1 drive (RAID-0) or 2 drives for hard disk performance

[Gene Lee]

Ok, I tried installing and playing the demo of FIFA 10. I think something is wrong. The game plays fine, but no textures or shadows are rendered in the game!! And when I exited, my Windows 7 desktop background theme was gone and the desktop was all black! I tried to change it to something else, and it stayed black….

What is going on!?

[Brian Louis]

[Gene Lee] “but it records 720p30 as *.mov files. Since I’m a noob, I’m not sure if that is considered AVCHD, but I do EXPORT to H.264… but that’s after I edit, so I guess it doesn’t matter…”

The MOV wrapper contains H264/MP4 video with PCM audio, it can be very taxing on most systems particularly with effects added, like mentioned before you should try a intermediate codec, something like Cineform’s NeoScene, you can download a trial version.
Other software that can do reasonable RT with H264, AVCHD currently is Grass Valley’s Edius Neo2 with booster, booster is soon to be added to Edius NLE

[Gene Lee]

Thanks, Brian. I will do that. NeoScene seems to be pretty inexpensive.. is that the intermediate codec that you would recommend the most? Also, should I export the final product using that codec, or just use it as an “intermediary”?

Also, may I ask what kind of video card you use personally? In research about my video card problem, it seems like a LOT of people have had issues with the new ATI cards…

[Vince Becquiot]

Well, I think we established you have a problem with the card, or the drivers. DV should be playing back with no lag at all (as long as no effects were applied).

Certainly, H.264 will be less likely to give you realtime playback without rendering, but the fact that the textures were not there in FIFA tells you there is something going on with the card.

Having exhausted the driver options, it may be the time to return the card if you still can and try something on the Nvidia side.

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Gene Lee]

Thank you very much, Vince. You’ve been very helpful (and looking at all the posts you make in other threads, you’ve been helpful to a lot of people)!

So do you recommend Nvidia cards? Which card do you use personally, if I may ask?

[Brian Louis]

Till the NLE manuf. get caught up to the newer compressed formats sometime, neoscene appears to be a cheaper way to go than getting a huffing puffing 2cpu 8core system with hyperthreading, Grass Valley has the idea with their booster addon for their lower end software, soon to be added to their higher end Edius, Adobe probably will follow with their new versions.
With video cards I mostly stick with Nvidia, I used to intergrate systems in the past and had too many problems with getting proper drivers with ATI as they mostly used to develop for gamers and lag with multimedia except for their high end graphics cards, for most DV/HD/HDV editing and compositing you only need a decent display card, for my current desktop NLE system I use a 9600GT 512MB and the same with my laptop, for my graphics worksta I use a FX1700 quadro