Im going to buy a new machine around xmas and want to buy something on a budget of about £500 for a machine that will run ulead without any errors or bugs?
Can you guys recommend me anything?
I have seen one in PC world for £499
Intel Core 2 Duo Processor E4400 2.0GHz, 800MHz FSB, 2MB Cache Genuine Windows Vista (R) Home Premium 1024MB RAM Memory 250GB Hard Drive Dual Layer DVD Re-Writer Drive nVidia GeForce 7500 LE Graphics 8-In-1 Media Card Reader 6 USB connections 20" Widescreen LG TFT Monitor
Would that machine be any good?
I was thinking about getting one made for £500 but im not sure on what to get because im not clued up when it comes to making them in what i need to ask for, only thing i know is i can save some cash by getting one made then buying one from PC world.
System setup you recommend for VS11?
Moderator: Ken Berry
Here are the System Requirements.
Digital video editing is just "data manipulation". A slow computer can do it just as accurately as a fast computer, but it will take longer. (Rendering is the most CPU intensive task. Some highly-compressed formats can take several hours to re-render to the DVD format.)
For real-time video capture, the computer does have to be fast enough to keep-up with the streaming video. (If your computer is too slow, this is where your problems will likely show-up.)
You need a big hard drive. AVI/DV is 13GB per hour. MPEG-2 is typically 3GB per hour (depending on the bitrate). You need room for the original copy, an edited copy, and Video Studio needs additional temporary "working space". (Any new PC should have a big-enough hard drive, unless you save several different videos on your hard drive.)
Your video card & monitor are only used to monitor your work... A high-end "gaming" graphics card will not improve your DVDs. You do want accurate color, but computer video is generated differently than composite video and the colors will always look somewhat different on a computer. This can make it difficult to make color adjustments. (There are graphics cards with composite video outputs.)
Digital video editing is just "data manipulation". A slow computer can do it just as accurately as a fast computer, but it will take longer. (Rendering is the most CPU intensive task. Some highly-compressed formats can take several hours to re-render to the DVD format.)
For real-time video capture, the computer does have to be fast enough to keep-up with the streaming video. (If your computer is too slow, this is where your problems will likely show-up.)
You need a big hard drive. AVI/DV is 13GB per hour. MPEG-2 is typically 3GB per hour (depending on the bitrate). You need room for the original copy, an edited copy, and Video Studio needs additional temporary "working space". (Any new PC should have a big-enough hard drive, unless you save several different videos on your hard drive.)
Your video card & monitor are only used to monitor your work... A high-end "gaming" graphics card will not improve your DVDs. You do want accurate color, but computer video is generated differently than composite video and the colors will always look somewhat different on a computer. This can make it difficult to make color adjustments. (There are graphics cards with composite video outputs.)
[size=92][i]Head over heels,
No time to think.
It's like the whole world's
Out of... sync.[/i]
- Head Over Heels, The Go-Gos.[/size]
No time to think.
It's like the whole world's
Out of... sync.[/i]
- Head Over Heels, The Go-Gos.[/size]
Some thoughts on your pc
Hi Mayhem,
the PC world pc should do just fine for use with VS.
It's not possible to absolutely guarantee that VS will work with no conflicts, though, since all too often pc's, especially from "Tier One" suppliers like HP, Dell, Gateway and so on tend to come larded up with all kinds of crap. I have an HP myself, and it took me ages to purge all the unwanted stuff. Even then, I was finding references to AOL and Norton AntiVirus over a year later. I finally got around to doing a "clean install" of Windows XP, from some discs I got recently, using my original HP serial number. What a revelation! My HP pc is noticeably zippier than it ever was, even though I had really tried to get rid of stuff I didn't need.
Still, let's assume that you don't want to build your own pc. These days, cpu's are much more powerful than they were, so it's maybe less important anyway.
One good thing I have noticed is that my preference for cutting out all unnecessary Windows services in a dedicated "Video editing" hardware profile doesn't seem to make any real difference to the video encoding performance of a dual core pc. Whilst I still minimise stuff, and usually disable internet access when doing any serious video editing, it no longer gives any meaningful performance gain as it used to do with a single core, single threaded pc.
The E4400 is a pretty good CPU and from my own experience with a C2D laptop, VS seems to be able to make good use of both cores. This might contradict some exasperated posts from others, but I could show you screen shots to prove VS's effective dual core use, along with render time comparisons between my 1.8Ghz C2D laptop and my old P4 2.8c desktop machines.
With luck, the RAM in the PC World machine will be a single 1024Mb stick. Although 1024MB is plenty with XP, most Vista people like to have more. RAM prices are really low right now, so it wouldn't cost much to add another 1024MB - but if the pc has 2 x 512Mb sticks, it would be more of a hassle. You could see if there is a RAM upgrade offered in that case. Chances are that there are also 4 RAM slots, in which case you could keep the 2 x 512Mb and add 1 x 1024Mb. More RAM helps lots of things in a pc, but one thing I found with my old P4 2.8c was that it made virtually no difference to encoding speed. I might get around to checking that with my C2d one of these days, just to help dispel some myths.
My father in law, who does a lot of Photoshop work, reports no problems using only 1024Mb on his Vista Home Premium pc. I believe it's the Mac - look "Aeroglass" feature that really eats RAM, and you don't even get that with the Home versions as far as I know.
I would look for a Firewire port on the pc if you're going to capture miniDV footage - otherwise you'll have to add a separate Firewire card (and set it up!) I find it's handy to have a Firewire port on the front, though.
I would consider adding another hard drive. Hard drives are cheap, and just about every pc case allows you to add another one really easily.
The multi card reader can be useful. I have one on my HP, but find that I get faster data transfers from, say, my camera SD cards when connecting them to a USB port with a separate, more recent card reader. If you were really lucky, you might find the card reader on the PC World pc can read the larger capacity SDHC cards which can be used in many digital cameras. These can't be read by regular SD readers, such as all the ones I have...
Sadly, just about all pc's come with a single partition on the hard disk for the operating system, programs and your data. Quite often on HP's, Dells and many others, there is also a small hidden backup or restore partition. I dread to think how long it must take to defrag a big hard drive - but on all my own pc's, I create separate data partitions. Although it's not something that will differ between pc's you might be looking at, it's something I would strongly recommend for anyone using a pc.
To summarise, in order of importance:
1) Firewire port?
2) RAM - what size existing installed modules and how many empty slots?
Happy shopping!
the PC world pc should do just fine for use with VS.
It's not possible to absolutely guarantee that VS will work with no conflicts, though, since all too often pc's, especially from "Tier One" suppliers like HP, Dell, Gateway and so on tend to come larded up with all kinds of crap. I have an HP myself, and it took me ages to purge all the unwanted stuff. Even then, I was finding references to AOL and Norton AntiVirus over a year later. I finally got around to doing a "clean install" of Windows XP, from some discs I got recently, using my original HP serial number. What a revelation! My HP pc is noticeably zippier than it ever was, even though I had really tried to get rid of stuff I didn't need.
Still, let's assume that you don't want to build your own pc. These days, cpu's are much more powerful than they were, so it's maybe less important anyway.
One good thing I have noticed is that my preference for cutting out all unnecessary Windows services in a dedicated "Video editing" hardware profile doesn't seem to make any real difference to the video encoding performance of a dual core pc. Whilst I still minimise stuff, and usually disable internet access when doing any serious video editing, it no longer gives any meaningful performance gain as it used to do with a single core, single threaded pc.
The E4400 is a pretty good CPU and from my own experience with a C2D laptop, VS seems to be able to make good use of both cores. This might contradict some exasperated posts from others, but I could show you screen shots to prove VS's effective dual core use, along with render time comparisons between my 1.8Ghz C2D laptop and my old P4 2.8c desktop machines.
With luck, the RAM in the PC World machine will be a single 1024Mb stick. Although 1024MB is plenty with XP, most Vista people like to have more. RAM prices are really low right now, so it wouldn't cost much to add another 1024MB - but if the pc has 2 x 512Mb sticks, it would be more of a hassle. You could see if there is a RAM upgrade offered in that case. Chances are that there are also 4 RAM slots, in which case you could keep the 2 x 512Mb and add 1 x 1024Mb. More RAM helps lots of things in a pc, but one thing I found with my old P4 2.8c was that it made virtually no difference to encoding speed. I might get around to checking that with my C2d one of these days, just to help dispel some myths.
My father in law, who does a lot of Photoshop work, reports no problems using only 1024Mb on his Vista Home Premium pc. I believe it's the Mac - look "Aeroglass" feature that really eats RAM, and you don't even get that with the Home versions as far as I know.
I would look for a Firewire port on the pc if you're going to capture miniDV footage - otherwise you'll have to add a separate Firewire card (and set it up!) I find it's handy to have a Firewire port on the front, though.
I would consider adding another hard drive. Hard drives are cheap, and just about every pc case allows you to add another one really easily.
The multi card reader can be useful. I have one on my HP, but find that I get faster data transfers from, say, my camera SD cards when connecting them to a USB port with a separate, more recent card reader. If you were really lucky, you might find the card reader on the PC World pc can read the larger capacity SDHC cards which can be used in many digital cameras. These can't be read by regular SD readers, such as all the ones I have...
Sadly, just about all pc's come with a single partition on the hard disk for the operating system, programs and your data. Quite often on HP's, Dells and many others, there is also a small hidden backup or restore partition. I dread to think how long it must take to defrag a big hard drive - but on all my own pc's, I create separate data partitions. Although it's not something that will differ between pc's you might be looking at, it's something I would strongly recommend for anyone using a pc.
To summarise, in order of importance:
1) Firewire port?
2) RAM - what size existing installed modules and how many empty slots?
Happy shopping!
JVC GR-DV3000u Panasonic FZ8 VS 7SE Basic - X2
-
project mayhem
My current computer can just to say cope with VS11. But cos its time for me to upgrade or get a new pc, i just wanted to know if this pc that i have seen at "PC World" will work great with VS11? or is it better to get one made for 500.DVDDoug wrote:Here are the System Requirements.
Digital video editing is just "data manipulation". A slow computer can do it just as accurately as a fast computer, but it will take longer. (Rendering is the most CPU intensive task. Some highly-compressed formats can take several hours to re-render to the DVD format.)
For real-time video capture, the computer does have to be fast enough to keep-up with the streaming video. (If your computer is too slow, this is where your problems will likely show-up.)
You need a big hard drive. AVI/DV is 13GB per hour. MPEG-2 is typically 3GB per hour (depending on the bitrate). You need room for the original copy, an edited copy, and Video Studio needs additional temporary "working space". (Any new PC should have a big-enough hard drive, unless you save several different videos on your hard drive.)
Your video card & monitor are only used to monitor your work... A high-end "gaming" graphics card will not improve your DVDs. You do want accurate color, but computer video is generated differently than composite video and the colors will always look somewhat different on a computer. This can make it difficult to make color adjustments. (There are graphics cards with composite video outputs.)
Intel Core 2 Duo Processor E4400 2.0GHz, 800MHz FSB, 2MB Cache Genuine Windows Vista (R) Home Premium 1024MB RAM Memory 250GB Hard Drive Dual Layer DVD Re-Writer Drive nVidia GeForce 7500 LE Graphics 8-In-1 Media Card Reader 6 USB connections 20" Widescreen LG TFT Monitor
I know it will be better then my current computer when using "VS11" but because im going to be spending £ 500 i want to make sure i can get a machine that can do everything i want it to do, without slowdown. Im not concerned about rendering time, i am more concerned about buying a machine that can handle fast paste videos with alot of strobe because i like my videos fast and strobe like. But thats were my current pc suffers.
-
project mayhem
Re: Some thoughts on your pc
Sorry must of missed your post when i was making mY last.2Dogs wrote:Hi Mayhem,
the PC world pc should do just fine for use with VS.
It's not possible to absolutely guarantee that VS will work with no conflicts, though, since all too often pc's, especially from "Tier One" suppliers like HP, Dell, Gateway and so on tend to come larded up with all kinds of crap. I have an HP myself, and it took me ages to purge all the unwanted stuff. Even then, I was finding references to AOL and Norton AntiVirus over a year later. I finally got around to doing a "clean install" of Windows XP, from some discs I got recently, using my original HP serial number. What a revelation! My HP pc is noticeably zippier than it ever was, even though I had really tried to get rid of stuff I didn't need.
Still, let's assume that you don't want to build your own pc. These days, cpu's are much more powerful than they were, so it's maybe less important anyway.
One good thing I have noticed is that my preference for cutting out all unnecessary Windows services in a dedicated "Video editing" hardware profile doesn't seem to make any real difference to the video encoding performance of a dual core pc. Whilst I still minimise stuff, and usually disable internet access when doing any serious video editing, it no longer gives any meaningful performance gain as it used to do with a single core, single threaded pc.
The E4400 is a pretty good CPU and from my own experience with a C2D laptop, VS seems to be able to make good use of both cores. This might contradict some exasperated posts from others, but I could show you screen shots to prove VS's effective dual core use, along with render time comparisons between my 1.8Ghz C2D laptop and my old P4 2.8c desktop machines.
With luck, the RAM in the PC World machine will be a single 1024Mb stick. Although 1024MB is plenty with XP, most Vista people like to have more. RAM prices are really low right now, so it wouldn't cost much to add another 1024MB - but if the pc has 2 x 512Mb sticks, it would be more of a hassle. You could see if there is a RAM upgrade offered in that case. Chances are that there are also 4 RAM slots, in which case you could keep the 2 x 512Mb and add 1 x 1024Mb. More RAM helps lots of things in a pc, but one thing I found with my old P4 2.8c was that it made virtually no difference to encoding speed. I might get around to checking that with my C2d one of these days, just to help dispel some myths.
My father in law, who does a lot of Photoshop work, reports no problems using only 1024Mb on his Vista Home Premium pc. I believe it's the Mac - look "Aeroglass" feature that really eats RAM, and you don't even get that with the Home versions as far as I know.
I would look for a Firewire port on the pc if you're going to capture miniDV footage - otherwise you'll have to add a separate Firewire card (and set it up!) I find it's handy to have a Firewire port on the front, though.
I would consider adding another hard drive. Hard drives are cheap, and just about every pc case allows you to add another one really easily.
The multi card reader can be useful. I have one on my HP, but find that I get faster data transfers from, say, my camera SD cards when connecting them to a USB port with a separate, more recent card reader. If you were really lucky, you might find the card reader on the PC World pc can read the larger capacity SDHC cards which can be used in many digital cameras. These can't be read by regular SD readers, such as all the ones I have...
Sadly, just about all pc's come with a single partition on the hard disk for the operating system, programs and your data. Quite often on HP's, Dells and many others, there is also a small hidden backup or restore partition. I dread to think how long it must take to defrag a big hard drive - but on all my own pc's, I create separate data partitions. Although it's not something that will differ between pc's you might be looking at, it's something I would strongly recommend for anyone using a pc.
To summarise, in order of importance:
1) Firewire port?
2) RAM - what size existing installed modules and how many empty slots?
Happy shopping!
I defo going to get a firewire and want alot of ram.
Like i said its because i like to make fast moving video's with alot of editing and want to make sure i buy the right machine for the 500 budget im on.
Cheers for your reply.
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sjj1805
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Before buying lots of RAM if your going for a Vista system take a look through this Google search first.
4GB RAM problem with Vista
It would seem too much RAM can be worse than not enough.
4GB RAM problem with Vista
It would seem too much RAM can be worse than not enough.