What's necessary ?

[v2rahn]

As beginner I'm planning to buy a new PC to make video editing of my personal videos (Sony Hi8 PAL). I plan to go with a Marvel G400TV or G440-RRG combination plus MediaStudio or VideoWave (how do the 2 compare ?). As I do not want to spend money for nothing:

1. Is it necessary or beneficial to have an UltraDMA/66 drive ? Is it necessary or beneficial to have a 7200rpm drive instead of 5400rpm ? Or does drive speed not matter and I rather spend the money for some more GB capacity...

2. Is processor speed an issue for video capture, recording back on tape, or monitor viewing, or for any of the editing software? Or is whatever >400MHz fine? Has PentiumIII any advantages over PentiumII or Celeron ?

Thanks a lot !

[This_Idiot]

It's all about value for money. I have 2 machines, with a PII 266 and Celeron 300a @450. The PII has 96Mb RAM, the Celeron 128Mb. Both machines have an HD for the O/S and applications, and a second 8.4Gb UDMA (33) drive for captured video ONLY.

Look for a reasonably specified low or mid-range PC and then be prepared to spend just a bit more on making RAM up to 128Mb and the biggest HD you can afford. Since it is (almost) impossible to buy HDs that are not UDMA compatible now you shouldn't have too many problems. Take care over soundcard choice (read the forum here for problems, SBLive seems to cause all kind of problems)

[v2rahn]

Thanks a lot for your answers !

May I wrap it up so far:
- There is no command in the PentiumIII a Marvel or any editing software involved depends on. It would just be faster, if the CPU is faster.
- A hard drive with DMA/33 is perfect. The bigger, the better.

If I understood it so far, may I add another question:

A) About the VE softwares: If I need to edit some video taking up 1GB after capturing, do I need 1GB of disk space, or do I need 2GB (=1 for the original and 1 for the new copy) ? How smart are those softwares in managing this ?

B) I know I can not tune into PAL TV with a NTSC tuner. Anyhow, will I be able to capture / output to tape PAL video with an American (NTSC) version of G400TV ? (Why I ask? In the US it's hard to get a PAL card, but I sit here with friends in Europe as viewers of my tapes and thus a PAL camcorder).

C) Do you have a soundcard to propose that makes no problems? I really need it only for the video stuff, not for gaming.

Would be wonderful if someone could reply to this as well.

[Pertti]

Hi v2rahn,

A) The 1G+1G should work quite well.

B) The Line-In/Out can do PAL/NTSC/SECAM on all cards.

C) Old SoundBlaster 32/64 ISA AWE:s are amongst the best choises, whatever PCI ones are potential troublemakers.

You could also consider getting several smaller (~10GB) HD:s instead of one HUGE, you know why when you are moving your files from one partition to another to keep your capturing partition empty.

Pertti

[This_Idiot]

Yep, Pertti is right.

But I disagree to a small extent on the PCI soundcard front. While it seems true that a number of PCI soundcards can give problems, I have been using a Yamaha Waveforce 193XG for several months now and haven't had any problems with it at all.

A bunch of smaller HDs works out more expensive but can easily be optimised (try defragging a 10Gb drive).

If ypu are intending to output to tape you can play multiple edited clips off the timeline direct to tape instead of rendering, but if you do any significant editing on the soundtrack or transitions you will need extra HD space. Rendering to an intermediate file for processing to MPG (or whatever) will require an *2.x factor sinve you need to render the original movie (*2) and then generate the MPEG or MP2 (around 25% of original movie size)

[Grigory]

1. There are NO benefits from 7200. Most modern hard drives can do their job well with 5400 and 6-8 MB/sec datarate.
2. The more CPU power - the better in terms of transitions rendering. It is going on CPU only. You may want to find the optimum: 450 PIII costs 100$ more than Celeron, but "may" give speed increase for newest codecs and effects that support new instruction. The total system cost increase is only several percent.
PIII 733 costs > x3 more than 450, but gives you only 1.5 speed increase. It may be better to buy extra 30-50 GB of drive space for these money.

Grigory