Turn my Dell into an editing station

[Celia Cotelo]

Hi everyone

Once again I'm turning here for help.

I have to edit 4 mini dv to 20 minutes. It's a paying gig, I have edited on fcp in rental facilities but don't want to again because it was nerve racking trying to be creative while the clock was ticking. It also ate up all my profit. I rather put that money into bumping a spare desktop that can be dedicated to editing,.

I have a dell dimension 8200, 80g hardrive, 256 ram., 1.7g processor.

Need firewire and extra ram.

I can put $600 into making it editing ready, maybe a little more. But even if it's a rude system I figure what I gain in calm will be worth what I lose in slick.

Can you advise me?

[Glenn Chan]

You need editing software don't you? That would kinda kill your budget unless you get mid-level editing software like Premiere Pro Elements of Sony Screenblast.

From what I have seen from Premiere Pro and Sony Vegas, Premiere Pro is a lot like Final Cut on PC and Vegas makes no sense if you are used to FCP. On that level I'd go with Premiere, unless you need to work on multicam stuff or you have time to invest in learning a new program. Vegas can be great for compositing, color correction, and audio editing if you need those kind of tools.

For cutting, your machine is fine. If you want to do complicated things then you want to invest in a computer with a faster processor (check motherboard/chipset compatibility if not getting a new computer) or for Premiere, get a hardware accleration card. That exceeds your budget though.

2- RAM: get pc3200 RAM off crucial.com or newegg.com. If you want to save a little money, check:
pricewatch.com
pricegrabber.com
resellerratings.com
For the best performance, use all the same model RAM and in pairs. Perhaps get 2X512MB and auction off the 256MB.

If you use Vegas, 512MB is fine.

check pricewatch.com for prices on firewire cards.

3- You might want more hard drive space, but you can figure that out. DV is about 13GB/hour, and you need to leave about 10% of your hard drive space free to avoid problems.

[Celia Cotelo]

Thanks for your help. I just got Premier off a friend. and haven't looked at the tutorial yet. I'm not really used to FCP. I used it for one project last year. But I was kind of stressed out by the rental fees and the newness of the set up. I liked it though.

I don't want to do complicated things. I have footage I've been accumulating over the past year for a project. I finally jumped fine into videocamera from film camera - but I've blocked on the mechanics of video editing. I'm a good film editor. I don't do complicated stuff.

I still don't understand fully what using a computer to edit takes. I understand about the ram and the hardrive. I'm getting 2 sticks 256 rdram, which I think I can just add in the 2 empty memory slots for now. And I was able to get a sealed 120G hardrive that was laying around.

The firewire card / i-link thingis still a bit of a mystery and I don't know what to shop for.

I don't know what a hardware accelerator card is.

I have a sony trv900, if I run through the camera do I need a video capture card?

I'll keep researching and perhaps next communication I won't be so ignorant.

Thanks again for your help

[Glenn Chan]

I don't know what a hardware accelerator card is.

Mmatrox, canopus, etc. sell hardware cards that give extra processing power for Premiere so you get more real-time effects. I don't think you need one since you're not doing anything complicated.

I still don't understand fully what using a computer to edit takes. I understand about the ram and the hardrive. I'm getting 2 sticks 256 rdram, which I think I can just add in the 2 empty memory slots for now. And I was able to get a sealed 120G hardrive that was laying around.

The firewire card / i-link thingis still a bit of a mystery and I don't know what to shop for.

Your camera has an iLink/firewire/IEEE1394 port, which means you just need a firewire card and 6pin-4pin firewire cable to capture your footage. The computer/editing software can control your camera and cue it up to the right place. When you tell Premiere to capture, the computer will control the camera and start capturing. The video is transferred digitally (exact copy of 1s and 0s) so there is no generation loss.

The DV footage takes up about 13GB of hard drive space per hour. Multiply your hard drive's capacity (120GB) by ~85% to get the amount of space you can use to capture. When you format the drive you will see the # of GB drops. You should leave some extra space on the drive to avoid problems and to give yourself room in case you need to export your whole project into a final file.

Workflow:
You can either:
A- capture all the footage on your tapes. If you set the date/time on the camera, you can set Premiere to break your footage up into clips based on changes in date/time. See the figures above to determine how much HD space you need.

B- Use batch capture in Premiere. Play the footage back and set in/out points and create a bunch of clips (right now they refer to footage on your source tapes and there's no actual DV footage on your hard drive). Once you are done finding the clips you want to capture, you hit batch capture and Premiere will automatically control the camera and capture all your clips.

I hope that makes sense.

2- Sorry about recommending PC3200 RAM, that is not the right type for your computer. I didn't notice your computer uses RDRAM.

RDRAM happens to be kind of expensive.

3- If you buy a firewire card and it comes with a cable, it's almost certainly a 6pin-4pin cable. I would go on pricewatch.com and buy a firewire card off there. All the cards follow the IEEE1394 standard and do exactly the same thing. If you are running winXP, they won't have compatibility issues.

Places to check for buying firewire cards are:
newegg.com (if you one fast, this vendor is likely your best bet)
pricewatch.com
pricegrabber.com
resellerratings.com

[Celia Cotelo]

Hi

Yes, that's clear. thank you!

meanwhile everything has kind of changed and I'm still hung up as the desktop will not come to life and so I'm going with my portable : dell inspiron 2650, 30 g hd, 256 memory, pentium 4 1.8g.

I guess same thing goes. bump ram, fire wire card - but now definitely ext fw hard drive, thinking about lacie 800.

I only have 18mg free on hard drive. Is this enough to load up Premier? Or do I install it on the ext fw drive?

I've been using this computer for everything - is there some hard drive pre installation preparation maintainance I should do?

I really thank you for your help.

[Celia Cotelo]

I'm sorry I forgot to mention:

The graphics card seems prettry puny - all the specs say is card circuit graphics, video 16mb

the sound card is Sigma

is this something I must upgrade - and then am I running into major $$?

[Glenn Chan]

I guess same thing goes. bump ram, fire wire card - but now definitely ext fw hard drive, thinking about lacie 800.

For a laptop, you need a different kind of RAM and firewire card but they don't cost significantly more.

If your computer has 2X128MB SODIMMs and only 2 slots for RAM, you would need to replace one or more SODIMMs to upgrade your memory.

Firewire drive: You may or may not have problems capturing or printing to tape without dropped frames if you have both a camera and a firewire drive connected. Many people don't experience this problem, although some folks do. Factors seem to be:
A- Combination of firewire drives and deck/camcorder (some combinations do not play well).
B- Speed of the hard drive, chipset used in the firewire-ATA convertor/bridge.
C- Whether or not the devices in question are on the same firewire bus/controller. If you have one firewire card, then they are on the same bus/controller.
D- luck

If you get dropped frames from camera <--> firewire drive, then you will have to capture to and print to tape from an internal drive instead. To put footage on your firewire drive, you will have to use your laptop's internal drive as an intermediate step (i.e. capture to it first, then move the footage to the external drive).

I only have 18mg free on hard drive.

If you only have 18MB free, you seriously need to free up some space on your laptop. The utility Treesize can help you do this as it will show where all your space is being taken up.

http://www.jam-software.com/freeware/index.shtml

If your drive is more than 90% full it can/will run into fragmentation problems.

The graphics card seems prettry puny - all the specs say is card circuit graphics, video 16mb

That's fine.

The sound card is also fine if you don't do sound work. Laptop sound is generally very bad as the small size of the laptop forces the sound card circuitry to be in an environment with lots of electric/magnetic interferences, which means lots of hiss. You can get a USB sound card/interface to solve this problem, but then the rest of your audio chain has to be good (good sound going in, plus good monitor speakers and acoustic treatment for your room).
Anyways... you probably don't need a sound card/interface as long as you aren't going to do anything fancy sound-wise.

[Celia Cotelo]

Hi Chan

At newegg there's a firewire card
SABRENT FireWire 800 / IEEE 1394b 3 Ports PCI Host Card Adapter, Model "SBT-1394b" -RETAIL

Specifications:
External Port: 2x 9-pin 1394b, 1x 6-pin 1394a
OS Support: Windows 98SE/Me/2000/XP, Mac OS 8.6 or greater
Data Transfer Rate: 800Mbps/400Mbps/200Mbps/100Mbps for 1394
Features:Works in 64 bit/33MHz and 32 bit/33MHz fully compliant PCI host interface.

The FW800 Drive would run off the 9 pin- 800 port and the camera off the 6pin-400.

Would this work? My laptop is 64bit

Also I have an internal drive on the desktop. Can I put that into a case and use it as a third drive for the laptop?

[Glenn Chan]

I believe your laptop needs a PCMCIA card (smaller and fits in the slot in your laptop), not a PCI card. You should double check this.

Also I have an internal drive on the desktop. Can I put that into a case and use it as a third drive for the laptop?

Yep.

[Celia Cotelo]

<<<-- Originally posted by Glenn Chan : I believe your laptop needs a PCMCIA card (smaller and fits in the slot in your laptop), not a PCI card. You should double check this.


Wow! You really saved me on that one. Thanks!

The Adaptec Duo from Dell seems to be safe bet. but a little expensive.

Also on using internal WD 1200 with laptop - Should I get a USB2 case would that solve potential frame drop problems?

[Glenn Chan]

Also on using internal WD 1200 with laptop - Should I get a USB2 case would that solve potential frame drop problems?

You should probably get a firewire hard drive as they are faster in real world performance. Firewire hard drives also generally support USB2 too, so you can try that if firewire ain't working.

Firewire drives with oxford chipsets are generally considered better. Also, larger capacity hard drives are a tad faster (and make more sense as more hard drive space is very good for video editing). 8MB cache drives are also *slightly* faster.

What you really want to do is to capture without dropped frames, so you don't have to do the capture to internal drive workaround. Unfortunately I can't say 100% that a certain configuration will work for you. I can tell you that some people do get dropped frames when capturing to firewire drives. The majority of people don't get problems.