Upgrading Avid, need advice

[The village idiot]

At work we are upgrading the software on one of our Avid composer NT machines. We decided to add Boris Red to the machine, and will have to upgrade to Composer 10.0.6. Any problems I should look out for when adding these 2 things? Also to make matters worse, we were told that we need to upgrade to win2000 or XP for Boris to work. Here is the current machine specs (don't laugh to hard).

IBM Intellistation 6889-52u:
single 500 Mhz slot1 PIII
256 Mb ram
SCSI system disk
Normal AVID boards (Merridian, Genie, SCSI, I think?)
PCI Matrox G200 display board
winNT4 sp5, DX?


I told the people who use this machine, that we need to at least put the second processor in this box. Or we can wait for hours (days) for it to render the effects in Boris. So we are planning to do that to, not that 2 PIII 500's is going to make a lot of difference. They aren't even the Xeon version, but that is what they want to do.

[BJ_M]

get a dual ibm intelistation dual xeon 2.4 or 2.8 on eaby -- which are approved for all flavours of AVID ..

but if you stay with what you have:
generally add to a gig a memory and max cpu speed out on your motherboard will keep in you in the ball park ..

all you need is the matrox g400 which is on the approved list ..


your question would be better answered on the creative cow forum or the AVID forum really .. (which i now see you have asked)

http://www.creativecow.net/index.php?forumid=45


personally i think the dps velocityQ system is a nicer system for the money and for sure has better video quality (without question) .. Real Time Simultaneous Playback of 4 Video Streams, 6 Graphics Streams, and
4 Channels of 3D DVE.
http://www.leitch.com/custserv/products.nsf/pcnlookup/nt0000587a

[The village idiot]

Yeah, I figured it would be best to ask at the other forum, but one of the guys that uses that box had already done that. So, I figured it wouldn't hurt to ask here too. I wish we could upgrade the machine. For the little amount of money it would cost, a P4 would work better. The problem is that we are a cheap channel owned station, and they have that nick for a reason. Thanks for the input

[The village idiot]

Forgot to say the other reason I asked this question here. it's for comments like this:

personally i think the dps velocityQ system is a nicer system for the money and for sure has better video quality (without question) .. Real Time Simultaneous Playback of 4 Video Streams, 6 Graphics Streams, and
4 Channels of 3D DVE.

Most likely I wouldn't have received a comment like that on the Avid forums. Indeed for what we are doing, and with the source that we have, Xpress DV powerpak makes more sense. Using uncompressed video with a DV source, and DV output like DVCpro is mostly a waste of storage. The only gains would be in rendering effects where the compression might interfere with the quality of the final output.

We just replaced an old Mac powerPC based composer with a new compaq P4 Xeon based machine and composer. But this isn't the one getting Boris, makes sense doesn't it. Infact the new P4 machine is used for in-house promotions, not making commercials that actually make money. For promotions, Xpress DV would be fine. I keep trying to convince them to just let me build the PC for use with the high end Avid, it would save a lot of money over what Avid charges for the hardware. And being that we are CheapChannels, we are not buying the Avid support package, so all the problems are ours to deal with anyway. Some days it is just the "Bang head here" routine ....

[BJ_M]

yes - avid dv would be really the way to go and it is used by many a station .. lots in fact ..

also vegas - yes vegas - take a look at the forum http://www.creativecow.net/index.php?forumid=24 and see how many are using vegas in a production setting ... and being all the time compared to avid dv ...

both are good really ...

i use all - avid DV (used for high def in my case), vegas, dps velocityHD (for high def)
most bang for buck is vegas by far -- speccially version 4

if you dont need 3d DVE , the 2d version of the dps reality is quite nice and not expensive (about $4000 - $5000 plus cost of the PC and storage)..

i know a lot of people using AVID DV and Vegas along with a Laird DV convertor (component I/O )