Computer build up

[lsvtec]

Hi there, I'm new to this forum board. This site seems very interesting.. the search tool is kinda confusing. So i'll just ask here.

I'm going to build a whole different computer for movie making. I have this computer here for personal usage.. But talking about movie making, what makes rendering and capturing faster? the CPU speed? Video Card? I no playing video games is good with a faster video card.

Right now i have the p5n-e sli mobo with the q6600 and 4 gb ram..

any advice on a new build? looking to spend 1k$ Thanks In advance

[jagabo]

Nothing makes capturing faster. The single most critical component for encoding video is the CPU. The Q6600 is a good choice. 4GB is more than necessary but memory isn't expensive so you might as well get that much. Two or more drives is a good idea. But they don't need to be raid or even 10K drives. Dual monitors is nice.

[lsvtec]

i haven't notice a lot of difference from this q6600, from my pentium d.. cpu.. and i'm not sure if my mobo is weak or what.. need to invest in A better mobo

[jagabo]

What software are you using? If the programs aren't well multithreaded you may not see much improvement going from a Pentium D to a Q6600. Most video encoders are fairly well multithreaded these days though. I've seen a significant improvement going from a Core 2 Duo to a Core 2 Quad.

Are all four cores being recognized and used bye Windows? Bring up Task Manager (Ctrl+Alt+Del) -- does it show 4 cores in the Performance tab? If not, you may need a BIOS update.

[kush]

Or you may need to reinstall the ACPI multi-processor driver (if Windows can't see the 4 cores, no matter how multithreaded the programs are you can't take advantage!)... Should be in Device Manager under either Computer, or Processors.. Just to be safe, I'd set a restore point (just in case!), uninstall, reboot, and Windows should automatically reload the ACPI driver so the quad can be properly recognized.

And yes, the increase from dual to quad (much like my jump from single core K7 -> dual K8 a couple years back) in a decently threaded program should be quite noticeable.

[Faustus]

What software are you using? If the programs aren't well multithreaded you may not see much improvement going from a Pentium D to a Q6600. Most video encoders are fairly well multithreaded these days though. I've seen a significant improvement going from a Core 2 Duo to a Core 2 Quad.

Are all four cores being recognized and used bye Windows? Bring up Task Manager (Ctrl+Alt+Del) -- does it show 4 cores in the Performance tab? If not, you may need a BIOS update.

The Pent D is a dual core chip. Its just not part of the current series.

That being said when I went from my 805D to my 2.2 Core2Duo I saw a difference but it was hardly a HUGE one.

[Soopafresh]

No need to spend a lot of $ on the video card. Anything above an Nvidia 6200 will work just fine. Spend the dough on a Q6600 and new motherboard and hard drive.

[lsvtec]

[redwudz]

What hardware do you plan to use for capturing and in what format? That has quite a bit of bearing on what you may need. DV needs very little for transferring the video from a camcorder. Some AVI formats require quite a bit of CPU power to process on-the-fly. For direct MPEG capture, the Hauppauge cards are popular. Then you just edit, author and burn to DVD if that's your final format.

A fast CPU and several cores really helps with encoding, especially highly compressed codecs like H.264. Also important is lots of hard drive space. I usually install three hard drives. One for boot, one for edit and one for storage. The video card is mostly used for viewing (Or gaming ) I also like the Gigabyte MBs, but that's a personal preference.

And welcome to our forums.

[aedipuss]

you might try changing the fsb:dram setting to 1:1 and lowering your mem timing to 333 that would give you 3.0GHz and less stress on the mem chips.

[lsvtec]

Adobe Premiere Pro CS3
I think my problem might be space as well, im just using one internal hd. 500gb.. i might just need to get more hd's Thanks for all the advice..

i'm really new into the computer stuff i been buying HP and Dell computers.. and they have been really crappy.. building my own stuff has really been useful and less stressful.

[lsvtec]

i have a hdr-fx1 sony hd camcorder. im using windows xp pro...

[redwudz]

If you are doing transfers via a FireWire card from a camcorder, then that's hardly any CPU strain. But DV will use about 13GB an hour of hard drive space. Figure editing and encoding will each need that same amount again, and you can see how you can run out of HDD space fairly quickly. You don't really need super fast hard drives, just lots of space.

If your PC has a free SATA connector on board, you might consider a eSATA external drive. You can use a eSATA PCI slot adapter and bring the connector to the rear of the PC. That's sometimes easier than installing a new drive inside the case.

[rcguy1]

If you plan on upgrading to edit HD in the future, you may consider a good video card. At least a 8600 or better.

[jagabo]

If you plan on upgrading to edit HD in the future, you may consider a good video card. At least a 8600 or better.

Actually, the nvidia 8500GT has all the features of the 8600GT, just a little slower (both are sufficient for 720p and 1080i). The 8600 may be a better choice simply because it's hard to find a 8500 with two DVI ports. The cost difference isn't so big anymore.

The main issue here is the hardware h.264 and VC1 decoding for playback. There have been promisses of hardware encoding by the GPU for years now but no software has turned up (except for a few alpha demos).