What kind of computer required for HD?

[Rafael Lopes]

I guess I'll have to find somebody who can land me another card/10000rpm hd to try it out (I won't be too hapy if I buy a new one and the issue remains). Thanks for the input anyway.

[Brett Schofield]

I just built my system the other day and it consists of:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400 Dual Core Processor
4GB Ram
Geforce 7600GT Video Card
2 x 250GB 7200rpm SATA internal hard disks set up as RAID0
1 x 200GB SATA system drive
2 x 19" Widescreen monitors
2 x Pioneer 111D DVD RW drives

and Im using Premier Pro2

I dont do this for a living, just a hobby and im loving it.

[John Rofrano]

Originally Posted by Rafael Lopes

I guess I'll have to find somebody who can land me another card/10000rpm hd to try it out (I won't be too hapy if I buy a new one and the issue remains). Thanks for the input anyway.

Rafael, A 10K RPM hard drive is NOT going to help. I have one and have posted my findings on the HDV page of my web site. The bottom line is they cost 5x more with only a 12% boost in linear read performance. Not worth the money for video editing.

Look at your hard drive light as you play back the footage. Is it on solid or just blinking? My guess is it’s just blinking which shows there is more throughput available. The fact that VLC pays the footage fine on the same hard drive proves it is not the harddrive that is the bottleneck. Your processor and NLE are the bottleneck.

My total system specs for the PC I build are on the PC Equipment page of my web site but I’ll repeat the core ones here for you:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ Dual Core
ASUS A8N-SLI Premium motherboard
2GB RAM (CORSAIR XMS Twinx2048-3200c2pt)
HD-1: WD Raptor WD740GD 10,000 RPM SATA150
HD-2: 160GB Western Digital SATA 7200 WD1600JD 8MB
HD-3&4: 2 x WD 250GB WD2500JS SATA II (in a Raid 0 configuration)
MSI Geforce 6800GT 256MB GDDR3 Graphics card

When I playback HDV M2T files from my RAID the hard drive light blinks occasionally. I use Sony Vegas as my NLE and if I display the footage full screen on my secondary monitor in "draft" or "preview" mode it plays back smoothly. If I view the same footage in the preview window it is jerky. This is because it has to be rescaled to play in the smaller window and you are asking your processor to rescale a 1920x1080 image 30 times per second. That’s a lot to ask. So full screen HDV will playback faster than a small preview will because there is no scaling.

My HDV page also has frames per second measurements for HDV footage using DV, M2T, and CineForm codecs in Vegas so you can see how each performs on my system. (note: these measurements were taken using "best" mode, not "preview" mode because preview runs smooth in all cases)

~jr

[Rafael Lopes]

John, I visited your website and I think I know what the problem might be. If, like you said, only one core is used for previewing the footage then that is the problem, since I have a AMD 64 Dual core 3800+ that might be the issue. Is there anyway I can change this and "force" my pc to use both cores to preview?

[John Rofrano]

Originally Posted by Rafael Lopes

Is there anyway I can change this and "force" my pc to use both cores to preview?

No. Unfortunately, this has to be done by the software. If the software is not written to be multi-threaded, then the scheduler cannot assign a second thread to the other CPU core. Vegas 6.0 takes advantage of dual core CPU’s. I’m not sure about other NLE’s.

~jr

[Rafael Lopes]

Darn it! I can't belive it. There's not a freaking way to make it work! Each core has 2.01 GHZ. Do you guys think if I increased it to at 3 GHZ it could solve my problem? Any ideas of how much would that cost? How about RAM? Should I bump it up form 2 gig to 4 gig?

[Fred Foronda]

Originally Posted by Brett Schofield

I just built my system the other day and it consists of:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400 Dual Core Processor
4GB Ram
Geforce 7600GT Video Card
2 x 250GB 7200rpm SATA internal hard disks set up as RAID0
1 x 200GB SATA system drive
2 x 19" Widescreen monitors
2 x Pioneer 111D DVD RW drives

and Im using Premier Pro2

I dont do this for a living, just a hobby and im loving it.

Damn..that looks sweet. I wish I knew how to build on my own.

[Rafael Lopes]

Surprise surprise. I found out that SD footage is jittery too. There's something REALLY wrong with this picture and I don't know why. I have to pin point what it is because I can't afford right now to buy a new graphic card, 3 ghz of dual memory, 2 gig of aditional ram. I just bought a mic and a Brevis35 and that kind of blew my budget a little bit. I HAVE to pin point what's wrong so that I can buy ONLY what I need (even though I wouldn't mind at all doing a massive upgrade).

[Rafael Lopes]

Oh yes! Finaly! Sweet! I changed the Tranfer mode to "Ultra DMA 6 - Ultra 133" on the device manager. I don't even know if this is the best options that'll make the HD go faster. All I know is that now I can preview HDV real time at maximum quality, baby!!!