Using HVX200 Footage in Avid

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PhoenixF2B

Member
Hello. My company got the HVX camera on Friday and we fell in love with it already. One problem though we are having is when we are using Avid Media Composer, we transcode to the hard drive of our editor, the HD footage plays back stuttering.


We figure it is either an issue of RAM (we have 2 gigs, while Avid says 3 is needed for HD) or our harddrives are not fast enough. I realize the hard drive issue is more realistic than the RAM.

We currently have two 500 gig SATA 1.5 drives striped together internally. We can play uncompressed SD no problem and were hoping to get away with one stream of DVCPro HD.

If it is a hard drive issue....is there another way to solve the problem other than spending thousands of dollars (that we don't have) on an expensive SCSI array system?
Thank you.
 
I would go much higher. YES RAm is a major issue when editing on AVID. The stats and recommendatiion on AVID are completely false. I know - i went through the same nightmare about 2 years ago when editing HD on AVID. 3.4 processor at least, but i would go with 3.6. I never had any problems at 3.6. Also make sure you video card is up to par. The stats on the video card are correct. One more thing, DVC HD PRO takes up alot of hard drive space. And even your data needs to be stored on a faster hard drives. I recommend eSata hard drives. You can pick up a 500 gig eSata external hard drive online for $150. I would say 100 gigs equals about 111 minutes of 1080/60 footage. I think when i upgraded my system i spent about $450 on the processor and another $450 on hard drives. So you are just under about a thousand dollars. You shouldn't have any problems, unless you plan on shooting ALOT of footage. Hope this was hellpful.

Omar
 
Hi Omar,

Thank you for the suggestion, but please forgive my ignorance, I'm not familiar with eSATA. Is that just an external SATA drive? If so, how does it connect, through USB? Is that fast enough to pull HD footage through? I can't imagine an external USB drive would be faster than an internal SATA raid.

Can you tell me what drives you purchased? Thank you very much :)
 
Your drives are most likely not the problem, they would run fine as singles, but striped together they will be more than enough. BUT... Striping increases your chance of total system loss. You are better off mirroring the drives. If you need more drive space then you should buy two more drives and run two mirrored drive pairs.

I ran Express Pro at 2GB of RAM for a while, then upgraded to 4GB. I didn't really notice a difference.

Without knowing your full system specs I'd suspect your video card.

Bob
 
It actually is an external hard drive. You can actually get them to build them in the computer. When you purchase the drives, the come with a Sata card that you can put into your computer. Here is a link which has prices and stats

http://www.mwave.com/mwave/skusearch.hmx?SCriteria=3988748

I actually purchased it from this company and had no problem with the drive. Once again, you need to change your processor for you to edit on HD. I would go with 3.6 processor to be sure.
 
And Also, Bob is right about the card. It could be the card check AVID if you have the correct card. To check if it is your processor is the major problem, hit control alt delete in AVID while playing a clip. You will see a "vexctor" like scope appear as your footage is playing. It should have a setting for PERFORMANCE. If the top line peaks - it is definetely your processor. This is how i knew (when i had a Pentium 4 3.0 processor) that it was too slow. You can check the performance of your processor, by playing the footage in AVID and clicking CTRL ALT DELETE. Once i changed the processor, i was good to go.
 
The system we built was built to Avid specs but it's a couple of years old so some of the specs have changed. It's a Xeon 3.06 processor, 2 gigs of RAM, with two 500 gig SATA 1.5 drives striped together.

I can get the specs of the video card tomorrow, but it is an avid recommended card, but it was the only one we could get that still worked with our system (we don't have PCI express).

So you guys think the graphic card is the main culprit here?
 
Not neccesarily. Again, it could be your processor. For me - my card was fine. I had the same stuttering free problem that you are having and it was DEFINETELY the processor. The Avid Forum users recommended using the CTRL ALT DELETE to check the processor perforrmance. Here is a chart

http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?t=109625&page=3

If your lines are over the top it is definetely the processor. I had two computers both Pentium 4s and they both had issues until i changed the processors on both systems. The cards were AVID recommended, and the stuttering was severe. This was even when i was editing on HDV as opposed to dvcpro hd. From having this problem twice, it was a slow processor. One of the Pentium 4 had a 3.0 processor as well. ONce again check the performance by CTRL ALT DELETE while playing clip in the timeline.
 
Really? A 3.6 makes that much of a difference over a 3.02? We can play uncompressed SD at no problem. I will check our full system specs out tomorrow. We are going to take the RAM out of a twin machine and throw it in this one to see if 4 makes any difference at all.

The video card there is not much we can do about, since it's the only one we really had to option of getting with our system. I will check the Processor stats in the morning.

I had no idea that simple difference in CPU would make that kind of result.

So overall my problem is most likely not the drives then?
 
I am also using avid media composer but with dual xeon 2.8 and 2,5 GB of ram and it flys with anything. Its the processor get a quad core if you can
 
If you are able to play uncomp SD footage flawlessly, I find it very strange HD is proving so problematic. Can I ask which version of Media Composer you are using? Avid's HD handling has improved from version to version. You say you have an Avid recommended machine, but without a PCI xpress slot. At a guess would that be a Dell Precision 650? I beleive the highest card they were able to accept was the Nvidia Quadro FX 1100. If this is the case, it is worth making sure you have the Avid recommended drivers for that card and not the latest ones Nvidia have to offer.
 
Ok, we just checked the CPU power when trying to play back HD video, and it's totally peaking at 100% so it looks like our processor isn't powerful enough. The problem is, our computer is a couple of years old. It is a customized machine, but we built it to the parts Avid asked for then.

If we took the CPU out of a twin machine, and had it running at 2 processors at 3.02 it should make a bit of a difference right?
 
Well, Like i said it - for me it was about 3.4 or 3.6 - no problems. Other board members may have different experiences.
 
Hmmm ok, it's tougher to tell now. The double Ram did not help, and the double CPU's did not help either. The interesting thing is...when I connect the P2 camera to my laptop (1.7 ghz Intel Centrino, 2 gigs of ram, and a stanard 7200 rpm ide internal harddrive) and the HD play totally fine.

If my laptop can do that, then I see no reason the editing machine can't. The only real difference is the Laptop has a better video card. We were thinking that could have been the problem, but now the machine is having a lot of trouble playing standard definition so maybe is a bus or resource issue now?
 
It's something else

It's something else

The bottlenecks in PCs are usually not the graphics board or the harddrive, at least not in this day and age. You say you have 2 striped SATA drives, which will give you average throughput of 120 to 150 Mb/sec - which is way more than HD footage needs. For most gfx cards, even a previous generation AGP gfx card like you have, displaying 2D images at 1920x1080 at 60 Hz is not too difficult either. The performance of laptop gfx cards is usually far below that of desktop cards.

eSata doesn't change anything, it's just SATA in an external box.

If your Xeon is maxing out playing the footage while your 'measly' 1.7 Pentium M happily plays it, something else is up. I'd check your background processes and see what's eating the CPU time. You can see that in the Task Manager. Has the machine been running for 2 years and never been re-installed?
 
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Ok....we figured it out...and it was TOOOOOO simple LOL.

Turns out, it was bad reference. Somehow our reference got out of sync, and once we unplugged it and plugged it back in, our system is flying now and handling HD at no problem.

In this attempt we stole a CPU and Ram from another twin machine (which will stay in this editor now LOL) and we were ready to start looking into new graphic cards/hard drives/cpu etc...

Thank goodness we figured this out before spending any additional money (now we can buy another P2 card!)

I would like to give my personal thanks to everyone on here who helped and gave assistance. We were so excited about the HVX200 and bummed out when we realized we couldn't edit the footage, but now the world is bright again! lol

Thank you again everyone.
 
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