£5,000/$9000 to blow on a NLE system????

R

Rooster

Member
Evening all,

I've got some cash to burn. I know a little about editing systems but not enough not to make a big mistake on the components.

Does anyone have any suggestions on what system I should build or buy for around £5000 or $9000????

I'm shooting on a DVX100a 'PAL' and really like Premiere, AE, and Magic Bullet.

Cheers fellas
 
Buy Avid. I'd throw in After Effects as well. for that kind of money you could build up a pretty sweet computer and add Avid Express Pro Hd and After Effects without blinking really.
 
Set up a budget - how much of the 9k will go to software and how much will go to hardware. After you decide on the software side u then can start building the computer...intel is launching some new dual core xeon processors and i think AMD has new one's as well.

are u going to be editing HD? also i assume u are a PC person (just like me)....the adobe production suite is a nice setup (this is what i use)...but everyone is going to have an opinion on software...how are u going to use the setup?....there just a bunch of questions u need to answer before i would suggest a system...building your own pc can be fun and painful at the same time...
 
First of all...what is your final output? DVD,TV or Film-out. Most computers don't cost that much now days and with technology changing so fast a lot of the NLE's have built in effects that will be sufficient. It is better to spend your money on proper lighting, sound and other peripherals since you already have the camera. Not to mention you should at all costs get good pro speakers to hear what you are editing (not computer speakers and gamers soundcards) Dumping heavy cash into a computer just to have to fix all the problems from not shooting it right should be avoided first. Garbage in-Garbage out.
 
I am in the market for a new editing system aswell & i am seriously thinking of switching to FinalCut Pro. Manily due to the stability & realtime performance.

If i were to stay with Adobe Premiere i would look into Matrox RT.X2 the new realtime HDV/DV editing card. One intresting thing to note about this card is Full-resolution HD monitoring on an inexpensive flat panel display via independent DVI output !!! I am going to see a demo at sirentechnology next week some time & that will give me a better picture of where i shall put my money.

Matrox RT.X2 £1300inc Vat, A Dual-Core Intel System fully rigged at £1500, 2 x Dell 24" LCD Monitors (£850 each) = £4500 & you still have £500 to spend on accessories & gadgets :)

The Coming Intel Mac Tower with good ram, graphics card, dell 30" display, G-RAID Pro 1000GB fully loaded with FinalCut Studio could come just under your budget aswell & would be hell of a system (looking at the performance of MacBooks i am certain the intel Mac tower will blow things away).

Do your research & see what you want to use the system for in the future & what features you need most & then spend your money wisely...

Good Luck :thumbsup:
 
Thanks for the advice guys.

With my DVX (and my M3), I'd like to produce a full length budget feature in London. I'm currently writing a script and have been doing some test shooting. My problem at the moment with my set up is that when I apply an effect in Premiere or AE it just takes soooooo long to preview. This kinda kills the spirit and fun of editing and experimenting for me.

I've had loads of advice and it all seems to pull in different directions. A lot of people have recommended Final Cut and it would seem to be the most stable system.

BUT....

I'm a PC man at heart, I love tinkering and I love my games, it's soooo hard to let that go. At the end of the day though I just wanna make films and edit in as real time as I can get and output to a format that could 'fingers crossed' be transferred to film.

I guess I'll just research a little more before I burn the cash! :dankk2:
 
Rather than vote for one NLE over another, here are some comments regarding building a system and what has been said so far.

Avid is a pain in the butt to deal with. I have Avid Express Pro HD and SoftImage XSI, which is an Avid product. I purchased XSI first and configured the system exactly the way they recommended and then added Express ProHD and because my system was not configured exactly the way they recommended for Express ProHD they gave me nothing but grief supporting it. So I switched to Adobe Premiere.

Depending on your workflow, if you collaborate with others or use multiple applications to create elements that you will ultimately edit together, the Adobe Production Suite is a very good solution. Conceptually I thought the direction Adobe was going was cool but I wasn't sure how much it would effect my workflow until I started using it. While assembling a show I usually have After Effects 7, Photoshop and Illustrator open and can seamlessly pop back and fourth creating motion paths in one application and using them in another for example. It has become so second nature and the application interfaces are so similar that it really is like working in one application.

Apple has a similar level of integration between its applications but it can be more difficult to find applications that can resolve problems if you need to go outside its suite of tools. Also, we hired an editor who continually said "I could do this so much easier in FCP" so we gave up and purchased him a dual 2.5 G5 and FCP. Occasionally he could do something easier than we could in Avid or Premiere but it certainly was not faster. In fact it has been our experience that FCP on this system is considerably slower. Granted this system is a year old and we produce exclusively in HD and everything that has been said about FCP in SD might very well be true.

It’s probably better to stay away from video accelerator cards like the Canopus Edius and Matrox RTx2. The performance of third party graphics cards is improving so quickly and all the NLE’s are leveraging the GPU so well that the performance gains you get from proprietary cards is negligible. We are using the NVIDIA FX540, it has good OpenGL performance and real time component HD output.

Although it was not our intention to edit HDV when we started editing HD, more and more people are shooting with the JVC JD100, Sony Z1 and Canon so now 70% of our work is acquired in HDV. Using Cineforms AspectHD we convert the 25Mb HDV stream to a 100Mb HD stream comparable to DVCProHD and edit exclusively in that intermediate codec. Typically we can edit four streams of HD in real time without using any additional [expensive] hardware assistance.

Razamalik said it best “Do your research & see what you want to use the system for in the future & what features you need most & then spend your money wisely...” I’d add to that actually sit down with someone who is using the NLE system you’re considering and watch what they are doing, the work arounds for problems that NLE might not handle well, what exactly do they mean by real time etc..

In the NLE market there is no such thing in truth in advertising.
 
9grand on editing system lol... ive finished my documentary on p4 3.2ghz 2 gig ram and a radeon card. bough it 2 years ago for 2200cnd.

9grand in my opinion is overkill, i'd put tht money toward making sure the script is well written and ahve decent gear, invest into the film type of stuff, actors etc.

I edit on premiere 1.5 btw.
 
I'm buying the newest version of Adobe Production Suite later this year, but next year I'm building out a true edit box and I'll be purchasing the latest version of Avid Express Pro HD to use as a primary editor and I'll use the remaining Prod. Suite programs (After Effects, Audition, Encore, etc.) in conjunction with it.

In my opinion, Avid is where it's at as far as editing goes. I use Premiere Pro 1.51 right now, but I won't when I get Avid again.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top