Hard disk speed?

K

KnoxHotch

Well-known member
In terms of external drives, how fast do they need to be to adquately edit native 1080p avchd files in vegas?

fw400 single drive? esata card? raid 0 box? My lappy has 2 internal drives and would a 500gb 7200rpm drive be good, or do i need to go external raid/esata combo?
 
You don't need any speed at all. The files are less than 5 megabytes per second. What you need is a fast processor and ideally an editing program that supports graphics card acceleration. For example, Premiere Pro CS4.1 can edit much AVCHD footage in realtime, even on a laptop off the internal drive, as long as you have an nVidia graphics card.

If you don't have a suitable graphics card, or you don't use a program that takes advantage of the graphics card, then you'll need substantial CPU horsepower to be able to smoothly edit native AVCHD. In cases like that, you might find it useful to use an intermediate editing codec, like CineForm or Apple's AIC or ProRes. But in those cases then you'll increase your file sizes and would need a beefer hard disk.
 
But of course, I do have an nvidia card (9600m gs) and got adobe 4.1 from a friend to try out, but it doesn't seem to be any faster than my own copy of vegas 8.1 (even with all the new native avchd goodies). The current edius trial seems to fare about the same as the other two programs and i'm sure my processor (intel c2d t7300) is the major limiting factor.

After transcoding, either to dvcprohd or canopus or cineform, how significant is the hard drive issue then?

I stated in another thread that i may take a little bit of cash and upgrade to an intel t9500 on this laptop to postpone dropping $1300 on an i7 desktop.
 
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