New System HW dilemma for HDV

[calinux]

my old P4/1.8 + ATI AIW setup served me years for various SD video processing, but the recently purchased Sony HC3 HDV put this on knees and decided to change it.

the Ulead editors are familiar to me so will go with UVS11+ which has now features that only the bigger brother UMSP had years ago.

after weeks of investigation have choose to go for the AMD+ATI fam.:
- GIGABYTE MA69GM mobo (has D-Sub, DVI AND HDMI outputs for the onoard X1250 embedded graphic), troublefree reputation
- Athlon64 X2 5000+ and 2GB DDR2
- depending with the UVS behaviour plan to add (or not) an ATI HD 2400 or 2600 later on

1. is it a looser way to chose AMD for UVS11+?
2. i don't expect from the additional graphic card to speed-up rendering, but as proven to play with near-zero cpu load any HD format for ATI HD 2x00, did anybody experienced dramatic timeline speed increase with such (or similar technology GT8500 - 8600 from Nvidia)

unfortunatelly the Core2duo cpu is more expensive than a similar rated Athlon 64 X2 with the UVS11+ license cost

any advice based on personal experience or useful links are wellcome!

[etech6355]

Whatever video card under ATI you need the card to have AVIVO (HD hardware accelleration & hardware de-interlacing):
AVIVO
Desktop HighDefintion ATI Video Cards:
http://ati.amd.com/products/home-office.html

I don't see the X1250 listed. I also don't recommend video setups that use shared memory.
Just make sure that video is HD Certified or you will have playback problems. HighDef needs hardware accelleration, especially for playing back the new h264 avchd format.

Both ATI & Nvidia are nice cards. I have both. My Geforce 6600GT drives HDTV's without a problem, same with the ATI HD certified video card.
Hard to choose but the ATI card seems to display the video better on the HDTV then the Nvidia, both cards are excellent, to me the difference would be very excellent versus suberb. I have to admit the Nvidia has many programming features that can be used that most persons aren't aware of, such as "Virtual Desktops". ATI also has this but I prefer Nvidia for that route.

All this is for proper playback, editing in VS or the ulead products doesn't require an expensive video card. I use VS/MF on an older machine using a 32meg video card, works fine.

Can't comment on AMD, I only use Intel processors.

[calinux]

thanks etech6355 for your advice, actually the order for the mentioned HW was placed online just before starting the thread and they moved unexpectedly fast.

so after one week have it working together with VS11+ full and to the moment i'm fully satisfied by the results (for the $$ spent)

had to capture again all the HDV tapes, not because HDVSplit or CapDVHS old-system captures weren't good, only because loading in VS such (11GB) file took ~15min, now the VS11 same size files come in instantly.
noticed just ~25% cpu load during capture, tried playback with 1080p download samples with different encodings and all worked well - only with H264 decoding the load was ~70%, all other <50%.

impressive mobo, take a look at and notice there's another bracket with more analog TV-outs