Canon 7D PC System Requirements

[David Keslick]

Even the newest fasted systems could have trouble playing 7d footage. Especially once you add transitions and other effects. The new Premiere CS5 with its new mercury engine claims realtime playback and Edius also claims realtime playback. If you want to stay with Vegas than you can transcode or try DVFilm EPIC, which enables realtime playback without transcoding even with a laptop.

Dave Keslick
DVFilm.com

[Phillip Grey]

Oh, I intend to transcode. I didn’t mean editing straight from the camera; I just meant editing transcoded 7D footage. I’ll probably use Neoscene.

I’ll definitely be staying with Vegas.

[Phillip Grey]

So now that I’ve clarified, would you see I’m good to buy this computer?

[Aaron Stewart]

I would say this should be fast enough. Just make sure you’ve got enough HDD space, and you are backing up that HDD so if it fails you’ve got a backup. Might be worth the speed trouble to make sure you have a Firewire 800 card installed in the PC, as well as a Lexar Professional CF Card reader. Those things are a life saver…. 2-3 minutes to dump a full CF card instead of many more minutes for USB 2.0. Plus you could edit off of faster external drives… just something to think about.

Aaron R. Stewart
arstewart@gmail.com

[Erik Wright-olsen]

If I’m editing in Final Cut Pro, once I’ve transcoded 1080p 24fps footage, is there a snowball’s chance in heck that a 5400 rpm drive will work, or do I need 7200?

[Al Bergstein]

Philip, I’m running Vegas 9.0e on an HP with i-5 and a Samsung i5 laptop. Both work fine. Make sure that you have an outboard drive, as the laptop seems to have difficulties with playback on the internal system but plays fine after rendered out and played on anything else (like a standard WMP or Quicktime player file played on a DVD or external drive). I’ve had a bit of aggravation with playback on the desktop machine even with the external drive, as Vegas seems to be having some problems with that using either MOV or transcoded AVI, but I assume that Sony is working on that issue,as I’m not the only one complaining about it. I work around it for now, but it appears that Vegas might need to start making use of video graphics cards better, as they have always claimed to not need high end video cards to playback. I must say that the same footage, moved to Final Cut Pro on a high end Mac Pro, plays flawlessly on the monitor, no jumpiness. With both machines having tons of Video Ram, it’s not the footage!

On my Windows boxes, I’ve gone to the eSata doc, running off an eSata internal card add on for the desktop and the newer Samsung has an eSata port, but I’ve experienced a few problems with it going to sleep on me.

As to the question of 5400 RPM drives on the Mac, if they are firewire as opposed to USB, you might have the snowballs chance. The Canon T2i (550d) footage does seem to work fine with my older slower drives on my Mac (I have both newer faster drives and some older slower ones, all not the drive that holds the OS, remember). My Mac has 12 GBs of RAM by the way, so that may be also be an issue if you don’t have a lot of RAM. My older MBPro is pretty much useless except for Pro-Res Proxy, which is a pain. I’m in the midst of transitioning to Vegas for laptop field use. Much easier to use than FCP in the field!

Alf