Ideal computer system for HD editing (or minimum)

[metmot]

I have various ongoing problems with my old faithful socket A configuration and am contemplating updating my motherboard, processor, ram and hard disks. The more I read the more confused I get.

Of course in a perfect world I would plunk down $5-6k and be off and running but I am just not that rich yet. Can anyone recommend an affordable combination of above listed components and configuration that is known to work somewhat acceptably? I plan to stick to XP pro.

My main problem now with performance is preview quality and long waits for editing mouse maneuvers to complete. This gets old fast. I am convinced I need to move forward from my current system but am afraid to make the wrong move. With my new canon hd30 it just isn't cutting it and I need to do something.

If there is a nice discussion already here I haven't found it. Sorry in advance if this has been beat to death somewhere.

Thanks in advance for your input.

[2Dogs]

Hi John,

I'm also in need of a new desktop pc too. My trusty old p4 2.8c is still fine for making DVD's from minDV source footage, but wouldn't cut it with HD.

Even my laptop, nothing special, a 1.8Ghz C2D, is significantly faster than my desktop.

In some ways, however, a desktop will always be faster. 3.5" hard drives are generally quicker than 2.5" ones, and optical drives in particular are faster - they draw too much power to be used in mobile pc's.

So I wonder about upgrading my old P4.

As far as the fastest media encoding performance is concerned, I think that Intel have the upper hand, especially with the 45nm versions of their processors, whether dual core or quad core.

The trouble is that those 45nm cpu's, although maybe 15% faster than their 65nm predecessors, are significantly more expensive.

The AMD quad core cpu, the "Phenom", is not quite a match for the 45nm Intel cpu's, but it can just about keep up with the 65nm ones. It's also quite a bit cheaper. One further thing in it's favour is that motherboards for AMD cpu's are significantly cheaper than those for Intel cpu's, so if bang for the buck is important to you, an AMD based system might be pretty competitive.

The biggest difference between the AMD and Intel cpu's is that the Intel ones give you more overclocking "headroom" - i.e. you can achieve greater overclocks than you can for AMD cpu's.

For most people, however, overclocking isn't an issue. You have to be a bit of an enthusiast to take advantage of it, and maybe learn more about pc's than the average person wants to know.

Nevertheless, there are some motherboards that have an "automatic" overclocking feature which makes it more accessible to normal users.

Looking at your existing system, you already have DDR2 RAM, so that could be re-used in an upgraded system.

Since you also intend to stick with XP, 2GB would be fine anyway. You can find plenty of motherboards with four dimm slots too, so you could easily add more. Bear in mind that 32 bit XP only uses up to 3GB.

Last week, I bought 2 x 1GB modules of Corsair DDR2 800 for $16:99! So RAM is pretty cheap right now.

One further advantage of AMD motherboards is that they almost universally include an IDE connector, so you can also re-use an IDE optical drive or hard drive. Many Intel motherboards only have SATA connectors, so to use an older IDE device you'd need to add a separate IDE controller card.

For video editing, you don't need anything special in terms of graphics - the humblest integrated graphics would be fine for standard definition editing.

For HD work, however, it's a bit different. It's OK if you're dealing with HDV video, which uses mpeg2 compression, but AVCHD video, using h264 compression either needs a very powerful cpu to play it or video graphics with h264 acceleration.

The latest integrated graphics motherboards for both Intel and AMD cpu's both feature h264 acceleration, but the AMD 790G and 790GX boards have much more powerful graphics, enabling you to play some video games too, which might be important to you.

When you're editing, however, VS can't take advantage of the h264 acceleration, so preview playback of AVCHD clips will stutter - unless you have a super fast cpu or enable smart proxy. The downside of doing that is that it takes VS ages to create the smart proxy files. On the plus side, the proxy file creation is a one-time deal, though.

Now assuming you're interested primarily in video editing, with HD editing capability too, rather than playing video games, I would suggest you could upgrade your system with an AMD quad core cpu and an integrated graphics motherboard.

A 2.3Ghz AMD Phenom 9600 can be had for about $120, or the more capable 2.5Ghz Black Edition 9950 for $185. The latter cpu is easier to overclock as well as being a little faster.

A 790GX motherboard might cost $125. Features to look for would be built in firewire, and maybe HDMI out.

Dropping down to a 780G motherboard you can pick one up for as little as $75. If you're not intending to do any major overclocking, it might be a better option, since it still incorporates h264 acceleration.

If playing video games became more significant, you could always add a separate video card later.

So you might be looking at as little as $200 for your upgrade, depending on if you can re-use your hard drives, and if your existing power supply is up to the job. The quad core cpu's use a bit more power than dual core ones, but without a fancy video card and with no overclocking, your existing power supply would probably suffice.

The lowest price Intel quad core, the 65nm Q6600 can be had for $185. A suitable integrated graphics motherboard to go with it would be around $100, so the combination would be about $25 more than a comparable AMD system, though the AMD would have significantly more powerful graphics.

You'd probably need to spend another $50 or so on a 45nm Quad core and motherboard combo.

I know that I will be looking out for deals in the upcoming Black Friday!

[sjj1805]

Just a little about re-using your IDE drives.
Most of the new motherboards are geared up for SATA hard drives and only have one IDE slot - no doubt intended for the CD/DVD drive - but at least you can get one IDE hard drive on a dual ribbon.

If you purchase a PCI to IDE card it normally comes with two IDE slots so you can run 4 IDE devices from that card (Providing you have space in your Tower unit and sufficient power supply cables). What may not be immediately obvious is that the two slots provided are different speeds.
The first slot will be Ultra ATA 133 (maximum transfer speed of 133 megabytes per second) however the other slot is a slower ATA 100 (maximum transfer speed of 100 megabytes per second). whilst a higher rated hard drive will work in the slower ATA 100 slot - it will be slower.
Just a point to bear in mind if you intend stacking several old IDE hard drives in your new machine!

Another alternative for re-using you old hard drives is to purchase an external enclosure. The hard drive fits inside a box - normally made from aluminium due to the fact it lets the heat dissipate without the need for fans. Some of these enclosures then connect to the computer with a USB 2.0 cable, Some use an IEEE1394 fire wire cable and there are a few hybrid one's about where you have the choice of both types of connection.

[2Dogs]

You make a good point Steve. In fact a lot of the newer motherboards only have ATA100 IDE support, so if your old IDE drive was going to be your main hard drive, you might even choose to install an IDE controller card anyway.

Don't forget that you can turn your old hard drive into an external eSATA drive, much faster than USB or firewire. Many newer motherboards will feature an eSATA port. Since many eSATA hard drive enclosures can also be connected by USB or firewire, you can still connect the drive to other, non-eSATA equipped pc's.

[metmot]

Thanks for all the input.

Here's what I did and it works great!!! Edits and renders HD in less time than my old socket A did DV.

I kept my coolermaster case which was almost new (This case is awesome) and the 430 watt power supply. Also reused my DVD Writer and card reader as I am not ready to produce Blueray discs yet (too expensive!)

I decided on an Asus M2N-SLI motherboard. It has 2 IDE and 4 SATA ports as well as a front firewire and audio which my case has but my old motherboard didn't support, which is nice. This way I used my old 200gig Maxtor as the C drive and I bought a 500 gig WD sata drive as a video working drive. I also already had two external USB2 drives for storage and backup only, a 400 and a 500 gig. I used an Athlon 64 x2 6000+ Dual core running at 3GHZ and 4 gigs of ddr2, 800MHZ ram. I reused my Nvidea Gforce MX 4000 elcheapo video card in one of the PCI slots and it works fine. I reloaded XP Pro and all my programs and this baby is plenty powerful for what I want to do.

Total cost for the MoBo, Ram, HD and Processor was $470. I know I could have shopped it up for less on the net but my local guy takes good care of me so I bought it from him. Including the stuff I already had it is a total of about $700 invested. Not too bad for what it does.

[sjj1805]

[2Dogs]

Sounds like a fair upgrade on your previous setup, and you certainly seem to have plenty of storage.

Unless you're a gamer contemplating fitting dual mid-range or high-end video cards, the SLI feature is an extravagance - but maybe you just got a good price on that board, and it does have a useful amount of other slots.

There's no h264 acceleration though. It will be interesting to know what cpu usage you get when playing an HD AVCHD file.

For a pc used primarily for video encoding, I would have gone for a quad core, either AMD or Intel, but most regular programs don't exploit multi-core cpu's, and as far as I know, no games do.

[metmot]

You are correct about SLI but this board had everything else I wanted and was in stock at my local mom and pop called "Gamers Galaxy". No wonder he had this board on hand.

I was a bit concerned about the lack of h.264 accel but it seems to be more than fine. I created a test video at 100% quality encoding a 7 minute MPEG 2 HD to H.264 at a resolution of 1280x720 with 128kbps audio. The file size increase from 1.3 gigs for the HD to 1.7 for the Mpeg4. I played it on Sonic Cine player, Roxio's bundled player with media creator and it takes about 40% of this processor's resources to play which seems ok. The original MPEG HD 1440x1080 takes right at 50% processor. No skipping or hesitation with either. I encoded it again h.264 at 50% quality which made a file of 330 megs and uploaded it here for testing purposes on the web http://vimeo.com/2111920

My new canon hv30 camera does way better than my old 3ccd panasonic pv dv953 under the same football lights. The game in the video highlight clip sent my son's team to the state playoffs and I will get a chance to film a game under daylight a week from Saturday. I can't wait to see what this remarkable HD camera can do under those conditions.

[2Dogs]

Ah, now then! you have an HV30, an HDV camcorder - a very sensible choice, to my mind, and it still gets the highest ratings of any consumer HD camcorder. The HDV format, using mpeg2 compression, doesn't need as much in the way of pc resources to play - I can play sample HDV clips from an HV30 on my old P4 2.8c, and they use up to about 70% of the cpu. Interestingly, a smart rendered mpg created from them uses up to 100%.

VS is actually able to edit HDV video too. Most of the time, I would expect you to be smart rendering, so it shouldn't take that long.

Then, if you choose to encode it to h264, it will take ages - but as far as I can tell, there is no benefit from encoding to h264 in VS. You should be able to do so using a much lower bitrate than the original 25000kbps of the HDV, taking advantage of the more efficient h264 compression. If you try that, however, it seems to result in a loss of picture quality.

I've used a third party program to encode to x264 at around 8000kbps and it gives pretty good results. Using that, you could fit over an hour of video on a regular DVD if that was your target. The downside is that you lose the disc menu structure you can have with either an HDV or AVCHD disc created with VS. In your position, I would simply keep all my projects as HDV, and keep them on a hard drive.

[metmot]

Again very astute observations. I use a third party program called mpeg stream which is freeware to encode to h.264. I would prefer to use VS but......... I have VSx2 installed on two computers and they share a characteristic. The program crashes the instant I instruct it to encode to any mpeg4 format. And I mean instantly. It also crashes the instant I insert any mpeg 4 file into the timeline. Also it doesn't support 1280x720. You are correct the rendering time is long. It took almost a half hour to encode that 7 minute clip. I haven't tried producing any HD to disc yet. I am currently fascinated with the web production thing since I saw this http://peterzpicts.smugmug.com/gallery/ ... Db5Wm-A-LB The guy who did that told me he uses an HV20 on cine mode which is what tipped the scales for my camera purchase. I think they must have better lighting at his place up by Portland, OR than we have here on the coast as I cant seem to get such a bright clear picture. I think it's funny that that guy is a professional photographer but his production is so hokey with the transitions he uses etc. But the clarity is unbelievable for internet video. The consensus from the hosting sites is h.264 rendered at about 3000kbps video and 128kbps audio and 1280x720 is ideal for the best results. I feel I am still doing something wrong though I can't quite put my finger on it.

For now I am going to take lots of footage and when the price of blu ray media and players comes down I will start to produce some projects for my 50" plasma TV. In the meanwhile I can always render to DV.

[Black Lab]

WOW! Unbelievable picture. You have me salivating...