Recommended minimums for PC used to author DVDs....

[LarryBoy]

I am going to buy a new PC which will be eventually used to transfer home movies (Hi-8 mm) to DVD. I will be editing movies and hopefully adding menus, etc.

My question is this... what options do I need to make sure my new PC has? This is what I'm looking at:

P4 2.8 Ghz w/533Mhz fsb
512 MB 333 Mhz DDR SDRAM
80 GB Hard drive
IEEE 1394 Adapter (3-port)
NEC-2500A 8x DVD+/-RW

Am I okay with this setup?

What about video and audio cards? I'm not real familiar with these... what should I have to accomplish my objectives above? I don't plan on playing any video games on the computer... it will be used for basic tasks and the video editing.

Any comments will be appreciated.

Thanks!

Larryboy

[Bodene]

In my opinion, that set up should be more than enuff to give u
optimum speed and the capability to do whatever u desire. Just make sure you use XP, and don't have alot of apps running in the background. Minimize the amount of things that start up during the boot. The less things u have hogging yer memory the better.

As for video cards, any up to date type will do. I prefer the ATI Radeon line of cards. If u wish to try one of those, anything from 9000 on up will last you a good long time. GeForce cards are good too, but u need to do some research on the manufacturer you choose, to determine customer service and reliabilty issues.

A suggestion tho.....if u plan on backing up your DVD collection, have a DVD-ROM installed also. They are pretty inexpensive these days and will come in extremely handy. Most folks who do much backing upping do not use their DVD burner for anything but burning. Ripping is best done by a ROM. I use a samsung 352 cdrw/dvd-rom from walmart. It does an awesome job and is extremely compatible, but nearly any type would do u a good job.

Lastly...keep in mind that it's doubtful you'll be able to burn any DVD's at 8x for a while. At least until media can catch up with burner capabilities. 4x causes some folks problems as it is, so don't freak when yer 8x burns look awful. Good luck. Hope this helps.

[Richard_G]

A second hard drive too. If you intend capturing analogue video, it is much better to capture to a dedicated hard drive.

[gcutler]

Fine machine...just about any new machine these days will do the job more than well.

The Seperate additional hard drive will also help if you wish to keep multiple projects unfinished at a time. So if you add a 2nd 80GB drive, you can manage the D: drive seperately and clean it up as you see fit, yet still have plenty of room on your C: drive for family photos, mp3s and other long term data (assuming you are going to be doing other things with the machine than JUST Capture/Edit/Encode/Author/Burn.).

So for example on my systems all applications are on my C: drive but my Digital Video related output and input and work and temp dirs are on my D: drive. And if I need more space, I can remove the D: drive and replace it with a new 250GB drive or whatever later (and only make sure that I have the appropriate empty directories available for output, temp, etc to get everything working again.)

On one of my machines I had a D: drive but shared it for authoring and mp3s and a few games and it just became a pain if I had two uncompleted authoring projects at the same time. Delete project to install new game or delete game to create another project...

[MrMungus]

I am going to buy a new PC which will be eventually used to transfer home movies (Hi-8 mm) to DVD. I will be editing movies and hopefully adding menus, etc.

I'm capturing video to MPEG-2 (using a hardware MPEG-2 card) and converting tapes to DVD using a PIII 750 (but not any editing). Works great...but the new computer is coming this week (P4 3.0Ghz...drool...).

[teegee420]

I agree with the notion that a second hard drive would be a wise investment. As far as video cards go, you really only need one if you plan to run some of the newer games, which has nothing to do with capturing. However if you wanted to capture straight to mpeg-2 then one of the ATI Radeon All-In-Wonder cards would be great.

[stvn]

P4 2.8 Ghz w/533Mhz fsb
512 MB 333 Mhz DDR SDRAM
80 GB Hard drive
IEEE 1394 Adapter (3-port)
NEC-2500A 8x DVD+/-RW

Just a thought but for the price diffrence its well worth the LITTLE extra and getting the full blown 800fsb P4 with 400DDR and consider getting a good mobo with an 865 or 875 chipset. The Extra memory bandwith is well worth it. But deciding on enabling /disabling Hyper-Threading is something else depends on your apps as some ARE NOT smp aware

As posted b4 i entily agree let a burner just burn and for the little it costs compared to the time it saves invest in a combi drive or dvd drive to rip from. As for graphics cards of any form it depends on what flavour takes your fancy ( i finally decided on the FX5900 taking into account price x performance ). HD soon get full think carfully before deciding on 80Gb as 120 Gb + isnt much more $$$$$$

[Gazorgan]

2nd Hraddrive. You may want to look at SATA. The increase in performance is phenomanal, but the cost is high.

[drewson99]

HD soon get full think carfully before deciding on 80Gb as 120 Gb + isnt much more $$$$$$

really, I have a 100 and a 120, and I'm frequently needing to burn backups to free up space.

[DTSL06]

Just from personal experience. I found that having 1gb of memory seems to help. It seems to make the whole ripping and process of compressing files faster. I tried 512 and wasnt happy since my previous setup I was using 1gb. I notice their was a diff. The new system P4 3.2 800fsb had 512 duel channel PC3200 mem as compared to old system which was 1gb PC2700 running on P4 3.06b 533fsb both HT. But when I went with 1gb in the new systen with duel channel mode, it seemed to be faster then 512, memory used Corsair XMS PC3200C2 pro (2x512) and LL (2x256).

Also if u are buying this system new, why are u getting a 533fsb system, pay a little more and get a 800fsb duel channel HT P4c and mobo. The performance is there.

Also with alot of the Intel base mobo with 865/875 chipsets, you'll get SATA connector. Stick with the 80 as ur boot disk and get two SATA drives and raid 0 them. Just rip to the duel SATA drives and speed will no longer be any issue. SATA drives are about the same price as the PATA ones these days. I picked up 2 Seagate 120 SATA for $20 more the 2 Seagate PATA 120 would have cost me.

BTW U wre wondering for a min system...ur system listed would be more then fine.

[solarfox]

Your proposed setup looks OK to me, LarryBoy, although personally I would go with an AthlonXP rather than a P4... But that's just me.

My recommedations are as follows:

#1 -- If it really comes down to deciding where best to spend your money, you can get away with 256Mb of RAM and go for a bigger hard drive instead. Massive amounts of RAM aren't so important for video capture and DVD authoring (though it certainly doesn't hurt); your bottlenecks will more likely be CPU speed and HD speed/space.

#2 -- If you're going to do DV captures over Firewire, be aware that this will chew up your HD space at 3.5Mb per second, and plan accordingly.

#3 -- Having two drives, one for your OS/Applications and one for raw captures, is a Very Good Thing. Having your OS/App drive be large enough to split it in half and using the second partition to recieve the encoded MPEGs, so that your encoding/authoring app can read from one physical drive and write to the other, is even better.

#4 -- Onboard audio sucks. Yes, it does. My personal preference is the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz card, but any high-quality audio card should do.

#5 -- If you're not going to do gaming, then just about any video card should do the job. If you're planning to do analog capture, do consider the ATI cards.

[MrMungus]

2nd Hraddrive. You may want to look at SATA. The increase in performance is phenomanal, but the cost is high.

SATA has a performance increase? I thought the only difference was the type of connection...?

[MrMungus]

getting the full blown 800fsb P4 with 400DDR and consider getting a good mobo with an 865 or 875 chipset

I agree. It pays for itself in terms of time between upgrades...and in a year or so you won't remember how much more you paid but you will appreciate the speed difference.

[stvn]

My recommedations are as follows:

#1 -- If it really comes down to deciding where best to spend your money, you can get away with 256Mb of RAM and go for a bigger hard drive instead. Massive amounts of RAM aren't so important for video capture and DVD authoring (though it certainly doesn't hurt); your bottlenecks will more likely be CPU speed and HD speed/space.

Id definatly have 2x 256 as a MIN and that way you get the full benifit from dual channel DDR, as for cpu bottlenecks ive had no problems as such, but HD's will always be a bottle neck even with sata drives in raid/striip config

Memory prices are so competative at the moment it isnt worth going for geniric brands or unbranded GOOD MEMORY IS worth getting as the P4 is very over-clockable. i've got a p4 3ghz @ 3600 with kingston ddr pc4000 all @ default voltages so produces less ov a heat problem

[LarryBoy]

Thanks for all the replys. Lots of good suggestions there. I will add a 2nd hard drive, that seems to be the #1 suggestion. I failed to mention that the system has a 16x DVD ROM in addition to the NEC writer, so that should cover the ripping concerns.

I plan to play my HI-8 tapes through a digital 8 camcorder and let the camcorder convert to digital -- then send to PC through IEEE 1394. Looking forward to learning and experimenting with burning my own DVDs.

Thanks again.

Larryboy

[lechtin]

I agree with the people suggesting a 800fsb, even if it's with a 2.4GHz P4 (model C). Get some DDR400 memory to keep things synchronized (faster).

Nobody mentioned the audio card. A way to kill 2 birds with one stone is to get a Soundblaster Audigy 2 which will give you both some of the best audio performance available AND a firewire port. That's what I use for capturing DV and it works great (only ever had a problem with Avid Express DV which I think is only comptible with TI firewire chipsets.)

[solarfox]

Id definatly have 2x 256 as a MIN and that way you get the full benifit from dual channel DDR, as for cpu bottlenecks ive had no problems as such, but HD's will always be a bottle neck even with sata drives in raid/striip config

Personally, I've not found that having large amounts of physical RAM available speeds up encoding all that much (and it doesn't do anything for DV capturing). Yes, it does help the overall system run a bit faster, and it definitely becomes a necessity once you start playing with fancy effects in a video-editing program like ULead Media Studio Pro (on-the-fly, real-time previews of clips with multiple filter effects eat memory quick!), but for a straight capture-encode-burn process I don't think it helps much.

emory prices are so competative at the moment

I guess it depends on what you mean by "competitive". Some of us are doing this on rather tight budgets, to the point where I'm still debating with myself whether I really need to upgrade from my A-04's 2X burn speed even though Fry's keeps putting the A-06's on sale for $129.

[stvn]

Well solarfox i recomended 2x256 as a minimum as the p4 will use the dual channel ddr memory bandwidth with the two sticks of memory more efficently than 1x512 .

LarryBoy hope your system comes together soon and is all you want it to be. the ideas given you here will give you a good guide as what to look out for but for a really good base to build from, reasearch your brand of MOBO first and go from there

[stvn]

I agree with the people suggesting a 800fsb, even if it's with a 2.4GHz P4 (model C). Get some DDR400 memory to keep things synchronized (faster).

by far the most overclockable P4 avalible