DV system and IEEE integrity. starting

[Anthony Milic]

Hello Digital ones.

Dare I ask so bluntly;

1. Will my digital video suffer uploading through IEEE? If so, how?

2. The following hardware has been recommended as an upgrade for me. Can I get some opinions.

1 x Abit AN7 nForce2 Chipset
1 x AMD XP 2600+ CPU: Desktop Athlon™ XP Retail w/fan
1 x Corsair TWINX1024-3200C2 2x 512MB 1024MB Dual Channel Optimised Pair
1 x Liteon 1633S DVD-RW Internal: 16x+ / 8x- Dual Layer
1 x PowerColor R98-PC3 9800PRO 128MB DVI 256Bit w/ CS:CZ (R360, 9800XT potential?)
1 x Seagate ST3160023A 160GB 7200rpm 8Mb Cache
2 x Seagate ST380013AS 80GB Serial ATA 150Mbps 7200rpm HDD 8Mb Cache Barracuda (RAID 0+1)

(have a DSR-PD170P, no capture card and will use Adobe Premiere)

Very stressed. - so much info.
Appreciate any solid advice.
Thank you so much!
Anthony

[Ronnie Grahn]

1. No.

<<<-- Originally posted by Anthony Milic : Hello Digital ones.

Dare I ask so bluntly;

1. Will my digital video suffer uploading through IEEE? If so, how?

Anthony -->>>

[Rob Lohman]

As Ronnie answered: there will be no quality loss when using
firewire (IEEE1394 / i.Link). The components you listed seem
good enough.

I'm just wondering what you are going to do with the harddisk.
You have one 160 GB drive and two 80 GB models. If the 160
drive is for OS and applications I would seriously downsize that
to 80 or less.

The space is needed when capturing, editing and outputting the
digitial video. Your list mentions raid, but not how you plan on
doing this. I don't recall from memory if the Abit mainboard has
raid or not. Keep the following in mind:

Raid 0: striping: it connects all the disks together to form one large harddisk
Raid 1: mirroring: you only get the free space of one drive, the second one is used to duplicate the first one in case of emergency
Raid 3/5: parity: at least 3 harddisks required, you get roughly the free space of two harddisks. The third is for failover.

There are more versions, but not everything is supported by the
way you are going to do raid (check to see which is supported).
I assume you want raid for safety?

For some basic overview of raid levels see the following site:
http://www.prepressure.com/techno/raid.htm

For much more indepth discussion of the various levels:
http://www.acnc.com/raid.html

[Glenn Chan]

You will get much better performance from a Pentium or AMD64 processor (the Pentium is faster at VIDEO applications).

2- Low latency RAM makes no difference. You can save a lot of money here by getting normal stuff. I have done my own benchmarks with Vegas and that's what I've found (low latency makes no measurable difference... not more than 1% at least).

3-

1 x PowerColor R98-PC3 9800PRO 128MB DVI 256Bit w/ CS:CZ (R360, 9800XT potential?)

Depending on the NLE and/or compositing application you use, the video card may make no difference at all on performance.

Rendering speed is mostly related to CPU speed, and a little bit on memory bandwidth (that depends on the motherboard chipset).

Some compositing applications can take advantage of video card acceleration. Most use openGL, which gaming cards aren't that good at. You may want to consider a workstation card (Nvidia quaddro, ATI fire) instead. I don't know much about workstation cards but look at the recommended hardware for your programs.

Dual head/monitor video card is recommended for video editing.

[Anthony Milic]

Thanks Rob, Glenn and Ronnie for the information and opinions.
Those were the components recommended by a tech-head friend.
Now, I've always been Pentium, never heard of an across the board 'IEEE DV transfer problem', and wouldn't normally go the way of striping and mirroring. Though I wanted to see what the DV boffins of the world thought.

In terms of space, I was just going to go with maybe a 200gig Western digital for all my DV (operations and storage) and maybe a 120 for OS, games music etc, without the need of a (crash) back up drive. At this stage it's creative/hobby, so loosing data, while painful, won't lose me a client or income.

1. Is it ok to store and operate DV on the same drive?

2. Are loss of data crashes really that common with DV - so as to warrant a backup on the raid? (is raid worth it?)

3. Would current software take advantage of AMD64bit? (I'm starting with Adobe)

Yes, a definite for the dual monitor output. An adaptor would be required for this particular card I believe.

I think overall I'm concerned about all of the HW/SW incompatibility issues and glitches that I've read about. Only cure is more research! .. or buy a ready-to-go system.. *shudders.

Appreciate the help guys! It's great!

Anthony

[Glenn Chan]

1. Is it ok to store and operate DV on the same drive?

As I understand it, your question is more like:
Is it ok to have your DV footage and your OS+programs on the same drive?

People with laptops do this all the time. You could potentially run into problems if:
A- Your drive is getting full. You should leave 10% free to avoid fragmentation issues.
B- Other programs are contending for hard drive access. You can avoid problems here by:
disabling antivirus
keeping your computer free of viruses and spyware
?disabling indexing service on XP

2. Are loss of data crashes really that common with DV - so as to warrant a backup on the raid? (is raid worth it?)

Hard drive crashes with video editing is as frequent as everyone else. If your hard drive does crash/fail, then you will have to redo your project. If you backed up your project file, you can re-create your project easily. Your project file contains the timecode info which lets your editing program control your camera and re-capture the right footage.

RAID probably isn't worth it.

3. Would current software take advantage of AMD64bit? (I'm starting with Adobe)

No. It might in the future (probably not), but you can upgrade then anyways when processor speed increases significantly.

Yes, a definite for the dual monitor output. An adaptor would be required for this particular card I believe.

If the card has a DVI and VGA output (and you want 2XVGA), check that the DVI port is DVI-I and not DVI-D. The DVI-I port means a DVI-VGA adapter will work.

I think overall I'm concerned about all of the HW/SW incompatibility issues and glitches that I've read about. Only cure is more research! .. or buy a ready-to-go system.. *shudders.

If you plan on using the hardware acceleration cards for Premiere Pro (i.e. Matrox RTX100), then you should ask people for combinations that work. Otherwise it seems like Premiere is pretty compatible with the various hardware out there. You'd then have to research which parts work with each other... if you ask people for their rig's configuration, you can copy that and have a working system.

Or you can go with a vendor like monarch computers, who will assemble the computer for you for a build fee ($50). They'll alert you if there are compatibility issues (between the parts).

[Anthony Milic]

Thanks for all the input!
Now playing aroudn with the following config.
Feel more at ease leaning back into Pentium land.

Roughly the following:
P4 3+Ghz Hyperthreaded
2GB of Dual Channel RAM,
80+GB Ultra DMA drive
160+ GB ATA100 EIDE or SATA drive for DV RAID 0 striped. (If RAID, probably want 160-200GIG combined)
64 meg ATI or nVidia based graphics card that supports dual monitors.
still looking..

any comments?

Thank you so much.

[Glenn Chan]

If you're on a budget, you may not really need 2GB of RAM. There are a few threads on this forum on the other two (vegas and premiere forums) that discuss this. You can check your (editing) software's recommended specs for what the recommended amount of RAM is.
Premiere Pro: 256MB of RAM (1GB or more recommended)
http://www.adobe.com/products/premiere/systemreqs.html

I think you can actually benefit from 2GB, so it shouldn't be too big a deal either way. If you get 2X512MB now you upgrade as you like (and you can also check if you are running out of RAM). Make sure to get the same model RAM when you upgrade.

ATI or Nvidia graphics card: Nvidia has slightly better drivers as you can kind of calibrate your monitor to NTSC bars and tone (your monitor will still be far from accurate- use any TV hooked up to your editing system regardless). If you use a shareware utility called "Ultramon", ATI drivers are otherwise as good as nvidia drivers.

With Premiere Pro you kind of need Ultramon, or at least a Nvidia or Matrox graphics card to do dual monitors. (Matrox makes good graphics cards too, but they have poor 3d performance so they are bad at games and they are also kind of pricey if you buy them new.)

[Dan Euritt]

i agree that 2 gigs of ram would be overkill in your case... so would the raid array.

what is important for hard drives is to get some air moving across the drive, to keep it cool... right now there are a bunch of junk external hard drive cases on the market that don't have cooling fans, so watch out for that... if you want to make the drive last, keep it cool.

[Rob Lohman]

I agree with the rest, don't go with RAID or 2 GB of memory. You
won't need it. RAID 0 is striping for speed increased. Your 200 GB
drive will be more than fast enough for DV, so no need for that.
Otherwise you get to mirroring (safety) and as you inidicated you
don't really need that. I would invest this money in a DVD burner
and perhaps an extra external harddisk (80 - 160 GB or so?) so
you can take stuff with you or make backups to an external drive
in case you want some extra safety.

The 2 GB is really only needed if you work a lot with very large
images in things like Photoshop or if you want to do a lot of
larger RAM previews in your NLE. Other than that, I'd go with 1 GB.