New PC for HD editing in Vegas

[Jonathan Harris]

I bought a Samsung HMX-H100P 1920x1080i / 720p full HD camcorder and a copy of Vegas Pro 9, both of which I’ve wanted for ages, but could only afford when they were nearly half price. The camcorder is great and puts out a really good h.264 compressed image.

Now I got a problem. I thought my Medion PC with an Intel 3Ghz P4 hyperthreading thingummy with 3.25Gb RAM visible to WinXP would be fine, even though it’s 5 years old.

Wrong! It will JUST play the straight 1080x720p, forget about 1920, and when editing, each frame takes several seconds to render in Vegas! Normal avi edits fine.

I’m not prepared to encode everything to avi first, and I’m not exactly swimming around in cash. I’ve been looking at PCs for days and they’re all specced for gaming and stuff. I don’t do that.
From what I’ve read on the Vegas forums, it doesn’t use the graphics card to do the rendering work, which was my first idea so I don’t need terabytes of memory that gaming cards have either.

What I could really do with is to find a system/chipset/whatever that could handle h.264 mp4 with ease. I don’t even need on with an OS as people are getting good results with Windows 7 so that’ll do me for the next 9 months at least.

I don’t mind if it’s a prebuild, but it’s been 6 years since I built anything myself as it usually seems to work out better to get someone to do it.

My budget is £500 or less and I’m in the UK. I suppose the question would be:
AMD or Intel? Dual or Quad Core? etc – just anything to get the h.264 playing/editing properly!

People are now also telling me that I should have got a CUDA-aware editing programe but from this thread https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/24/892369 it looks like Vegas isn’t. Is this going to be a big problem for me?

Thanks

[John Rofrano]

> I bought a Samsung HMX-H100P 1920x1080i / 720p full HD camcorder

Part of your problem is that you bought a camcorder that does not shoot in an industry standard format. The Samsung has their own version of h.264 that no NLE is going to be optimized for. 🙁 Vegas Pro 9.0 is optimized for standard HDV and AVCHD. You should have bought a camera that shoots one of these standard formats if you planned to edit your footage. But there’s not much you can do about that now.

You’re going to need the fastest QuadCore that you can afford. H.264 requires lots of processing power. The conversations about CUDA are interesting, but the current suite that supports it (Adobe CS4) requires a $2,000USD CUDA card. So… now that your graphics card cost twice the price of your computer what have you really saved?

Vegas Pro 9.0 does a good job of taking advantage of multi-core PC’s. Get a new Intel Core i7 QuadCore and you should see a big improvement. My old Intel QX6700 QuadCore plays back AVCHD in Vegas Pro 9.0 at full frame rates.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Jonathan Harris]

Thanks for the info, John, especially about CUDA. I’d not really heard about it before, but it sounds like it doesn’t apply to me!

FWIW, I’ve already been through the whole “my codec’s better than yours” thing with a friend. To be honest, I can live in a world of weird codecs, because he started off trying to prove how much superior his £800 Sony HD camcorder was (which is AVCHD) and despite his “it must be your monitor/the weather/something” protestations, we couldn’t actually tell the difference, and the fact is my camcorder was £550 cheaper than his and does 50fps and timelapse with 10x optical zoom (which is precisely what I wanted) whereas his…doesn’t!

So, my only “sticking point” was the grunt needed to edit. From the info on chipsets you’ve given me, I’d looking at under £450 for a complete new PC. So all in all it still works out better for me (if it really works!). I get a camera AND a replacement for my ageing PC for the same price as my mate’s Sony. Now who’s smug?! 🙂

Anyway, thanks for the help on that.

[John Rofrano]

> FWIW, I’ve already been through the whole “my codec’s better than yours” thing with a friend…

If you are happy with the quality of your camera… then that’s all that matters. That’s why the come in all shapes and sizes and price points. 😉

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Andy Thomas]

“Vegas does not take advantage of a graphics card” So basically what you’re saying is, building a PC with a motherboard that has an Intel HD graphics card as part of it will suffice? All I should really consider then is a decent processor, 4 GB Ram or more and separate hard drives for OS and footage. Please let me know if I’m correct in my assumptions?
Thanx