-
Advice for a HD editing station
-
[Adamcj] “By the way, does FCP have any sort of storyboard editing feature like Liquid or SpeedEdit?”
Not that I know of.
Shane
Littlefrog Post
http://www.lfhd.net -
Pity. It’s a great and fast way of putting a rough cut together.
-
Just about anything made in the last four years or so will “do” everything that final cut can dish out provided it is equipped properly. You can’t do uncompressed HD without a RAID array and an acceleration card. I don’t care if it is an eight core Intel or a 1.6GHz G5, it’s just a fact of life.
I think the word speed gets tossed around here quite a bit and really speed can mean a whole lot of things to different people. Speed to editers, however, means two things-RT and render times. Every system has a RT threshold, basically the amount of effects that can be handled before having to render out. Faster sytems have a higher threshold. Faster systems will also render faster when the threshold is exceeded.
For right now and your needs, HDV, a G5 system will be just fine but remember the old adage, “What is fine today won’t neccessarily be fine tommorrow.” Newer systems have a longer planned obselensce time period. For your needs, get a G5 with at least the PCIe bus interface, you’ll be able to do more with it later. A 2GHz system can be either-or between a third gen PCI express and a second gen PCI-X, be sure to ask.
-
If you are going to be working in HDV learn as much as you can about the HDV format, there is a great article about it in the Oct issue of the Creative Cow Magazine.
Conforming and rendering are separate things. Conforming can take a lot longer. Because of iFrame structure of HDV it can be a pain at times to work with, and it must conform or create new iFrames when you export back to tape or compress for DVD.
Depending on the length of your video conforming it can a long time. I recently did a 40 min video in HDV and it took 8+ hours to convert tit to DVD. And then of course for some odd reason the audio was out of sync, redoing it fixed the issue but it took 8+ hours to redo.
A faster computer cuts down on the time it takes to do it. I am on a Dual 2.5 G5 Tower with 2.5 Gigs of ram. and it still took that long to do. Boy do I wish a had had a new Dual Quad Power Mac.
-
-
I’ve also been considering what to get with my budget restraints…
I’ve been using FCP 5.1.4 Sony HDV (1440x1080i) ona Dual G5 w/ 4GB of Ram…
before I only had 2GB and I felt the playback was suffering from too many drop frames.
4GBs fixed that….but like they said…the render times make me wanna go drinking for a while.
Most of the work I’ve been doing is for web…I’m firewire all the way! so I havent even got a capture card yet, since I dont need to view a HD monitor (though it would be nice)…
–I would like one that would take some of the load off the CPU though…too bad I just dont have 2500 bux.
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up