[Don Huckleberry]

Hi,

Happy Thanksgiving!

If you are not comfortable with upgrading computers or don’t know anyone who can do it for you – you might want to stop right reading right now…but if you are on a tight budget or want to get more for your money – please read on!!! Also, some people think it’s not a big deal to pay extra for a “turnkey” system. If you think along those lines, then my recommendations are probably not for you — but money talks.

I put your specs in the HP online configurator and pasted the numbers below with the current 20% discount for small biz. You might have been quoted a different number, so please take that into account on your own. I have worked for both a major university and a major media company and we would routinely get at least 40% off but I doubt you have that buying power – but it doesn’t hurt to push your salesperson for a better deal anyway. You might even configure a workstation with Dell just to get comparable pricing and make them fight over your quotes, we did that all the time.

I build all my personal machines, but have worked with Apple, Dell and HP workstations professionally and there is something to be said about not having to troubleshoot individual parts when building a system. I should know, because I am trying to build a system because I just got CS5.5 on that crossgrade and took all my parts back to Frys because the system was unstable…very frustrating. You can save at least 1/2 if you do this, but there are support issues and headaches that go away if you buy a stable workstation from Dell/HP/Apple.

A hybrid solution can involve a “barebones” setup with the case, power supply, motherboard, CPU/heatsink, base ram and OS then upgrade the video card, memory and disc – all of which are very easy to do. If you aren’t comfortable with doing it, you should be able to hire someone to just install the pieces and still save a lot of cash as you will see below. Your warranty on the base system will not be voided and you can run tests on your memory and disc to make sure the upgrades are not defective.

Lastly, think of memory as the soft drink at a restaurant – the highest profit margin item. The cup cost more than the drink if I remember and it’s like 1000% markup or something. So that’s where you will save most of your money – and the ram I specd is direct replacement from Kingston – not a “generic” brand – but ram is weird anyway, coming from all kinds of sources with re-branding and all – there really isn’t a “generic” ram at this level. Also, with the flooding in Thailand – HD pricing is wierd but the sweet spot for a 2TB 7200 rpm drive with 32MB cache should be around $100 so you should be able to get 4x the space for ~70% the price (the numbers below are still just 500GB but I highly recommend against them because the cost/MB is bad). I would get 4x2TB drives and make 2 RAID 0 software striped arrays for your read/write drives (all internal). Of course the RAID 0 doubles the chance of failure, but it increases overall throughput and render times will decrease because the I/O on the disk will be better. You could add an external RAID later and then re-stripe the 4 internal as a RAID 0 or even RAID 5 for redundancy so you can worry a little less. Also BD burners have dropped sooooo low – that HP price is ridiculous.

With the savings, you could buy an external RAID, nicer video card, additional monitor, or upgrade your CPU – doing AE, you might want to get 2x4core (for 16 threads) – of course, that modifies all the numbers too.

———-
Your Configuration

HP Z800 Workstation (case, power supply, motherboard, CPU+heatsink, windows 7 pro $2,845.00
Genuine Windows 7 Professional 64-bit $0.00
HP Z800 1110W 89% Efficient Chassis $0.00
HP Z800 Localization Kit $0.00
Intel® Xeon® E5645 2.40 12MB/1333 6C CPU-1 (LOWPWR) $0.00
HP Air Cooling Solution (Must order Heatsink with this item.) $0.00
HP 1x Standard Heatsink Thermal Kit (Required if Air Cooling Thermal Kit selected and processor is LOWPWR. Not supported with two processors.) $0.00
NVIDIA Quadro 4000 2.0GB Graphics $999.00
HP 24GB (6x4GB) DDR3-1333 ECC 1-CPU RegRAM (Supported only with Single Processor) $1,560.00
HP 160GB SATA 10K SFF 1st HDD $0.00
HP 500GB SATA 7200 2nd HDD $140.00
HP 500GB SATA 7200 3rd HDD (Second drive must be SATA) $140.00
HP SATA Blu-ray Writer 1st Drive $399.00
HP RAID 1 (Mirrored Array) Configuration
Total before discount $6,083.00
Total with 20% disc. $4,866.40

Base HP with 3rd party upgrades
HP Z800 Workstation $2,845.00
Genuine Windows 7 Professional 64-bit $0.00
HP Z800 1110W 89% Efficient Chassis $0.00
HP Z800 Localization Kit $0.00
Intel® Xeon® E5645 2.40 12MB/1333 6C CPU-1 (LOWPWR) $0.00
HP Air Cooling Solution (Must order Heatsink with this item.) $0.00
HP 1x Standard Heatsink Thermal Kit (Required if Air Cooling Thermal Kit selected and processor is LOWPWR. Not supported with two processors.) $0.00
NVIDIA Quadro 600 $170.00
Kingston 24GB (6x4GB ECC) KTH-PL313K3/24G $314.00
HP 160GB SATA 10K SFF 1st HDD $0.00
500GB SATA 7200 2nd HDD $100.00
500GB SATA 7200 3rd HDD $100.00
SATA Blu-ray Writer 1st Drive $60.00

HP total $2,845.00
with 20% disc $2,276.00

upgrades $744.00

total $3,020.00

savings $1,846.40

Hope this makes sense. Sorry, but I would have done a Dell myself for comparison, but it’s getting late!!! I threw this in an excel spreadsheet, so I hope the numbers are right – it is late and I might have grabbed the wrong cells in my calculations. Please ask for clarification if something doesn’t make sense.

Or just buy the system, it’s all good!!!

Don

[Don Huckleberry]

Sorry for the late reply, was poking around and found this msg.

You should be able to use the free NeoPlayer to decode it on Apple:

https://estore.cineform.com/neoplayer.aspx

It’s been a couple years since I used it, but it worked well between our macs and win machines. You might have to rename your .avi to .mov – can’t remember. Download renameit off of download.com if you need to rename a bunch of files.

Hopefully you already found this.

Don

[Don Huckleberry]

Sorry, my fault – I still use an older version of PPro that has the export function – so with the encoder – I would still keep it simple and transcode in something else, which of course not everyone can do.

Don

[Don Huckleberry]

Hi,

Some thoughts…

Others may chime in, but typically I stay away from the media encoder for something like this. I would do a straight up File > Export > Movie and go set your codec from there. I do a lot of compressing with Carbon Coder or other 3rd party tools so I usually would go uncomp or Cineform as a mezzanine format then compress down from there. All depends on your disc space available and your archive/backup solution. I have used the media encoder for mpeg output, but don’t

I think of lagarith and hufyuv like flac audio files – good for archiving, but not really designed to be edited – so if you are archiving to one of these – you prob will have to transcode to work back in PPro, I’m not sure. I think they are pretty proc heavy for even just playback. Are you using any hardware acceleration like Matrox or Blackmagic? I have had good experience with the Cineform codec, it’s like $300 and lossy (but very high quality), but you can get hardware capture and playback with some high end video cards, if you are software only it may not be any better than laga or hufy.

Have you done any tests exporting and reimporting to test quality and usability for the workflow?

The YUV2 vs YV12 question might be answered by some testing too, just do a minute of a project to test. I think there is a bit depth difference between the two, maybe someone else has more info.

Once you stretch the faux HD to full HD of 1920×1080 (square pixels) you shouldn’t go back to 1440 (since that is a squeezed, nonsquare pixel), just archive it at full HD.

Frame blending in the encoder has to do with different frame rates mixed on the timeline I believe, do a search for it here and you should find some info – someone was yelling about a bug with it – so be warned.

Don

[Don Huckleberry]

To the lay person, 13GB/hr sounds huge, but that is actually very small compared to other compressed formats or even uncompressed standard def video as Ian alludes to.

The AVCHD codec that the NX 70 uses can go up to 28 megabits/sec (spec page from Sony), going down to SD it will go to a fixed 25 mb/s (I am assuming it’s just the DV25 codec) – so you don’t really save much and the picture quality suffers – in the time from the “invention” of the DV codec till HDV/AVC, technology advanced rapidly and the higher quality is being squished down to a manageable bit rate. Look at these data rates to scare you https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncompressed_video

I am not familiar with the AVCHD –> FCP workflow, but it appears that it uprezzes footage (maybe by default and you might be able to change that) during a transcode to get it to ProRES. Like Ian says – I think that FCPX “fixes” that by allowing you to access the native file in a file wrapper (sort of like how a .mov can be on of compressions an configurations, but they are all still playable by QT player).

The files will never be as small as “output” .mp4/h.264 files – you want and need more data than that to edit with to retain the quality and even AVC is extremely compressed already (reference the link above to compare the data rates). Fact is, AVCHD is a long gop type of h.264 and is already extremely lossy – that’s why FCP wants to uprezz it to ProRES.

You need more disc space and create a good workflow that allows you to copy only what you need and archive the project when done. You may also want to look into Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere if you are not in love with the move to FCPX and FCP 7 is causing you trouble.

Good luck, keep us informed plz.

Don

[Don Huckleberry]

Hi Elise,

I am assuming you are shooting PAL given the SD resolution you listed. If you are in the US and should be shooting NTSC, that would be the first issue. I am not familiar with the camcorder – some allow you to switch NTSC/PAL no matter where you are located.

If you are in Europe and PAL is correct, the the video should be interlaced as you describe (PAL does stand for Phase Alternating Line) – different software process it differently, so some automatically de-interlace for viewing playback in the software. You would not see the interlacing “combing” while playing back on an older NTSC TV/monitor.

You may be able to shoot progressively on the camcorder, something you will have to research since I am not familiar with it. Or, if you want to still shoot SD, you can de-interlace on output.

It really all depends on your workflow – and FCP really wasn’t ready for AVC I suppose. I do not use AVC in a FCP workflow, but if you are upsampling SD footage to ProRES 422, the scale to HD will make the interlacing worse and it’s a problem from then on. You have to get a handle on your workflow (shooting, ingest, edit, output, etc) otherwise.

Are you outputting to web, DVD, BD?

Hope this isn’t too late to help. Give me more info and I will try to talk you through it.

Don

[Don Huckleberry]

If you are only using DV footage I would stick with two seperate drives and wipe them every so often. SATA is pretty old, but you will have to crack your case or look up the MOBO info, there are SATA PCI cards out there. I would stick with ATA if you don’t have SATA, they are fast enough for most stuff. Keep captures on one and exports (for DVD and the DVD projects) on the other. Fragmentation is what can really slow things down.

HDs – more cache is usually better. I avoid Maxtor but others like it (I have seen a high failure rate), like WD, Fujitsu and Hitachi. Seagate is ok, but some have complained of failures at 2-3 year point, just dying w/o warning.

Don

[Don Huckleberry]

Gerwin,

What part of the workflow are you asking about? Exporting to MPEG 2 instead of DV avi is part of what you list in your workflow. Export to MPEG 2 instead of crappy DV then recompress to MPEG 2 in Encore. Encore is fine for most all DVDs, you just need After Effects and a good Photoshop artist to make them slick.

By making the montage, do you mean a rough cut? A montage is a specific type of scene. Are you asking if you should do titles before transitions? Do you do color correction? What about audio editing?

Currently we do (mostly dvd-productions):
– Capture entire tape using PPro or Scenalyzer
– Making the montage:
– Scenes
– Titles
– Transitions
– Export to AVI (DV)
– Import in Encore (this is not my favorite program, but ok)
– Make DVD

Don

[Don Huckleberry]

Oh yeah, all the 1280×768 or 1330×768 or whatever are not HD, they are resampling them I believe. I would gamble on the 1080p being the winner in this, but you never know.

[Don Huckleberry]

there is also a 1080p that is getting market penetration now. same as 1080i except not i.

The problem is there is no “standard” HD format, there are several. The US networks are using a mixture of them, so you either need to get a 1080p (abandon the i if possible) and uprez the 720p footage or get a 720p and downrez the 1080 footage.

At least NTSC had only one resolution.