Computer Update for DV

[DeeLnyc]

hi, I edit a lot with DV using Premiere and Nero and my movies are around 1 1/2 hours long. I built a new computer but it still takes a while to render the movies. My question is what else do I need to make my editing go faster ? thank you

P4 3.0 HT
MoBo Abit IC7-G
200 WD sata
kingston 1G pc3200 dual channel
Abit 9600XT 256MB
400W PS
XP Home Edition
16x NEC dual layer DVD-RW
If ur wodering Price- $850

[canadateck]

The only thing I can offer , is maybe a second Hard-Drive.

[Beavis]

The only thing that will really help you make a significant difference with rendering DV projects, conversion to MPEG, or both- is more CPU power.

[DeeLnyc]

What do you think is better ? having one hard drive for my OS and one for editing or just partition 1 hard drive.

[canadateck]

One for OS and one for editing. I even find it better to have 3 drives.

[thecoalman]

http://www.canopus.us/US/products/DVStorm2_Pro/pm_dvstorm_2_pro+.asp

[edDV]

Effects or MPeg rendering speed is all about CPU speed so long as you have a minimum amount of memory. Usually 256MB is enough. 512MB is plenty for most editors and encoders.

Higher end programs like Adobe Premiere and Sony Vegas will take advanage of Intel Hyperthreading. It may give you up to a 5-20% boost with certain encoders and effects that support Hyperthreading..

Second drives are good for capture but won't speed rendering.

[edDV]

What do you think is better ? having one hard drive for my OS and one for editing or just partition 1 hard drive.

A second drive is important for capturing and to keep OS and editing disk access processes separate. This works best when separate disk controllers are used. Most newer mother boards have additional EIDE (or SATA) channels on the mother board that can be configured as RAID or as additional EIDE channels. RAID is usually not needed. Configure as EIDE 3 and 4 and place your video drive on one of these channels.

The Premiere "scratch disks" (aka capture file or buffer) should be placed on the second drive. If you don't have a second drive, at least place the scratch disk in a separate partition from the OS.

[State Of Mind]

I also have a P4 3.0 GHz. Your DV files are 1.5 hours long. They are going to take some time. Live with it.

[The_Doman]

What do you think is better ? having one hard drive for my OS and one for editing or just partition 1 hard drive.

A 2nd harddrive is always nice but that 200G HD is really fast enough for your situation. You are capturing/transferring DV material which is not so demanding for the HD and CPU.
Just make seperate partitions for your OS and video captures.

[edDV]

What do you think is better ? having one hard drive for my OS and one for editing or just partition 1 hard drive.

A 2nd harddrive is always nice but that 200G HD is really fast enough for your situation. You are capturing/transferring DV material which is not so demanding for the HD and CPU.
Just make seperate partitions for your OS and video captures.

A single drive will generally work on a recent model computer, but watch out for background processes and anti-virus scans etc. In addition to these, the OS sometimes takes priority on the drive causing a potential for capture loss or in the case of DV, transfer loss. DV transfers are streams, not file transfers. If the HDD looses some packets or fields, there is no provision to back the camcorder up to resend data like there is in a OS controlled file transfer.

[The_Doman]

A single drive will generally work on a recent model computer, but watch out for background processes and anti-virus scans etc.

It wil work easily, I even have used a celeron 466 and scenalyzer to grab my dv tapes on a single drive system. Just make seperate partitions for your DV stuff and it will work fine.

[edDV]

The processor speed has little to do with DV transfers. It's about disk controllers and drives (anything over ATA33 is very good for DV) and bus mastering on the PCI bus. As long as the OS leaves the bus alone all will be well. Data will flow from the IEEE-1394 port to the disk controller and then to the drive.

For a single drive system, if the OS takes control of the bus and disk controller for a long enough period of time, your IEEE-1394 port data buffer will fill and data will be lost. The trick is to keep OS activity under control while transferring data. With a second disk controller and drive, this is much less likely to happen. Bus mastering allows the IEEE-1394 port to transfer data to the second HDD controller while the OS independently controls the OS drive.

Home users may not care but professional work will be rejected for these dropouts.

Note: Notebooks (and the Mac-Mini) have no provision for second disk controllers on the PCI bus, so the single disk limitation applies to all notebooks. External HDD on notebooks carries additional overhead burdens.

[filmguy123]

"State Of Mind" is right, with 1.5 hour movies it is simply going to take that long. Your comp is plenty fast enough for what you are doing right now. The only thing that will really make rendering significantly faster, like others said, is more CPU power. I don't recommend upgrading your CPU right now either. The best thing to do will be to just wait it out until faster hardware is out... have you seen Intel's latest roadmap? Of course there is hype and over-estimations mixed in, but basically they say by the year 2008 we can expect to see a ten-fold increase in speed... so count on things being 5x faster

Anyway I will say this. I have used both Adobe Premiere and Ulead Mediastudio Pro. I tend to favor Mediastudio as its scrubbing is much better than Premiere, it also has realtime preview playback, and its file rendering tends to be 2-3x faster. So one thing to look forward to may be improvements in Adobes code, or if you must have faster speed and don't mind switching software, try out a different program. www.ulead.com has a demo version of Ulead.

But you're probably just gonna have to wait until consumer desktops get faster and be happy with the speed you do have right now.

[SoundFX]

I run an internal four drive RAID0 array to capture and edit from. Forget the external FW drives, too slow. Leave the OS on it's own drive. Depending on the amount/type of effects, it's so fast I can print to tape from the timeline most of the time and skip the rendering all together. (sometimes pre-render the few problem areas...) I use this setup in both my 3Ghz P4 running Vegas5, and my dual 2.5Ghz G5 running FCP 4.5. Highly recommended...

[unclebud]

It also depends on the encoder used. TMPGenc will take longer then the Main Concept encoder. The number of passes will often double the times.
I presently use Vegas 5 on a 2.4ghz P4 non HT.
For DV encoding to MPeg2 for DVD creation I get...
1.5 hour video 1 pass is about 2 hours.
1.5 hour video 2 pass is about 3.5 hours.

Just My 2 Cents
UB

[cuervo]

If you were to use Vegas 5 and had a second computer, V5 allows network sharing for rendering. Not much good for small files, but, it's a real boon for large files.