P4 3.06 ghz

[Haopengyou]

I have a celeron desktop with 512 mb of ram, an ATI dual head video card (128 mb ram) 15K 36 GB HD, a 10K 72 GB and a 1TB hard drive on the way, that I can upgrade to a 3.06 ghz P4 with 3gb of memory for about $40. I was planning on just getting parts for a whole new computer...then this really neat sale came up on a camcorder, and, well, you know how that goes.

With the P4 will I be able to do real time editing? - that is one reason why I got the dual head video card. With the present system it takes about 3 hours to render 1 hour of video (am using Ulead v. 9) With the upgraded system will I come close to having a 1 to 1 ratio for rendering? i.e. one hour to render one hour of video? Does rendering time depend on the software being used?

[jagabo]

With the P4 will I be able to do real time editing?

Of what? Standard definition DV? Yes -- ish. High definition AVCHD? No. (Note that editing is not rendering.)

that is one reason why I got the dual head video card.

That won't make editing or rendering go any faster.

With the present system it takes about 3 hours to render 1 hour of video (am using Ulead v. 9) With the upgraded system will I come close to having a 1 to 1 ratio for rendering? i.e. one hour to render one hour of video?

No. Going from a 2.4 GHz Celeron to a 3.0 GHz P4 will probably increase your rendering speed by about 20 percent. So your 3 hour encode will drop to about 2.5 hours.

Does rendering time depend on the software being used?

Yes. Some encoders are faster than others. CCE is fast, TMPGEnc is slow. I think Ulead is somewhere in between.

[edDV]

A Core2Duo processor will get you faster than 1:1 for MPeg2 encoding with ULead's Mainconcept encoder.