Help with unique editing situation.

[BillThomas]

Hey, I've been working for the past few months as an editor at a skydiving dropzone. I have been using my Mac Pro and Final Cut and it has been working very well until now.

First let me share my typical workflow here; A load of tandems goes up with 4 or 5 videographers. The videographers each film; a beginning interview with the customer, footage in the plane and second interview, the skydive, landing, and a final interview. They all come back and give me their dv tapes and a CF cards at the same time. I capture the first tape and start copying and burning the stills. Each uncut video is 6 to 8 minutes long so I can usually copy and burn most of the stills while the first tape is being captured. I start editing the first video while simultaneously capturing the second tape via AVCVideoCap. Next, I start burning the first video in DVD Studio while editing the second in FCP and capturing the third with AVC, etc. Usually the first video is ready to give to the customer after 12-15 minutes and each additional one takes 6-7 minutes. It's also necessary to back up the video and stills for a least 6 months.

The problem is that all skydiving videographers are now switching over the CX-100 which captures in AVCHD to flash media. This is really the only camera choice for skydiving because OIS and Hard Drive systems don't work well in freefall. This camera brings up a few problems with my current editing setup. First, FCP can only Log and Transfer if the entire AVCHD folder structure is intact, so in order to back up the footage I can't just copy the mts files I need, I have to copy the entire card. Some of the videographers wipe their card after each jump and some never delete a video. It's also impossible to store the converted footage since when converted to ProRes or AIC it takes about 1GB per minute of video. Secondly, despite the fact that converting the files to AIC via USB is faster than the realtime capture of DV tape, when it comes time to render the project and send to DVDStudio I lose any time advantage I gained since it takes 4-5 minutes to render.

I think the way to go is to start using a Windows based system using Sony Vegas. I've been giving a budget of 1500 for the tower so I am looking into getting one built around the i7 920. I am a bit unfamiliar with Windows systems but from my understanding Sony Vegas can edit mts files natively (no conversion, and most importantly without having to keep the AVCHD file structure intact) as well as being able to have multiple, completely independent, copies of the program open at once. Since the most important thing in this industry is being able to edit multiple videos quickly and simultaneously, I would love to be able to finish my first video and let it start to render and then open a separate copy of Vegas and start to edit the second video. What kind of GPU should I be looking for? Is a single i7 920 good enough for HD? 6 or 12 gb ram? Is Vegas even the solution?

[aedipuss]

vegas is a decent, fairly easy to learn and use editor. with multiple instances, you'll have to reduce the number of rendering threads to save some cpu power for editing. it may be a bit sluggish with avchd. you'll probably want 4 hard drives also. one to render to, one as source, one for temp and one for the o.s./page file. samsumg f3s are about as fast as 7200rpm drives get and you'll want speed. maybe an external also for long term storage, i'd only save the rendered mpeg-2s for space reasons.