Good enough Computer for Heavy Editing?

J

JSP

Member
Hey guys, great forum. I posted this in the Canon area, but not sure if I'll get a response as fast as in this part of the forum.

I'm looking at this system from HP, and just wanted to make sure it will be capable of doing some heavy editing of 5-10 minute clips in HD, 24p, cinemode. By heavy editing I mean lots of editing on Sony Vegas Pro 9.0, and a lot of Adobe After Effects creations. Below is the specs for the computer.

HP Pavilion Elite HPE-170f Desktop PC
- Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
- Processor: Intel Core i7-920 Processor
- Memory: 9GB PC3-8500 DDR3 SDRAM memory (3x2048MB and 3x1024MB)
- 6 DIMM (240-pin, DDR3) (occupied)
- 24GB max memory expansion
- Video Card: NVIDIA Geforce GTX 260 graphics card with 1.8 GB dedicated graphics memory, DVI, HDMI, and VGA capabilities and support for Microsoft DirectX 10
- Hard Drive: 1 Terabyte Serial ATA hard drive
- Sound Card: High Definition Audio with up to 7.1 surround sound capabilities
 
You should opt for the GTX 285 instead of the GTX 260 becuase the GTX 285 is certified for the Mercury Playback Engine.
 
Thanks guys! What about this iMac, 27 inch screen.


  • 2.66GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5
  • 8GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 4x2GB
  • 1TB Serial ATA Drive
  • ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB
  • 8x double-layer SuperDrive
 
Are you asking about this specifically for Vegas?

If so, the video card doesn't matter. And I wouldn't buy a Mac to run Windows; you can do much better for the buck.
 
My system is Win7-64 running on an i7 920 with 6 GB RAM and an nVidia 9600GT video card. I use Vegas MS (not Pro) with no added filters or add-ons and when I render full HD with 5.1 surround sound my render times are roughly 4X real time. I think this is quite acceptable based on other comments I've read, and I expect your system will perform fine.

I did try one time to use a de-chaker add-on but this slowed rendering times horrendously. Plus it didn't seem to have all that great an effect on the rendered output. So I stopped using it.

The single biggest system performance improvement I've ever come across was to add a 64GB Solid State Disk as a boot device. Doing this is not exactly simple because there are a number of tweaks you have to do to the system BIOS and Win7 to make an SSD work properly, but these are all documented and don't have to be done all at once. I mention this because booting from an SSD gives you a separate "work" drive (namely, your former C: drive) and it's always nice to render to a separate hard drive. In my case I also have a removable 1TB FireWire drive for backups etc.

In general the limiting factors on rendering have to do with CPU cycles and disk access. You can make more cycles available to Vegas by upping its thread count to 8 (default is 4 I believe) and by increasing the amount of RAM Vegas uses to buffer stuff (thus reducing # disk I/O operations.) Also, Vegas needs to be tweaked to render HD video with a 64-bit OS. Instructions for this are in the Sony Vegas Pro forum.
 
That's true; a good GPU (especially Nvidia) is helpful for AE.

AE won't be leveraging the Mercury Playback Engine, though. A GTX 260 is still pretty smoking.
 
Definitely pay attention to CPU Power and disk management. 2 Drives are pretty much a requirement, three is even better. (OS drive, Footage/Documents, Scratch/Render Drive)
 
Thanks to all who has posted in this thread.

I went ahead and purchased the HP computer. Should get it tomorrow.

I'll let you know how it all runs. Thanks again!
 
JSP said:
Thanks to all who has posted in this thread.

I went ahead and purchased the HP computer. Should get it tomorrow.

I'll let you know how it all runs. Thanks again!
Click to expand...

WIth the specs you posted, how is the preview screen in BEST FULL or AUTO especially when adding effects? is it decent?
 
CacheMoneyVideo said:
WIth the specs you posted, how is the preview screen in BEST FULL or AUTO especially when adding effects? is it decent?
Click to expand...

I will actually be adding effects today and will let you know.

As for just the video with no effects added, it's very smooth. And I shot in 24p, cinema mode.
 
I've been looking at the HPE-270f recently and I've been trying to find out if the specs are good enough for Vegas and Canon 7D footage (1080/24p) to operate with real time editing. They're very close to the ones you posted, but I'll list them anyway:

HP Pavilion Elite HPE-270f
Processor: 2.8GHz Intel Core i7-930
Cache: L2: 1MB / L3: 8MB
Memory: Slots: 4x DIMM
.........................Type: PC3-8500 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM
.........................Installed: 8GB (4x2GB)
.........................Capacity: 24GB
Graphics: ATI Radeon HD 5770 with 1GB GDDR5 dedicated video memory
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit)

I'm not very computer saavy so if anyone can vouch for these specs, I'll order it today! I'm also very interested in how your 170f has been treating you. Can you edit in Vegas in Preview (Full) mode in real time? What about when you add some color correction?

Thanks in advance, guys.
 
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