What card to buy to speed up Premiere and DVD authoring?

[993tt]

Hi all

I'm planning to upgrade my system because I'm tired of waiting everytime I'm going to render a project or preparing a DVD. I'm going to order a P4 Northwood 2.4GHz, 1Gb RAM and two 120Gb Maxtor DiamondMax Plus9 in a new box with ABit BH7 motherboard and a Sapphire ATI Radeon 9000 RV250 graphics card.
In addition to this I understand that I can buy a special DV-card that will make Premiere run much faster when calculating transitions and such. The question is, which card is the best out there? value for money? I recently bought a DVD+ and - R/RW and started to try and record my own DVD. I discovered that it takes a shit load of time to render? (don't know what the hell the program does, some mpeg conversion maybe) when I'm going to record the DVD. I would also like the DV-card to be able to speed up this process if possible.

Can someone please give me some information on what to buy?


I looked around a little and this is what I found. No information about support for DVD authoring though...
Matrox RT.X10 Xtra
Matrox RT.X100 Xtreme
Pinnacle DV 200
Pinnacle DV 500 DVD
Pinnacle DV 500 Edition

Which is the best one for my needs - Premiere support and speeding up DVD authoring? Is there maybe another card that better suit my needs out there? I realize that the support for DVD rendering is probably more application specific (if it's possible) so please tell me which program to use also.

ahhh... almost forgot. All my source material (up to this point anyway) is from my DV-camera. And I already own a Firewire card so it's not neccesary that the DV-card have it.


The software I use is:
Premiere 6
Nero 5.5.10.28
Dazzle DVD Complete
Running under Win98 though I will propably go with XP on the new system.

Thanks for your time
/Erik

[993tt]

I almost decided to go with the Matrox RT.X10 Xtra but it doesn't seem to support DVD authoring directly from Premiere. Does anyone know if the Matrox MediaExport plug-in uses the card to speed up the process or if it's just dependent of the processor speed?

/Erik

[housepig]

I almost decided to go with the Matrox RT.X10 Xtra but it doesn't seem to support DVD authoring directly from Premiere

how could it? Premiere is not a DVD Authoring application, it's a video editor.

If you're looking to speed up your edit time, then these all look pretty good. If you're looking to speed up your rendering time, I have a hard time seeing the benefit - it seems like the Matrox stuff is focused on real-time editing, not encoding.

This would speed up editing and compositing decisions, because somehow it doesn't require a render to view the effects and edits. But big deal - Vegas Video on my system doesn't require a render to preview either. (And my system is not that hot, check my specs).

But for encoding, I don't see anything that's going to speed that up, except a faster processor and faster hard drives.

And once your footage is done, you're still going to have to author with a dvd-authoring app. What are you using now? Is it possible that some of the long time you're experiencing is due to your authoring app reencoding some not-quite-compliant video assets? (either not dvd-compliant, or in some cases, valid as a dvd file but not supported by the app, so the app reencodes it to a format it likes.)

More info on your encoding software and specs is needed, as well as your authoring app.

[Heavensent]

i think that some mpeg2 capture cards (realtime) have
a chip that whould help you encode faster, but i dont know which ones
have it...
but on the other hand, it can save you time by capturing directly to
mpeg2.
you will not be able to edit it as much as you want thogh...

hope this helps in some way....