[Nigel O’neill]

I recently picked up an Asus i7-720qm laptop (Model N61JQ)with Windows 7×64. Although it did not have native firewire, I added a firewire ExpressCard. I also use Vegas Pro 9 x64, so I bumped the RAM up to 8GB. The laptop has e-SATA and a single USB 3.0 port, which will be handy in future. It offers VGA and HDMI outputs.

I did look at an i7 Sony Vaio, but it cost AUD$1,000 more for a very similar configuration. I think the Vaio includes a blu-ray/dvd burner, but the Asus is just is blu-ray reader/dvd burner.

Some specs to compare:

https://www.computeralliance.com.au/parts.aspx?qryPart=11860

https://www.computeralliance.com.au/parts.aspx?qryPart=11170

Asus offers a 2 year warranty versus Sony’s 1.

Whilst Sony has a reputable name, Asus has not let me down as a desktop system.

The last time I purchased a quality brand name laptop, I got burned big time by a faulty nvidia chipset that literally cooked the laptop inside out!

Intel i920, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 9 (X64), Vista x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S 4.1

[Nigel O’neill]

Glad to be of assistance.

FYI, I have had a 100% failure rate using BD-R discs and a 100% success rate using BD-RE. I use Shintaro discs as they are the only ones I can buy that are inkjet printable.

When I used BD-R, it would actually say the disc creation was successful after about 1.5 hours of burning, but when I flipped the disc over, I could see only a fraction of the disc was used. It would load in my player and play a small portion of the content, such as the menu, or just one chapter. Go figure.

I have had no such problems with BD-RE.

Intel i920, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 9 (X64), Vista x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S 4.1

[Nigel O’neill]

Vegas 9 (32 bit and 64 bit) does address multi-cores during renders. The 64 bit version allows you to address RAM above 4gb. I use it when I receive the dread ‘out of memory’ error in Vegas. It has not let me down since. I should use Vegas 9 x64 all of the time, but it does not have support for some of the codecs I use.

Interestingly, when I rendered 2 equally large projects (1.25 hours of multi-cam footage) in Vegas 9 (32 bit), I was expecting render times to blow out a fair bit. They didn’t take any longer than for a single project! My Windows 7×64 i7 920 12gb RAM machine was running flat out… .

Unlike Vegas 9, DVD Architect 5 only appears to utilise 1 core 🙁

Intel i920, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 9 (X64), Vista x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S 4.1

[Nigel O’neill]

Are you creating the content first and then trying to burn the disc separately?

What sort of media are you using in the drive? BD-R, BD-RE? If you are re-using a BD-RE disc, you may need to format it first.

What burn speed are you trying to burn at?

What brand of BD disc are you using?

Intel i920, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 9 (X64), Vista x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S 4.1

[Nigel O’neill]

Tom

That’s a loaded question. Wedding videos are an industry in themselves, and styles tend to be particular to the editor/business. Sounds like you know your way around a video editor and need to create a ‘wedding feel’ or style. I found the best way to learn is to watch what others do effectively and aim to emulate them in your own way. You might want to check out some samples here that I find are particularly nice (note: not my work):

https://vimeo.com/4781309

Of course, these videos were crafted with pre-planned set shots and cutaways to make it all work together nicely. Even if you don’t have such shots, using slow motion, adding a faint glow, or using black and white on some key shots can add the atmosphere or style you are looking for.

There are links to other samples and even full weddings that you can watch to get an idea of presentation styles. You might want to pay attention to the music he uses which also enhances the vision.

With respect to the photos, you could use them in a photo montage set to music using pan and zoom to create a Ken Burns effect. You could play with a few fancy transitions, but I would keep them to a minimum otherwise the video could end up looking a bit kitch.

Intel i920, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 9 (X64), Vista x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S 4.1

[Nigel O’neill]

As I use RAID 1 (mirroring) for my projects drives, it gives me automatic redundancy without having to remember to make regular backups of my projects, plus offers good read performance during renders. In my experience as a network admin, RAID 1 offers better read than write performance, hence why I place my media on it.

My output drive comprises of 2 x 10,000 RPM Western Digital drives in a RAID 0 configuration. RAID 0 offers superior write performance as you are spreading the load across multiple disks and drive spindles. Of course, if 1 of the 2 drives fails, ALL data is lost, hence why I only use it for output that can easily be regenerated.

I also configure Vegas to use this drive for its prerenders e.g. scratch drive.

The data transfer rate I am referring to is not the same concept as the video acquisition data rate.

I personally would not edit with a USB drive, especially during renders. Perhaps in emergencies, but not as a main drive. The maximum data transfer rate (which during renders is independent of the video data rate) of USB 2.0 is 60MB/s half duplex whilst eSATA and SATA are 300 MB/s.

There are a number of variables that contribute to overall system performance: 64 bit applications such as Vegas x64 running on a 64 bit operating system will outperform their 32 bit equivalents, the speed of your CPU and the number of cores it supports, the number of drives (and optional RAID set up), the speed of your RAM and your choice of motherboard that supports the above. With Vegas, high end video cards don’t make much of a difference.

Once USB 3.0 becomes main stream, it will challenge what I have said as it supports data transfer rate up to 600 MB/s.

With Solid State Drives coming down in price, they too will one day replace spinning platters, offering next to no latency and no moving parts. The current limitation on SSD is the controllers they use to support the drives. Plus they are very expensive.

In closing, I would like to state that I would not rely 100% on RAID 1 redundancy as my only backup strategy if I was running a video business for a living. In that instance, I would employ tape backups and store them off-site.

Intel i920, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 9 (X64), Vista x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S 4.1

[Nigel O’neill]

Unnecessary for you but I definitely get measurable performance and redundancy benefits. Each to his own.

Intel i920, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 9 (X64), Vista x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S 4.1

[Nigel O’neill]

The i4600 comes with a caddy. You place the disc in it, push it in only so far, and then the printer takes over and pulls it in and prints on it. I have not had any issues with scratching. My main challenge has been taking the disc off before the ink has dried. I now wait a minute or so, or carefully handle the disc by the edges and place it to one side to dry.

Intel i920, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 9 (X64), Vista x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S 4.1

[Nigel O’neill]

Ryan

Here’s an extract of an article I wrote for an amateur movie making club (Queensland Movie Makers or QMM):

Given the fall in disk prices, there is no excuse to not take advantage of low prices and high capacities. A video editing PC should have at least 3 hard drives:
• C: – contains your operating system and programs
• G: – contains your video captures/project files
• H: – contains your output files

By splitting the workload across drives, you can improve performance having one disk read whilst the other writes. An improvement to the above set up could be to have 5 drives in your PC as
follows:
•1 x HDD: C: – contains your operating system and programs
•2 x HDD (RAID 1 mirror): G: – contains your video captures/project files
•2 x HDD (RAID 0 stripe): H: – contains your output files

I leave D: and E: drive letters alone as some commercial DVD’s or software CD’s insist that the media must be on those drive letters, and will not work otherwise.

Unfortunately, software RAID is only offered in Windows XP Professional, but you can buy dedicated RAID controllers or motherboards with hardware RAID which your PC builder can set up for you. Hardware RAID offers better performance, but if your motherboard develops a fault, you need to have an
identical board to access the data. Software RAID provided by Windows is slower, but is transferable across hardware.

The benefit of mirroring is that you can have 2 drives working independently on the same task, with the added benefit of their combined performance. A RAID 1 mirror creates a copy of your
drive, and should one fail, you still have a backup on a second hard drive. The drawback is that 2 x 320GB HDD‘s combined in a mirror will result in you seeing only one 320GB (approx) drive in total in
Windows Explorer.

RAID 0 on the other hand, combines (stripes) the two drives to give you 640 GB (approx) in total for excellent write performance, but the drawback is that if one of the drives fails, the data on both drives is lost for good. If it is used only as an output drive for your renders, then you should theoretically be able to regenerate your output from the RAID 1 mirror drives.

As a general guide, RAID 1 is good for reading from, whilst RAID 0 is good for both reading and writing, but with no data protection.

It is possible to install 5 or more HDD‘s in your PC and set up RAID 5 in which all your data is constantly protected, but you will only have the benefit of the capacity of 3 drives, as the equivalent of 1 is used to maintain parity, whilst 1 is offline as a hot spare. There are a number of other RAID configurations, which a Google search on ”wiki RAID‘ will give you all you ever need to know about RAID, and then some.

I would recommend against using USB docking ports as suggested by Steve (no offence intended Steve) unless you are using them for backup purposes only. Unless you have USB 3.0, USB 2.0 data transfer rates are quite slow. I do like Steve’s suggestion of an external drive caddy, but would use eSATA. eSATA drives do have good transfer rates and you can edit/render off them. Personally, I use an internal SATA caddy and swap my project drives in and out.

If you are a commercial editor, you can give an entire copy of the project to your client on an inexpensive SATA drive. If they want changes done 6-12 months later, you just need the drive back and can pick up where you left off. Of course, you will need to have your client sign an agreement so they don’t take your work elsewhere… .

Lastly, my main challenge when setting this up was finding a good motherboard that had sufficient SATA ports. I added an existing Promise Controller I had for another 2 SATA drives).

Hope this helps.

Intel i920, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 9 (X64), Vista x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S 4.1

[Nigel O’neill]

Thanks William

One of the three machines we tried it on was an i7 920 using both 32 bit and 64 bit versions of Vegas. I do have antivirus running, but it has never been an issue with my other AVCHD footage. The hanging is symptomatic of Vegas not handling the footage properly.

I agree with John in that I think it is something to do with the camera set up, plus NXCAM being new (Feb 2010) is probably indicative of a CODEC issue. I have installed CODEC packs, but I am pretty sure the camera operator has not, but we are having the same problems.

I’ll try and get him to register and respond to John’s original post.

Thanks for your suggestion.

Intel i920, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 9 (X64), Vista x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S 4.1