[Tim Kolb]

[Mark Warren] “1. Will a standard laptop with 7200 RPM hard drive work for me? If not, will I need something faster? How big of a hard drive should I get?”

Work for what?

If you’re ingesting uncompressed, you’ll need about 170 MegaBYTES/sec throughput (that’s for Y’CbCr…you’ll need closer to 260 MBytes/s for RGB in the case of dual link in an HDcam SR sort of work flow)…that’s RAID subsystem territory. No single 7200rpm drive will keep up with that…particularly a laptop drive.

I’m not as familiar with the Matrox products as I am with the AJA products, but a device that doesn’t have the compression function on board, moves that function to the computer.

You could get away with a laptop with the IO HD because it’s changing the incoming uncompressed signal to ProRes (about 25 MegaBytes/sec) before the laptop has to deal with it.

If you go with something that just brings the incoming signal in and passes it to the computer, the computer has to ingest the massive uncompressed bitrate and also encode to something in real time if you plan on using small drives. Even a stout laptop will have some challenges with that. Your tower could likely encode a stream of uncompressed to ProRes.

As far as the IO HD re-compressing on output…I don’t see how that would happen as the signal has to be uncompressed to travel out over SDI… Playing a ProRes timeline out through the IO HD via SDI would actually convert the ProRes to uncompressed.

…or am I missing something? I need the hardcore Mac folk to step in here and correct me if I’m off-base.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

[Alex Geroulaitis] “you would need at least 10-12 drives to reliably achieve Tim Kolb’s figure of 260MB/s of sustained writes across the array’s capacity.”

…and I should probably say that I was calculating 4:4:4:4 RGBA uncompressed or 10 bit 4:4:4 RGB (comes out to about 248 MB actually)…8 bit YUV 4:2:2 will be much lower data rate, but dual-link and 4:4:4 was specifically mentioned…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

I’d agree with what’s been said here…

2 cores at 3 GHz was powerful some time ago.

You say you’re on Windows 7…32 bit?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

🙂

Glad to help.

It can be frustrating to troubleshoot these issues at times…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

[Jeff Brown] “digital still camera + intervalometer”

Indeed. Or…many pro camcorders will do timelapse now. I know my EX1 has it.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

If your FW ports are on your mother board, you may need to install motherboard drivers appropriate to W7…and FireWire may not be all you need to look at.

Are you sure that your BIOS is setup properly for W7? USB? Audio card? Anything that needs hardware drivers may need attention.

I like new, fast OSs…

I hate slow, painful transitions to new, fast OSs…

-sigh-

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

As I’ve posted in other threads, a 64 bit OS makes a full 4 GB available to each app in CS3 or CS4, even though they’re 32 bit apps. A 32 bit OS is very limiting. It’s tough to judge CS4 on a machine that can’t very likely make 2 GB available to PPro (Adobe has other background apps running under PPro, plus your OS and whatever else is running on the machine is taking resources before you even boot PPro…)

Even with CS3, there is a pretty good track record of people moving from a 32 bit to a 64 bit OS and things smoothing out considerably.

CS3’s issues with large project files was a carry over from earlier versions, so the tendency to have problems with large project files goes back some time for most of us.

In my experience, CS4 has been an improvement over CS3…and that is even on my WXP 32 bit systems…

I’m not a fanboy (the folks at Adobe can tell you that…I’m to old to be a cheerleader as I have work to do), and other NLE systems have strengths as well, but I do think that, in many cases, CS4 is being condemned for being unstable on machines that simply aren’t beefy enough to run the apps.

Maybe Adobe should have cut off 32 bit OS’s on CS4 instead of CS5…?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

It sounds like your page file is getting too large… Re-focusing to another window will likely shrink it a bit. Running with your task manager open to the performance tab will show you proc usage and page file size.

What are your system specs? If you were running CS2 on the same machine, it’s a couple years old at least…32 bit or 64 bit OS?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Was the source material DV?

I’m not completely sure, but I think AE makes everything progressive unless you choose otherwise.

I wonder what would happen if you went into the PPro project and made that clip “always deinterlace” in the field options?

Progressive material will always fair better through an aggressive transcode than interlace will…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Odd.

Are you using an existing ME job queue?

Does it appear that interlacing is messed up? …or is it overall just soft? The aspect ratio of the image is still visibly correct?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,