step up to HD

[Steve Rhoden]

Dont follow horror stories, All you need to start working with
HD is just a powerful computer….Everything falls into place after that.

Steve Rhoden
(Cow Leader)
Creative Arts Director and Film Maker.
Project Samples at:
http://www.youtube.com/hentys

[Mac Mcginnis]

Thanks. Any minimum requirements you can recommend?

[Martin Phillips]

I made the move a year ago. As well as being able to provide clients with HD copies on bluray, you will see a huge improvement in your current workflow-particually render times. I went for a windows 7, i7 processor, 12GB ram. Be sure to upgrade to Vegas 9 64bit. You will see it fly ……. Martin

[Danny Hays]

I have a 2.8 Windows XP dual core desktop and a 3.4 dual core laptop, half XP, half Windows 7 ( Set for dual boot) and both work fine. I am using Pro 9 and dont have the Cineform codec to convert to, but either machine will work with HDV 1080i. Plus Vegas 7 still has the Cineform codec you can convert to which is way more CPU friendly that HDV or AVCHD. I also just built an i7 930 6 gig ram and it’s much faster than the others. I would guess most any dual core would work with HDV as long as you have the patience for preview refresh rate and long render times. I would start the renders and go to bed. Hope this helps, Danny Hays

[Mac Mcginnis]

I have the following:

Sony Vaio PCVRZ46G – Purchased in 2003

Pentium 4
3.2 GHz w/hyperthreading
200 GB Hard drive
3 GB Ram – I added 2GB a couple years ago.

[Deborah Curtis]

I have a Panasonic HDC-SD60 Full HD video camera. I’m using an older PC as well.

Mine has a 2.0 GHZ dual Pentium processor with 4 GB of RAM. I’m running the media version of Windows XP SP3, and I have a very fast video card as well.

I’m using Vegas Movie Studio HD 10.0 and it’s going fine so far. The render times are rather slow, but it’s worth it to me for the video quality.

If you can bump up the memory a bit, that would be cheap and would probably help the render time. I’m not sure what the maximum is on your model of PC.

[Martin Phillips]

Remember though, that with a 32bit system (or windows xp) you are limited to 4GB ram, regardless of how much is installed. In fact Vegas will only be allowed to use 2GB out of the 4 installed in a 32bit system. 64bit systems, are not limited, so Vegas will use all the ram and all the cores to render. A 90 minute HD film will render to a DVD template in 50 minutes (2 pass vbr render).

[Deborah Curtis]

Really??? Very interesting! I am actually surprised at how nicely my .M2T files render considering their file sizes.

PC prices are coming down, and it’s definitely time for me to consider upgrading 🙂

[Dave Haynie]

I started in HD years ago, on a single core AMD Athlon XP. It worked, but even with HDV, editing was slow enough to get me liking Cineform. Vegas back then (version 6? version 7?) was about one revision away from really handling HDV well, though it did work. HDV editing got pretty good by the next upgrade, which was a dual-core Athlon64.

I think you’re ok for HDV editing. That’s not the best CPU by a long shot, but it’ll do the job. The big need for more CPU you’ll find if you do much rendering to other formats, or multi-layered edits in HD. If you’re editing from HDV back to HDV/MPEG-2, you’ll still win with a faster machine, but it’s not as profound. I was getting to the point where rendered to AVC for Blu-Ray ran 24 hours per hour on the Athlon64 machine. This was driven home when my new laptop (some years back) actually did it faster. Today I use a Core2 Quad at 2.83GHz… not even close to the fastest thing around these days, but good.

You don’t have enough storage for much video work of any kind, particularly nothing in Cineform (which runs around 50GB/hour, depending on your HD format). I’m transcoding AVCCAM at 720/60p to Cineform at this very moment… I have 4TB of internal storage, 11TB of external storage. Needless to say, this allows one to juggle multiple projects. Now, if you’re only shooting YouTube length video with a single camera, maybe not such an issue. If you do multiple hour+ projects, you’ll need more storage.

I have a wedding shoot I’m working on, two cameras, in Cineform for editing… it has its own 1TB drive. I actually have a couple of drive slots in my main PC… they take SATA drives, 3.5″ or 2.5″, basically making plain old drives work as removable storage. Large projects get their own HDD, and also get backed up on the 8TB RAID. You know your own requirements. In HDV, video is no larger or smaller than DV, but you’re kind of at the edge of ease-of-editing with that Pentium.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Martin’s also talking about an i7 (“Nehalem”) system, the fastest (as a class, anyway) you can get.. at least for a few more months (Intel’s next generation “Sandy Bridge” architecture is due Real Soon Now.. these will actually be called i7 2xxx series commercially). That’s still kind of expensive. He’s also free of any memory limits, but unless you have a very complex project, memory only helps so much. I didn’t see any increase in rendering time on normal projects when I upped my system (64-bit Windows 7) from 4GB to 8GB. But it’s also true that in a 32-bit system, you can only see a total of 4GB of address space, some of which is eaten up by GPU and I/O devices. 4GB RAM usually gives you about 3.2-3.4GB of actual memory, which is why 3GB machines became popular for awhile.

But even an upgrade to an i5, better Core 2, or the better AMD systems today will get you a huge performance increase over a system 3-4 year old or older. When I upgraded from a dual core Athlon64 at 2.4GHz to a Core2 Quad at 2.83GHz, I expected an increase, but it pretty dramatic. Full HD AVC renders went from “about 24 hours per hour” to “a few hours” (sure, it depends on effects, compositing, etc. too). DVD is something I can crank out at lunchtime.

-Dave