recommended PC specs for DV video

[choirislife923]

i am just wondering, since I am about to make the plunge to get a DV camcorder, i would like to know if my PC is fast enough for DV.

768MB RAM DDR 2100
Athlon XP 2400 (2ghz)
120HD western digital...30GB left

if you need more specs, look in my profile. if you need even more, reply here and i will answer.

what i am thinking about doing is converting the DV video from my firewire port to mpeg 2 NTSC dvd standards in realtime using MainConcept. When I record stuff onto my HDD from VHS and 8mm, I use 3.96megabits per second @352x240. I do not know if my PC will be able to handle VBR with 2.5 megabits minimum and 8 megabits maximum @ 720x480.

[choirislife923]

btw, HDD is 7200RPM EIDE.

[Sifaga]

I am doing some DV capture(Transfer) using my Sony DV Camcorder and Firewire,

your PC specs are better than mine so it should be fast enough,

you will probably need more than 30gig, i think its about 13gig per hour of DV

you would need some work space

[Richard_G]

If you are going to do any amount of video you'll need more hard drive space. NTSC DV is 720 x 480 and runs out at 13 Gb per hour which works out to just under 4 Mb per second.

You should have no problem at all with your spec of machine. I can transfer DV to my daughters pc which is an Athlon 600, 256 Mb PC133 ram and a EIDE 66 hard drive.

My original video machine was a K6-2 450 and could manage sustained data transfer rates of around 15 Mb per second.

DV transfer should be no problem at all, it's analogue capture that needs higher spec hardware.

[choirislife923]

DV transfer should be no problem at all, it's analogue capture that needs higher spec hardware.

what about realtime mpeg2 conversion?

[Richard_G]

That all depends on what software you are using but your machine should be well up to it (mine is, see specs above). I rarely use it as I mostly want to be able to properly edit my footage before turning it into a DVD and mpeg isn't the format to use if you are going to be editing. Transfer as DV avi, edit and then compress to mpeg.