computer specs for capturing digital video?

[madsteintist]

I am posting on behalf of my brother who shoots videos of his band using a digital video recorder. The media he captures on to are those mini video tapes (I forget the exact name but they are about 1 inch wide or so).

He has an AMD 1100mhz CPU with 128K of RAM. Obviously he is on the bottom of the RAM scale and I assume capturing uses a lot of RAM. He has a firewire card for the capturing so the speed should be good.

Basically what I wanted to know should he max out his RAM to 1GB and keep his CPU, or get a new current CPU, or both? Feel free to ask specifics if I can offer up more info or post your suggestions.

Thanks in advance.

Mad Steintist

[thecoalman]

Just rip the disc to HD to edit it. Ram is probably a good idea as is a better CPU. Both are needed for video editing but if he doesn't mind waiting a few days for it to encode he'll be fine.

try DVD Decrypter

[hsugawar]

128MB is probably far short for anything. I was using an AMD Athlon 1GHz/1GB before moving to a Pentium 4/1GB to escape from frustrating sluggishness.

hiro

[lenti_75]

the faster the better

you need both, just ram si not enough. I recommend, 2Ghz or faster, min 512 ram
don;t matter if is pentium 4 or amd, i preffer amd because is cheaper

[madsteintist]

Bump.

Just wanted to get a few more opinions/suggestions on what I should suggest to him for hardware specs for downloading video.

Thanks again for your help.

[pchan]

Any Intel P4 2.4Ghz or better or AMD XP2500+ or better PC wih 512MB RAM and a 120Gig had drive. Make sure you have a good power supply with min 350W e.g. Antec, HEC.

[troyvcd1]

I think he should try to capture first and see what happens. The setup he has if his computer is running good should be good enough to capture. Then if he cannot I would say get some more ram. I have a p3 800 with 512mb and I never drop a frame.

[edDV]

OK hold on here. A PIII 750MHz and a ATA66 drive is more than enough to transfer DV over a IEEE-1394 interface from a camcorder. It should be possible with a PII 300MHz and a ATA33 but not fun. The speed is more to do with the HDD and disk controller speed than the CPU or RAM.

Now the question is RAM. You didn't say what OS you are using. If Win98se with all proper drivers then 128MB should work, 192MB would be a no brainer..

Are you having problems getting the data from the camcorder?

For Win98se or XP, 256MB is enough. For most editing and encoding programs 256MB is enough although there may be a small advantage to 512MB.

For encoding, CPU speed rules. RAM won't help much.

[madsteintist]

His computer is running win2000 and dreadfully slow. When he tries to capture, the program starts up then begins the capture process and about 3 seconds later the whole thing locks up every single time. I didn't build it, but its a real 'Frankenstein' and does not run well at all. I did clean up his system some and remove a bunch of background running programs.

[thecoalman]

Is he trying to capture to something other than DV-AVI?

[mats.hogberg]

DV "capturing" is simple I/O - no power needed here (but lots of HDD). Editing this would require lots of RAM, and encoding it to some other format (like DVD) takes CPU (if you don't mind having your computer occupied for a few days).

/Mats

[edDV]

We've all been assuming you are talking about a MiniDV camcorder and DV transfer over IEEE-1394, but reading your first paragraph again, this might not be the case.

"I am posting on behalf of my brother who shoots videos of his band using a digital video recorder. The media he captures on to are those mini video tapes (I forget the exact name but they are about 1 inch wide or so). "

Please be more specific what this "digital video recorder" is exactly.
We may be talking about a different animal.

[madsteintist]

edDV you are correct. He has a mini-DV camcorder and uses a firewire to put on his hard drive.

He is not looking to do any kind of editing just saving it to .avi or .mpeg for computer viewing and buring it to CD or DVD to be viewed. I don't know the specific cam type offhand.

[edDV]

edDV you are correct. ...

He is not looking to do any kind of editing just saving it to .avi or .mpeg for computer viewing and buring it to CD or DVD to be viewed. I don't know the specific cam type offhand.

With that computer, if working properly, he can.

- save it to .avi (DV-AVI)
should be OK

- view DV-AVI on computer
will be jerky or not play at all

- save it to mpeg2 (at DVD standard)
no way realtime.
DV-AVI could be converted over 1-2 hours to MPeg2 (for a full DVD) with a MPeg2 encoder and then burned to DVD.

- buring it to CD
CD will hold 3 min DV-AVI, or 10-20 min MPeg2 (DVD std).