open another instance of Vegas and happily edit away/playback from the timeline whilst the other video renders and you'd never know it was going on.

Same here!
Vegas is the only NLE that can utilize all 4 cores at 100% at the moment.

[Gert Kracht]

Hi,

At the moment i am using a A8N-SLI Premium motherboard with a AMD X2-4400 processor. 2 Gb internal memory and 3.5 Tb of harddisk storage.

For the easy work I use Pinnacle Studio. (HDV to DVD without the extra works)
With Sony Vegas and Premiere Pro 2.0 I do the rest of the editing work.

The special effects are added with Vision Lab Studio and Lightwave 8.5 at the moment.

All programs use incredible amounts of processortime. In the future I want to move to a hardware solution to do real time editing.
But for now: I recomend a good Dual Core or Quad Core PC with at least 2 Gb memory and enough harddrive space. Software: Vegas 7.0 and if you have the money for it: built a RAID for the video. That will be a real time saver.

Good luck with finding the new pc.....

Oh...one tip: buy a good house for your hardware. I have the Cooler Master Stacker. Plenty of harddrive space, great cooling and very silent.

[Phil Kay]

I use an Apple ibook G4 - 1.33GHz/768MB ram

Not easy,not fun! I'm still deciding whether to go Apple or PC....

[Chris Hurd]

Moved from Canon XH to HD / HDV Editing Solutions.

[Eric Weiss]

Would a Vegas 7 editor with a truly kick ass HDV set up be so kind as to post
their complete specs? Mobo, CPu, Ram brand, even case and psu.

My P4 3.4G machine is just no longer ideal. I'm addicted to HDV. There's no going back.

"Oh, I'll just spend $3K on the A1 and import as DV." says the man nearly $10K later.

[Richard Mather]

I dont use anything special, a p4 dual processor 2.8 running at 3.2 gig. 1gb ram, 3 internal hard drives and 3 external hard drives, all 7200 rpm but again nothing special, just off the shelf stuff. Theres an ATI gfx card somewhere in there with dual head support but it cost about £30 so 60 usd. Seems to cope very well with editting in Premier elements and fairly well at converting with mpeg streamclip. Probably needs another gb of ram at some point but Im in no hurry.

[Marcus Marchesseault]

"Would a Vegas 7 editor with a truly kick ass HDV set up be so kind as to post
their complete specs? Mobo, CPu, Ram brand, even case and psu."

Unfortunately, I am yet to be a kick-ass Vegas editor, but my machine seems very fast. I would probably buy the E6700 today instead of the E6600 as it has gone down in price. I might even buy the Quadcore Q6600 for a bit over $500. I like the Gigabyte board because it has solid capacitors. I bought a reasonably fast video card in case I want to use Magic Bullet and in hope that more software will start to use the VPU for rendering.

GIGABYTE GA-965P-DS3 LGA 775 Intel P965 Express ATX Intel Motherboard

Intel® Core 2 Duo E6600 Conroe Processor 2.4GHz, 1066FSB, LGA775, 4MB Cach

OCZ OCZ2P800R22GK 2GB Kit DDR2 PC2-6400 Platinum Revision 2 Dual Channel Memory

XFX PVT71GUQF3 GeForce 7900GT 256MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Video Card

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3320620AS 320GB Serial ATA 7200RPM Hard Drive w/16MB Buffer

Zalman ZM600-HP HeatPipe Cooled 600w Modular Power Supply

Coolermaster RC-631-KKN1-GP Mystique 631 Aluminum Mid Tower Case (Black)

In addition to this list, I already have a 10,000rpm SCSI drive and I'll probably get another SATA drive like the one listed.

I got about half of the order from Newegg and the rest from zipzoomfly.com. ZipZoomfly has better shipping costs to Hawaii so I bought the case and power supply from them.

Any name-brand RAM should suffice. I have used Crucial, Corsair, and Kingston successfully in the past. I chose some with slightly lower latency than average. Don't be fooled by the 1066FSB on the Intel chips. They only use 800MHz RAM (PC2-6400). In these machines, the FSB and memory are very much separate. All system functions seem to have their own clock so one can be changed without effecting something else. Changing the FSB doesn't seem to effect PCI, PCIX, or RAM timings.

My install went very smoothly. I went with all SATA devices so the cabling looks nice and neat. The Zallman power supply is very quiet and it's modular cabling contributes to a clean case. I got tired of the inevitable rust that comes with steel cases in Hawaii so I went with the all-aluminum case.

Everything is also fairly quiet. The big 120mm fans on the case don't whine and the stock Intel CPU cooler seems to do a good job without making a racket. I upgraded the stock VPU cooler to a Zallman because it is very quiet and I live in a warm environment. In addition to the fans being quiet, the onboard sound is much better than I've experienced in the past. It has no noticeable hiss or whine.

The only shortcoming to all this is that the motherboard doesn't have firewire/ieee1394. I already had a firewire card laying around so I used that. Make sure to use a card with the Texas Instruments chipset for best OHCI compatibility.

I haven't put this through any punishment yet, but so far it seems very fast and the build was easy.

[Glenn Chan]

In my tests, low latency RAM doesn't do anything for Vegas. Higher memory bandwidth will make a few percent difference in performance. You can make sure you get full memory bandwidth by using pairs of identical RAM, and installing them in the right slots (should be color coded now, though you can check your motherboard's manual).

[Doug Davis]

Originally Posted by Alastair Brown

I'm another home built Quad Core/4Gb/1tb Raid Happy user. Also using Vegas which you will know by now, is ULTRA stable and handles HDV with no fuss (ver 7). The Quad core really helps with rendering and also mean I can open another instance of Vegas and happily edit away/playback from the timeline whilst the other video renders and you'd never know it was going on.

Have you had any locking up issues while rendering? Are all 4 cores at 100% or close? I have a qx6700 and with vegas it seems to have issues... Just curious what your experience was...