Is this enough PC to edit AVCHD

[snowymountains]

My first post after reading through a lot of the incredible information on this forum. What a wealth of knowledge!

I have decided to take the leap and get a HD Camcorder that will record in the AVCHD format. What I am wondering is if I have enough PC horsepower to edit it. Thought I would get some opinions before dropping coin on a new one.

I have:
HP Pavillion a1467c
Athalon X64 x2 4200+ Dual Core
4 gig RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 9500GT w/1GB
Running XP

I also have Pinnacle Ultimate 12 as well which looks to have AVCHD editing capability. Pretty sure I may have some additional questions about editing this format!

Thanks in advance for your time and replies.

[poisondeathray]

No, unless you use an intermediate, native editing will be sluggish

(unless your editor takes advantage of GPU acceleration for avchd, e.g. with a 3rd party plugin)

[neomaine]

snowymountains,

I'm not big on the video editing side but been here long enough to see that the people who do know what they're doing generally frown upon anything Pinnacle.

On the hardware side:

- CPU, though low-end, seems adequate.
- Memory is fine but XP can only use 3.5gb. No big deal.
- A single hard drive will be a gating factor. If you're going to get into editing video a minimum setup would be:
- One hard drive for OS and programs.
- One hard drive for source video
- One hard drive for destination video

Keeping in mind the rule of thumb is to do all your reading from one drive and all your writing to another. This keeps your i/o as efficient as possible and eliminates thrashing (reads/writes to same drive). Some tools use intermediate or temp files to do the work so you need to be aware of where the software keeps it.

For instance, even though you have your source on drive D and your destination on drive E, if the software has uses a temp file on drive D before going to the E drive, you've only avoid half the problem. In this case it would be better to use D as both source and dest.

Software 1, no temp file:
Source -> Dest. Use D for source, E for dest

Software 2, uses temp file:
Source -> Temp -> Dest. Use D for source, E for temp, D for dest.

Software 3, used temp file but only renames it for dest.
Source -> Temp -> Dest. Use D for source, E for temp and dest.
I use Xvid4PSP to convert files. It reads from D:, creates a temp 001.avi file to write to that put on E and then renames it when done. No real i/o when going from temp to dest file.

Maybe you can't do the multiple hard drive thing right away but it should be something you think about if you really get into this.

(PS: Multiple partitions on the same drive don't count. However, as a first step you could partition your first drive into a C: for OS/programs and D: for video and have at least a second drive. Generally, OS/program activity is fairly minimal.)

[poisondeathray]

Good info by neomaine

But the bottleneck in your situation is the CPU; you are not disk I/O limited in this editing situation. So even a few ramdisks or ssd's won't help one bit.

You will be able to playback fine in multithreaded players, or dxva supported players (e.g. mpchc) - but editing is another story. You would have to pre-render or use intermediates. NLE's add another layer of overhead, and do not playback as well as dedicated media players. If your editing is very simple (like cuts & pastes) and timing isn't important you could get by. But each layer added, each effect, transition etc... will slow it down even more

Some lower end editors will automatically generate a MPEG2 intermediate file for AVCHD. Not sure if Pinnacle does this. This is bad because of quality loss.

[snowymountains]

Thank you neomaine and poisondeathray.

neomaine, I think you meant frown from using anything Pinnacle? I can say I'm not the biggest fan of the software with the limited use I have given it. Bought their movie in a box package to get all of my Hi8 tapes to digital. Didn't work. Threw the little USB box to the kids for a toy but kept the software thinking it might be better if I used strictly with digital video rather then analog. Still working on the Hi8 stuff. I don't want anymore tapes so I am probably going to give the Canopus box a try.

Any suggestions on a good editor that won't kill the piggy bank?
Did read some on Xvid4PSP and I am sure that I will be downloading that.

I had a hunch my CPU was going to be a factor.

The editing I am looking to do initially is the basic slice and dice of scenes with some transitions, menus, audio overs, etc. mainly for distribution to family. Of course no one in my family has a DVD player that is newer then 2003 so the format matters! For me personally I want to keep it HD. Maybe using something like WD TV in addition to Blue Ray playback. But as I move along I'm sure I'll want to do more advanced items.

Thanks again.

[fitch.j]

For what your wanting, using something like Premiere Essentials may suite you without blowing the bank by getting PremPro.

This of course is assuming you've upgraded your system to cope, or found an intermediate that you are comfortable using.