Time to upgrade?

[Tom Tailford]

I would say this year I have had an average job of 1 event to film, edit & produce to DVD per month. I use SD video, usually 3 cameras, sometimes 4x

I use Adobe Photoshop CS3, Premiere CS3, After Effects CS3, Encore CS3 for most editing.

My machine:
AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5600+ 2.80GHz
2Gb Memory
Nvidia Geforce 8800GTS 320Mb
Western Digital Raptor 74GB SATA
250GB Internal SATA
500GB External USB2

Is it worth upgrading this? If so what sorts of things should I be looking at?

I was thinking it would probably be worth using the 500gb as backup or portable storage and possibly making a raid array for quick HD access?

Are quad cores the standard these days? Do I need at least 1Gb memory per core?

Please make any suggestions / offer advice. Thanks very much.

Tom

[Ervin Farkas]

As we say here on the other side of the pond: if it ain't broken, don't fix it! If the present setup works fine, why would you want to spend money?

The only thing I would upgrade is the external hard drive - replace it with a RAID 1 at least, so your data is never lost.

[Tom Tailford]

I suppose it works yes. I generally dont have to sit and edit the camera angles... my friend does that.

Im sure it would speed things up with Encore / After Effects =P but is an unnecessary spend.

I'm very impulsive at times which is probably why I came on here asking "what pootah bits should I get"... well that's a little insight about me, how about you? ASL? jk lol

[Tripp Woelfel]

Originally Posted by Tom Tailford

I suppose it works yes.

If it works fast enough for you then there's probably no reason to upgrade. You might want to add a big internal drive rather than adding an external RAID. It would be quite a bit less dear and you could move it to another machine when the time comes to replace your system.

If you're a stickler for either speed or data protection then RAID 0 or RAID 1 (respectively) would be good options. There are a couple of precautions you can take to get a bit more protection:
1. Keep your projects and media files on different disks-if you lose the media drive, you can re-capture
2. Make periodic backup copies of your project files to another disk-if you lose the project drive, you have a backup
3. Make a copy of project, media and other components to your USB drive at the end of each day.

Each of these is really more backup than data resiliency . There are real and significant differences between the two that I won't bore you with here... unless you need a good kip.

[Brian Brown]

Since you're editing SD, a CPU upgrade won't significantly improve anything other than your rendering times. A new-ish desktop Intel quad-core would likely cut your rendering times in half. If this is something of importance to you, consider it. If you were editing HDV or esp. AVCHD, a CPU upgrade would be worth the $ with improved previews and processing speed.

Another upgrade to consider is moving up to XP or Vista 64-bit OS. This won't speed up either previews or renders, but allows you to address more RAM (which you'd have to purchase, as well), and multi-task amongst your apps much more robustly. The caveat with a 64-bit upgrade is to be certain that all of your hardware, peripherals, and software have drivers and patches to work with the new OS. I ran the CS3 on Vista 64 with 8GB of RAM for over a year and had no significant issues... but YMMV.

Lastly, you could upgrade your software to CS4 and improve quite a few day-to-day aspects of editing and workflow. I highlighted a bunch of new features that I find useful to my particular workflow in this post: http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/attend-wo...bout-time.html

Cheers,
Brian Brown
BrownCow Productions