Looking to try MSP8

[btc]

Hi
I am new to this forum and I am looking for a little advise. Please forgive me if this is not the place to ask this question. I am currently looking to try MSP 8 trial version but I am looking for a computer that can handle this software. Does anyone know of any pitfalls I should avoid. I thinking of purchasing a HP media center 7360 with an AMD 64x2 dual core processor(I was told this is the best on the market for editing?) an out the the box type computer. If I go with a custom made computer it will cost about $600 more. Do any of you have experience with just buying a ready made computer for doing your editing work? I currently edit all my work at a public access media center using Velocity. Any suggestions will be appreciated.

Thanks,
Lynn

[tyamada]

Your choice of hardware is ok but, the operating system Windows Media Center Edition is different from Windows XP

There are many post on this forum about folks that have MCE on their computers that are having problems with many of the Ulead products.

You might consider buying a system with Windows XP Pro, not MCE.

Do a search in this forum for MCE and you wil be able to find some the problems folks are having.

[DVDDoug]

Just get a BIG hard drive !

System Requirements -

-Intel® Pentium® III 800 MHz processor (Pentium 4 2.8 GHz recommended)
-Microsoft® Windows® 2000, XP
-256 MB of RAM (1GB or more recommended)
-800 MB of available hard disk space for program installation
-4 GB+ hard drive space for video capture and editing
-Windows-compatible display adapter with at least 1024x768 resolution (1280x1024 recommended)
-Windows-compatible sound card (multi-channel sound card for surround sound support recommended)
-Windows-compatible CD-ROM for installation

BIG HARD DRIVE -
Digital video editing is non-linear editing (NLE). You don't edit the original. You make a new edited-copy. That doubles your disk-space requirement. Then, you need space for a DVD image and some more temporary storage.

SPEED MAKES NO DIFFERENCE IN QUALITY-
Other than real-time analog-capture, the processing power is not an issue! If you are capturing real-time video, the computer has to keep-up with the streaming video. Any modern computer will be fast enough.

Digital video editing/processing is just "number crunching" to the computer. So, if you do the exact same edits and burn a DVD on a minimal system and on a high-end "gaming" system, the results will be identical… just as a spreadsheet gives the exact same results on all Windows computers. The fast computer will just do it faster.

YOUR VIDEO CARD AND SOUNDCARD MAKE NO DIFFERENCE -
Likewise, your video card (or video chip) and soundcard (or sound-chip) are not involved in the number crunching.

However, if you want to see how the DVD is going to look and sound, you need a fairly good monitor, soundcard, and speakers. For example, if you are adjusting the color, you need to know what the filter is really doing.

But, I've read that a computer monitor (SVGA) cannot exactly reproduce an NTSC or PAL image, so the pros use a special calibrated NTSC or PAL video card and monitor.

[DVDDoug]

One more thought...

You might try-out the other trial programs too. For example, if you are going to focus on DVD authoring, a combination of Video Studio and DVD Workshop Express might be a better choice, for about the same price. If your main focus is video editing, Media Studio is best. And, Media Studio is the only Ulead product with a 5.1 channel AC3 encoder.

[btc]

Thanks this is great insight, sometimes I am overwhelmed by the amount of computer knowledge you need vs. the creative. Is it fairly effective to use add-on or portable extra hard drives for storage space of projects. Many of my Mac friends do this.

[sjj1805]

Thanks this is great insight, sometimes I am overwhelmed by the amount of computer knowledge you need vs. the creative. Is it fairly effective to use add-on or portable extra hard drives for storage space of projects. Many of my Mac friends do this.

Word of warning about add on - portable hard drives.
My system currently has 5 hard drives connected to it. the actual hard drives are 'standard' IDE drives of varying capacities all 7200 rpm.

Now the way they are connected to the computer makes a tremendous difference. The only Hard Drives I entrust to video work are the one's connected to the motherboard by IDE cable. I have no problems with these drives whatsoever. I keep them in removable drive bays called caddies so that I can just turn off the computer, slide the hard drive out of the caddy and slide another one in. (I have several more hard drives in my computer drawer)

The other 2 hard drives connected to my computer are in external carriers and are portable. One can connect by way of USB2 the other by way of either USB2 or IEEE1394 (Firewire) cable, and is currently connected by firewire.

I would NOT entrust either of these drives to video work. I have found that anything heavy can cause them to suddenly lose connection with the computer and video capture/rendering is very heavy.

Steve J

[troppo]

I would agree with steve about the portable HDD being not as reliable. I have 4 SATA2 in a RAID0 and an IDE system drive all connected to my mainboard. Apart from a little tricky to set up, I have had no performance issues at all with these. My SATA portable (via usb 2.0) is very unreliable. I am getting to the point where i am almost scared to put any data on it for fear of losing it. Not to mention, I had to remove it and put it in another computer so I could format it, windows couldn't format it in it's portable case via usb.
However, I do have an IDE portable drive which has been very reliable as a backup.
USB 2.0 can be slow as well, when you need to transfer very large files. It took me 3 hours to transfer 300GB.