Jason Ramsey
Admin
Ok, so some of this info. I have posted in different places around the forum but I wanted to get it all togethor in one place in the Canopus sub-forum.
It seems that I wasn't the only one wondering how edius might handle dvcpro on a laptop, so I thought I would share my first impressions with doing just that.
First, my setup:
I am running a core duo 2.16 ghz laptop, 2 gig 667 mhz ram, 2 120 gig 5400rpm internal drives. The lappy has sd card reader, pcmcia (for p2 cards) and an expresscard.
In the expresscard slot I have an eSATA expresscard that I am running a Thecus 2050 2 bay eSATA enclosure with 2 320 gig SATA II 7200 rpm drives in a raid 0 via (of course) a single eSATA enclosure. The eSATA expresscard I have has 2 eSATA slots, of which I am occupying one of. The expresscard can also be raided with up to 10 drives. I am raiding the one slot in a contiguous raid 0. In the future I could get the same Thecus external setup and run it to the other express card slot and raid those togethor as well. A raid 0 would yield 1.2 tb of SATA II HDD space. Got it? OK...
Editing and P2 workflow:
So, I am editing either directly off of the p2 card or I first copy and paste the card contents to my eSATA drives and edit off of them.
Either way, I have found EDIUS to pretty much scream. I haven't done too much yet, but I have had 3-4 tracks of 720pn, 3-4 tracks worth of 1080 24pa with basic transitions (dissolves). I have added color correction, old movie effects, chromakey type stuff onto some of the tracks as well. Everything that I have mentioned above has been played back in real-time, with no rendering, and in full-frame on a 22" widescreen monitor.
I have found getting info off of the p2 cards to be very quick and extremely painless.
If I edit directly off of the card, I just do a direct import via tools--->p2 select. I select the clips I want to dump into the bin, click "direct import" there is a second hesitation and boom, "39 clips was registered". I can then begin editing.
Editing off of the eSATA drives works exactly as I just described except, of course, I first do a copy and paste of the p2 card over to the eSATA drives in "my computer". I have not sat there and tried to time it over and over, but I have offloaded a few times. All of which have been 5-7 gigs worth, and as far as the transfer speed of my lappy from p2 card to eSATA drives, it looks to be about 2x real-time on average. Really it's faster than that since most of my footage was 720pn. In other words 6 gigs worth of p2 data transfers to my eSATA drives in about 3 minutes.
The only time I have ever had to render anything is when I was trying out the 3d transitions, like the adorage program that is supplied with Edius, for example. Most of them, I would never use anyways (like a cartoon airplane flying across the screen) unless I was working on a kids show or something. I have found a couple that would be nice for weddings and such, though. Like a little sparkly, shooting star type transition.
Anyways, when I apply a 3d transition, I lose real-time. So I just select "render overloaded area" and it does so pretty much real-time. So a 3-5 second 3d transition takes about 5 seconds tops, and I am going again.
Anyways, in short (heh ^), Edius is pretty much just screaming through multiple tracks of 720 and 1080 dvcpro, so far. I can have funky color correction going on, chromakey, and a standard dissolve all on the same clip and it never misses a beat in playback.
The p2 workflow has been absolutely painless, and I am now in that club of people who has almost forgotten already... tape? what's that?
EDIUS = superpowerful, real-time, and true native support for all hvx formats. And I am doing it on a laptop.
There is some bad translation going on though "39 clips was registered"???
Some things definitely seem to be lost in translation, including parts of the layout, but that doesn't change what is under the hood of this baby.
Hope this helps some folks who are in the same boat as I was.
Jason
It seems that I wasn't the only one wondering how edius might handle dvcpro on a laptop, so I thought I would share my first impressions with doing just that.
First, my setup:
I am running a core duo 2.16 ghz laptop, 2 gig 667 mhz ram, 2 120 gig 5400rpm internal drives. The lappy has sd card reader, pcmcia (for p2 cards) and an expresscard.
In the expresscard slot I have an eSATA expresscard that I am running a Thecus 2050 2 bay eSATA enclosure with 2 320 gig SATA II 7200 rpm drives in a raid 0 via (of course) a single eSATA enclosure. The eSATA expresscard I have has 2 eSATA slots, of which I am occupying one of. The expresscard can also be raided with up to 10 drives. I am raiding the one slot in a contiguous raid 0. In the future I could get the same Thecus external setup and run it to the other express card slot and raid those togethor as well. A raid 0 would yield 1.2 tb of SATA II HDD space. Got it? OK...
Editing and P2 workflow:
So, I am editing either directly off of the p2 card or I first copy and paste the card contents to my eSATA drives and edit off of them.
Either way, I have found EDIUS to pretty much scream. I haven't done too much yet, but I have had 3-4 tracks of 720pn, 3-4 tracks worth of 1080 24pa with basic transitions (dissolves). I have added color correction, old movie effects, chromakey type stuff onto some of the tracks as well. Everything that I have mentioned above has been played back in real-time, with no rendering, and in full-frame on a 22" widescreen monitor.
I have found getting info off of the p2 cards to be very quick and extremely painless.
If I edit directly off of the card, I just do a direct import via tools--->p2 select. I select the clips I want to dump into the bin, click "direct import" there is a second hesitation and boom, "39 clips was registered". I can then begin editing.
Editing off of the eSATA drives works exactly as I just described except, of course, I first do a copy and paste of the p2 card over to the eSATA drives in "my computer". I have not sat there and tried to time it over and over, but I have offloaded a few times. All of which have been 5-7 gigs worth, and as far as the transfer speed of my lappy from p2 card to eSATA drives, it looks to be about 2x real-time on average. Really it's faster than that since most of my footage was 720pn. In other words 6 gigs worth of p2 data transfers to my eSATA drives in about 3 minutes.
The only time I have ever had to render anything is when I was trying out the 3d transitions, like the adorage program that is supplied with Edius, for example. Most of them, I would never use anyways (like a cartoon airplane flying across the screen) unless I was working on a kids show or something. I have found a couple that would be nice for weddings and such, though. Like a little sparkly, shooting star type transition.
Anyways, when I apply a 3d transition, I lose real-time. So I just select "render overloaded area" and it does so pretty much real-time. So a 3-5 second 3d transition takes about 5 seconds tops, and I am going again.
Anyways, in short (heh ^), Edius is pretty much just screaming through multiple tracks of 720 and 1080 dvcpro, so far. I can have funky color correction going on, chromakey, and a standard dissolve all on the same clip and it never misses a beat in playback.
The p2 workflow has been absolutely painless, and I am now in that club of people who has almost forgotten already... tape? what's that?
EDIUS = superpowerful, real-time, and true native support for all hvx formats. And I am doing it on a laptop.
There is some bad translation going on though "39 clips was registered"???
Some things definitely seem to be lost in translation, including parts of the layout, but that doesn't change what is under the hood of this baby.
Hope this helps some folks who are in the same boat as I was.
Jason