Computer upgrades needed to run Avid Xpress Pro v 5.6?

[Trademark]

So after a little less than a year of owning my HVX I was finally able to order the HD software I have been waiting for. I know I need to upgrade my computer to be able to handle the HD footage. Heres how it stands now:

MachSpeed Motherboard socket 775 with 4 ram slots and pci express (Model number PT88BSPRO-EC)
P4 3.20 GHZ
1 Gig ram
NVIDIA GeForce 4 Ti 4800 SE

I know I am going to need a new video card, and another gig or two of ram, of course a large external HD, but is my computer going to be able to handle DVC ProHD given I upgrade those things? Also do you only reccomend buying one of the supported NVIDIA QuadroFX cards listed on Avid's site? If so can you guys point me towards one of them?

I am going to be working on a fairly large project, 52 hours of footage on anything from HVX up to more professional cameras. So far I'm hearing I will be getting everything on HD's but I'm not completely sure, I know I dont have a ton of imformation yet but any issues you think I may run into would be better off attacked now.

THX =)

 

[MarkG]

Should be OK. When I tried to edit some DVCPRO HD footage in Xpress Pro 5.2 last year I found it was more CPU-intensive even than HDV, but it did work acceptably on a P4-3.06. Hopefully they've improved performance since, but even if they haven't you should be able to edit even if you can't do multi-stream realtime effects. In the worst case you might have to transcode to DNxHD to get good performance, but I'd try to avoid that if possible.

Not sure on the graphics card front, I use a 7800GS (mostly for HDV and DV) and it works OK.

 

[Trademark]

Thanks, still trying to figure out if its better to upgrade this one or start over with a new computer.