What do I need to moving to HD Video?

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Mark,

I think the first consideration would be which cameras/HD format will you choose? This can make a difference for editing. Will you work with HDV, AVCHD, XDCAM EX?

I personally use the Matrox RT.X2 and love it, I do a lot of 1080i HDV editing, all real time, no rendering! You don’t want to render all your effects for HD, it is quite intensive.

RT.X2 does not currently support AVCHD in realtime, so again, good idea to decide on cameras before the edit system.

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor

[Vince Becquiot]

All will depend on your budget.

If you have the right machine and camera, it may be all you need.

Many cameras such as the Panasonic HVX200 / HPX 500, or the Sony EX1 /EX3 record to solid state which can be transferred via Firewire / USB.

Either of these formats will require some type of RAID system for good performance (3 drives RAID 0) with separate OS and backup drives is a great starting system.

CPU wise, you should probably at least go for a Core2Quad (faster rendering).

4 Gigs of RAM or more, and a dedicated video card (NVIDIA 8800 for eg) and you should be set.

Expect to spend around $2000.00 + for the machine.

You will however need a card if you want to preview the footage on a broadcast monitor. (add between $2000.00 and $5000.00 for a good HD monitor) and $1000.00 + for a good HD SDI or component card (AJA, Decklink etc.)

Vince Becquiot
Director | Editor

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Mark Collins]

Would you recommend a 64bit computer?

Thanks,
Mark

[Mark Collins]

Thanks for the information.

You mention raid 0 configuration would be recommended, with Premiere Pro.

I currently have a raid 5 configuration. Do you know if I am losing speed with the raid 5 configuration? Would you recommend to me, to reformat to use raid 0, instead raid 5?

[Vince Becquiot]

Yes 64 bits will at least allow you to access extra memory at this point.

Hmmm, RAID 5 vs RAID 0. It’s a tuff one to answer because there are so many flavors of RAID 5. If you have a good RAID dedicated card ($600.00 + last time I checked) it has the potential to be as fast as the equivalent in a raid 0.

The motherboard integrated type will not do you much good and they are rarely reliable. They also use your CPU to process the data transfers.

RAID 5 is certainly safer than a RAID 0, but it’s by no means a substitute for constant backups. What I’m getting at is:

If you don’t own one of these cards, or can’t afford one, stick with RAID 0.

On the RAID, you should only store footage that need high speed access and that you already have a back up copy of. (Usually that won’t change much during the edit of a project).

It’s also perfect for preview scratch disk.

Keep your project files and sensitive data out of there.

Ideally you would have:

One drive for your OS, one for projects files (could be the same as your OS but separate is always better), the RAID drives, and one or more backup drive.

I use Backup4all for all our backup processing. A nice little application that support incremental backups.

Vince Becquiot
Director | Editor

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Mark Collins]

Thanks for the information, it really seems to be pointing me in the right direction. One other thought, as far as the G-Speed, Drobo and the alike raid systems. What is your recommendation, as far as reliability and functionality? If you used them, would you use them only for backup drives?

Thanks,
Mark