what upgrade to pc for video editing ?

[grahamdvddvd]

I want to upgrade my pc to improve the running of it while i use uLead video editing.
I have a pentimum 4 3.2 ghz with 1 GB of ram and 160 gb of harddrive.
Would adding another Gb of ram improve it ?
With hard drives cheap at the moment would adding another harddrive help ? I believe you keep the video editing software on one drive and the video on another ? can somebody explain ? many thanks

[2Dogs]

Your pc should be OK for standard definition editing, either using DV avi source material from a mini DV camcorder, or perhaps mpeg2 source clips from a hard drive camcorder.

At a pinch, it would also be capable of editing HDV footage, although it would take a long time to convert that to AVCHD - and then would not be powerful enough to actually play the AVCHD video.

Assuming you're using Windows XP, 1 Gb of RAM is fine. You won't see any improvement of transcoding speed with more RAM - e.g. when converting dv avi to DVD compatible mpeg2. You will see a slight benefit when Smart Rendering files however. If your source material is in fact mpeg2 footage from a hard drive camcorder, it might result in a significant improvement in the time it takes your pc to render a project.

There are a couple of things to bear in mind, however. Whilst DDR2 RAM is dirt cheap right now, I suspect your pc, like my old P4 desktop pc, uses DDR RAM. That isn't so cheap, though you can sometimes find it offered on eBay at reasonable prices.

Secondly, I wonder how many RAM slots your pc has. If you have four slots, that's fine, but if you only have two slots, and they're currently occupied by two existing 512Mb RAM modules, you'll have to junk one or both of them if you want to upgrade your RAM.

I would definitely recommend you get another hard drive. Almost all "Tier one" pcs from manufacturers such as HP, Dell, Gateway etc have a space for you to fit an additional hard drive, and HP's even sometimes have the spare bolts "parked up" on the chassis.

I always keep my operating system and programs separate from my data, but as you mention, there is also a definite speed advantage in some situations when using another hard drive.

If you Smart Render a dv avi clip, which you may do if you're in the habit of saving trimmed clips to a new file, for example, you will find that the Smart Render happens much more quickly when the source clip is on one physical hard drive and is saved to a second hard drive. There is still some benefit from doing the same thing when Smart Rendering standard definition mpeg2 files, but it is not so great.

Note however that to take advantage of this speed increase you would need to have your source clips on one hard drive, and set the output to go to the other drive. If you simply moved everything to do with Video Studio to the second drive, you would not get the speed increase.

The chances are that your motherboard has some Sata ports (sockets) So you will have a choice of getting either an IDE hard drive or a SATA drive. SATA drives have the benefit of slightly higher transfer speeds, and use a much less bulky connector cable. You may have to buy a SATA cable separately, however, since one may not come with a SATA hard drive. Whatever you do, don't buy such a cable at your local "big box" electronics store, since they seem to make most of their profits from inflated accessory prices!

If your pc already has an IDE hard drive, your existing IDE cable will have a "SLAVE" socket on it that a second IDE hard drive can plug into.

You may be able to optimise your pc to run a little faster. Check out Steve Jones' threads on setting up a video editing hardware profile, again possible if you are using windows XP.

http://phpbb.ulead.com.tw/EN/viewtopic.php?t=13950

You might not see a huge benefit on a Pentium 4 pc which uses Hyper Threading, but not running your antivirus program may give you a noticeable speed boost.

You should also use the Windows disc cleanup utility to clear out any "fluff" that builds up, and then run the disc defragmenter. Once in a while, it's also important to run chkdsk to make sure there are no bad sectors on your hard drive. In normal usage, Windows, in all it's varieties, has a nasty habit of gradually slowing down unless you actively work to keep things clear.

[Trevor Andrew]

Hi
What do you mean by ¡¥improve the running of it while i use uLead video editing¡¦
Do you mean to improve the speed of rendering?
Or is there some other problems with using VS????????????

Your forum profile allows you to enter details of your PC. This would help as we would know what operating system you are using.
I have just upgraded my pc to Vista and VS 10 crashed, like a lot.
I changed the option in windows properties (a week ago) to run the program in XP compatibility mode.
So far I have had no crashes. But as I say I am new to Vista.

Really we need to know a lot more about your system, and your problems.

Hard drive space
Its more a matter of good house keeping, knowing where your files are.
You need at least 30 Gb of space to edit one hour of video, especially if you are working with Avi.
Adding another hard drive will not help in the performance of video studio, although I would recommend it, for as I say good house keeping.

[Ron P.]

I still edit video on my AMD 2.0 Ghz desktop PC, with only 1Ghz Ram. It does fine for what I use it for. I don't have any HD equipment (TV, players, burners, or camcorders), so I have no need to have a PC to handle editing those formats.

If you are wanting to edit AVCHD, then you will have better luck using a quad core PC...

[grahamdvddvd]

Thanks for all your replys, The reason I wanted to improve my pc was to hopefully stop it crashing ! sometimes I can be doing some editing and then ulead crashes and I lose any changes I have made to the piece, when i use uLead I have to do every thing slow to stop it crashing ! thanks

[Trevor Andrew]

Hi

I doubt if upgrading, increasing the ram or hard disc size will stop the crashing.
But I would still recommend another hard drive.

Have you followed 2Dogs recommendations regarding Defrag, and disc clean up.

Grahamdvddvd can you give some details of your PC.
Go to your profile and fill in the relevant panels.
At least what operating system are you using?
PC details should show when you select the System button, below the post.

Updating Dirext X may help, see the ¡¥announcement¡¦ post at the top of this forum.

[grahamdvddvd]

Hi thanks for your replies, |I have updated my profile, I took the back off my pc to see what is inside !
It has only two RAM slots and each one has 512mb in.
The hard drive is this one
A western Digital WD2500 JD

Formatted Capacity 1 250,059 MB
Interface 1.5 Gb/s Interface
(Serial ATA 1.0)
Bytes Per Sector (STD) 512
User Sectors Per Drive 488,397,168
Dedicated Landing Zone Yes
Actuator Latch/Auto Park Yes

Data Transfer Rate
- Buffer to Host
- Buffer to Disk
150 MB/s 2
748 Mbits/s max
Average Read Seek 8.9 ms (average)
Track-to-Track Seek 3 2.0 ms (average)
Full Stroke Read Seek 3 21 ms (average)
Average Latency 4.2 ms
Rotational Speed 7200 RPM
Read Cache Adaptive
Write Cache Yes
Buffer 8 MB
Drive Ready Time 9.0 sec (average)
Start/Stop Cycles 50,000 minimum
LBA Support Yes
Error Rate
(non-recoverable) <1 in 1014 bits read


To add another hard drive what type do I need ?
thanks

[2Dogs]

To add a second hard drive, you will need the hard drive and a SATA cable. The power to the hard drive will come from one of the free connectors from your existing pc power supply unit.

In most pc's, there will be a free space in which to fit the hard drive next to the existing hard drive - but this will vary with different manufacturers.

Do we take it that you have a Fujitsu siemens pc? What model is it?

The manual that came with the pc (if you have it!) should give details of how to fit a second drive.

Once you fit a hard drive, you may have to format it. The drive will come with an installation disc containing some software, and usually a quick install type leaflet. You should read that first and any user guide or readme type file before attempting the installation. As an additional precaution, I would use Windows System Restore to make a fresh restore point before you try to install the drive.


I would agree with Trevor, however, that your crashing problem may not be solved by adding another hard drive.

You really should run the Windows chkdsk utility to make sure that there are no errors on your existing drive. If you've not used it before, find it by right-clicking on the drive letter in My Computer or Explorer and clicking on "Properties" and then the "Tools" tab. At the top of the window, click on the "Check Now" button. In the small window that then pops up, check both options and then click on the "Start" button. This will bring up a further window which advises that the check will have to run when the pc next boots up. Click on the "Yes" button. The disc check will take a while and run in a blue screen before your pc boots up, but it's definitely a good idea to run it to rule out disc and file system errors as a cause of your trouble.

You may also be able to get some clues as to what is causing your crashing by checking the Windows Event Viewer logs. There are several ways to get to these but I click on "Start" then right-click on "My Computer" and select "Manage". In the Window that comes up, click on the "+" sign to the left of "Event Viewer" in the left pane. Click on the "Application" log and look for red circles containing a white "X" which give details of application crashes. If you highlight any such entries, right-click on them and select "properties" to bring up the details in the "Description" panel. You might report back with the results.

Also make sure your ant-virus program is up to date and run a full anti-virus scan.

[grahamdvddvd]

Hi thanks for the replies very helpful, the model number of the pc is 350 lXP thanks

[grahamdvddvd]

Hi seen this hard drive on ebay


is it suitable ?http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/250GB-NEW-Seagate ... 240%3A1308

[2Dogs]

It should be OK - but for just a bit more money, you should be able to find a 500Gb or even 640Gb drive, which would be even better.

(my first hard drive was a whopping 100Mb, and I thought it was big at the time!)

You might ask the eBay seller if the drive comes with all the installation software and a SATA cable, even though it is described as "new".