Using Premiere on a PC?

[Vince Becquiot]

Depending on the type of footage, where it is stored, etc.

Your biggest issue is that this seems to have an integrated graphics card, which would be a deal breaker for any editing system.

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Brian Louis]

Depends on what flavor of video you want to edit, DV or HD/HDV? like Vince mentioned if you got the intergrated graphics version it could give you some problems with 3gigs of memory, CS4 can be a memory hog, as you didn’t comment which graphics adapter you have, the intel intergrated or quadro standalone??
If you want to spend a few bucks, you could add a 4gig memory chip or 2 to get a total of 6 or 8 gigs, upgrade to a win7 64bit version, get a external eSATA II drive(a good idea no matter which kind of video you want to edit)

[Kendra Hall]

Thank you for the help!

The graphics are NVIDIA Quadro NVS 160M. I was also planning to purchase an external hard drive as well. I would be editing HD/HDV video.

Now that you know these facts, what do you think?

[Warren Morningstar]

I sometimes edit with CS4 on a Lenovo T61 – Dual core 2.09 GHz, 3 GB RAM, Nvideo Quadro NVS 140M. I edit everything from DV to RED, but it’s mostly simply stuff — it will choke pretty fast when you start getting multiple HD streams. Several things to improve the experience. If CS4 freezes or quits, try scaling back the graphics hardware acceleration. I turn it off completely when I’m editing. I have a 2nd internal hard drive for my video files, but that still isn’t fast enough for some things. I also have an external G-Tech RAID 0 drive with an eSATA card for HD files.

[Joseph Donnelly]

I would recommend against Premiere–especially if the idea is to edit HD–with those specs. As your projected system is almost what I’m running, I can say that HD editing will be atrocious–I’d suggest trying out CS3 (I never edited HD with it but I do know that the RAM overhead is much more manageable if it has the capability to actually handle the footage, of which I’m unsure) or (shudder) getting Avid Media Composer through whatever sources you can, since Avid is the only reliable HD editor I’ve come across with our similar specs.

Joseph Donnelly
Editor

[Eric Addison]

As someone who edits HD with CS4, I can say that it works great for me. Something to keep in mind when using PPro is that it likes a lot of memory – and if you have a 64bit OS, that makes things a lot better. I’ve many HDV and XDCAM HD projects with very little if any trouble.

Looking over the specs, I’d say you may not have the best experience. I’ve got a Core 2 Duo 2GHz with 2GB of RAM with an extra internal 7200rpm drive for media, Vista 32bit, and I can play back and edit basic HD/HDV projects. I usually get decent playback performance by switching to draft mode for viewing, but if I try and do too much, things can slow down.

I would try and get a more powerful laptop if possible, otherwise you may have some trouble – HD requires a little more horsepower.

—Eric

[Joseph Donnelly]

Draft settings will help, but I’d still recommend a better rig or program for HD editing with your specs: while you might be able to achieve decent playback with unaltered footage, you will slow to a crawl if you do any effects work. Also, I’d be wary of render times: since migrating all of the export functions to Adobe Media Encoder, I’ve been dealing with significant issues regarding export functionality.

Are you on Windows 7/Vista or XP? Apparently CS4 is optimized for a 64 bit OS, but I can’t speak to that personally.

Joseph Donnelly
Editor

[Brian Louis]

The standalone quadro is an advantage, like mentioned Ppro CS4 likes memory, and the 64bit op system is an advantage, here is a link that has info on adobe 64bit.
https://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/production/pdfs/cs4_production_premium_64bit_wp.pdf
Your computer has 3gigs of memory, more than likely a 1 gig chip and a 2gig chip, if you replace the 1 gig with a 4 gig(kingston $170) that will give a leg up with 6gigs, and of course a 64bit OS, Since your laptop has a built-in eSATA port that gives an advantage to add a fast external drive or drive array, One item thats handy is a USB/eSATA drive docking station, drives just plugin and are in open air for cooling, easily swapped.

[Kendra Hall]

Thank you all for your feedback. Would the below computer work better to edit HD video in Premiere??

Mobile Precision M6400
Intel(r) Core(tm) 2 Duo T9600 (2.80GHz, 6M L2 Cache, 1067MHZ) Dual Core,Genuine Windows Vista(r) Business 64-BIT SP1, With media. Memory is 8.0GB, DDR3-1066MHz SDRAM, 4 DIMMS. Graphics are NVIDIA Quadro FX 2700M, 512MB Discrete. Primary Hard Drive 320GB Hard Drive, 7200RPM with Free Fall Sensor.

Thank you!