Hardware for Editing DVCPro 50 & HD

Carlitos

Carlitos

New member
New User here,

Can anyone with experience tell me what kind of juice you need to edit these formats smoothly. I'm a Vegas user first and a Premiere user second. Right now I could put together a really solid X2 4400+ system with 1 gig of memory for $1200-$1400. In 6 months you could do it for less than a grand. But if you have to go with dual, dual core proc's (xeon or opteron) your looking at a lot of money. Also, I'm not a gamer so I would be inclined to go with a very cheap video card. Will that affect performance in this arena? How?
 
PS I do realize that Vegas does not currently support these formats. I hope support is forthcoming. Otherwise I'll just go with Avid or Premiere.
 
i can't really offer good comments on what minimal CPU setup you will need but I will say you would probably want to invest a hunk of change in your storage, like a SATA raid setup. and go for 2gig of ram just because.
 
I know cost is a factor, but look at mac & final cut pro. I have edited alot of my projects on speedrazor, or avid on pc, but to be honest, OS10 is so much more stable, and easier to have large image files (actual no size issues with mac...you could have a 500 gig movie file no problems). I get alot more work done on my powermac than i ever did on pc doing the same work.
 
Many times I have thought about going the Mac FCP route, but its just too expensive and I have so much money invested in PC platform programs; After Effects, Photoshop, DVD Architect, Magic Bullet, Final Draft etc. not to mention all the non-production related stuff.
 
Carlitos said:
PS I do realize that Vegas does not currently support these formats. I hope support is forthcoming. Otherwise I'll just go with Avid or Premiere.
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You can always use the new DVFilmmaker with Vegas to edit with HVX200 HD footage. I also believe you can use Cineform with Vegas to edit DVCPRO HD as well.
 
Well, there are advantages to running both pc & mac. For editing video (and dvd authoring)...mac platform works very well. And if you do multicam events, final cut rivals avid in ease of use. Also, final cut and panasonic work closely with dvcpro codecs, and my experience with dvcprohd on mac has been great.

I would keep in mind that even though DVCPRO HD is compressed, it will still eat ALOT of gigs of storage. And windows isnt always very nice when your dealing with 3 - 4 hours of footage in a single file. Mac has no such issue. I would recommend going to your local mac store, and play with a G5 Imac or Powermac and final cut pro.
 
esperman said:
I would keep in mind that even though DVCPRO HD is compressed, it will still eat ALOT of gigs of storage. And windows isnt always very nice when your dealing with 3 - 4 hours of footage in a single file. Mac has no such issue. I would recommend going to your local mac store, and play with a G5 Imac or Powermac and final cut pro.
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If you run XP Pro there are no longer any issues regarding the file size. I work with 100's of GB's no problems.

I have both Mac G5 & PC and how I characterize which is better is that if you need/want to work with other artisans on a project you can't beat the PC. If you are a one person operation and are looking for tight integration [production-in-a-box] then you can't beat the Mac. However, if money is an issue you can get a lot more functionality and horsepower, both CPU and GPU on a PC for the money and Adobe has certainly improved their integrated workflow, especially if you use Photoshop and Illustrator. :engel017:
 
ChuckS said:
If you run XP Pro there are no longer any issues regarding the file size. I work with 100's of GB's no problems.

I have both Mac G5 & PC and how I characterize which is better is that if you need/want to work with other artisans on a project you can't beat the PC. If you are a one person operation and are looking for tight integration [production-in-a-box] then you can't beat the Mac. However, if money is an issue you can get a lot more functionality and horsepower, both CPU and GPU on a PC for the money and Adobe has certainly improved their integrated workflow, especially if you use Photoshop and Illustrator. :engel017:
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Sure, I have PS CS2 on all pc's and my one powermac. But lets be real, windows NTFS file system sucks....and I said windows isnt always nice with very large files. LOL My point is final cut pro works very well with HD, and in my opinion worth a look for anyone seriously editing, and doesnt want to pay avids costs.
 
esperman said:
Sure, I have PS CS2 on all pc's and my one powermac. But lets be real, windows NTFS file system sucks....and I said windows isnt always nice with very large files. LOL My point is final cut pro works very well with HD, and in my opinion worth a look for anyone seriously editing, and doesnt want to pay avids costs.
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This is what I love about the Mac PC thing. I'm using PPro 1.5.1 and granted I am only playing with HDV at the moment. However, I have a little more that 1TB of drive running a Stornext file system at more than 300MB's/sec across three concurent users, 2 PC's and a dual 2.0 G5. In case you didn't know, the Stornext file system is what Apple licensed and calls Xsan. However, it rocks on the PC and the G5 has contention issues that if I try to use it with more than a 200GB logical volume it thrashes and the performance fall on its face.

So if you want to talk about REAL serious editing and you need more than one artisan get a PC, if you are working alone get a MAC. If there's anyone out there who actually is using Xsan succesfully I'd like to hear from them because I have not had very good lucj trying to get Apple to play well in a heterogenious environment. :angry:
 
ChuckS said:
This is what I love about the Mac PC thing. I'm using PPro 1.5.1 and granted I am only playing with HDV at the moment. However, I have a little more that 1TB of drive running a Stornext file system at more than 300MB's/sec across three concurent users, 2 PC's and a dual 2.0 G5. In case you didn't know, the Stornext file system is what Apple licensed and calls Xsan. However, it rocks on the PC and the G5 has contention issues that if I try to use it with more than a 200GB logical volume it thrashes and the performance fall on its face.
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Looks like your the only poster I've seen that has the specs ready for P2 ingest. Your rig is likely what it will take to support P2 online content. Our's is 3 networked Liquid 6 edit suites with 1.5 TB's online and nowhere near your throughput (100baseT). I've been looking to go gigabit but I'm weighing the cost to benefit. We can ingest P2/MXF DVCPro50 all day long all day strong, but not DVCProHD which is the only codec we don't have across the board.

I've been sitting around doing the math for a couple of days on a typical project size. You'll need every bit of your storage if you want to keep content for any length of time.
 
Your right, Xsan is just a port of ADIC's StorNext filesystem driver to MacOS X.
However, Final cut pro 5 works great with Xsan mac to mac. And alot of post houses are doing serious editing over network for TV shows, especially with the new multicam support.

I wasn't aware that premier pro even worked on OS10.
Any ways, serious posts houses tend not to edit in Premier. The options tended to be either avid media composer, Pinn. liquid or (the now dead insync Speed Razor) or mac final cut pro. NewTeks toaster is also an option....but it's more of a mixer/switcher than editor.

"So if you want to talk about REAL serious editing and you need more than one artisan get a PC, if you are working alone get a MAC." is just not acurate. And besides, most people here shooting on dvx's and xl1's are just single editing alone anyway.
 
Interestingly enough that’s what I’m trying to figure out, a cost effective HD solution based on a dataflow paradigm not a video-centric-workflow. Sometimes I get a little pissy with these Mac vs. PC debates. If people are trying to figure out Mac or PC they probably aren’t well prepared for what its going to take to edit in HD. I just purchased the Sony HC1 and capture in PPro with the Cineform “plug-in” which plays at about 75Mb’s/sec, I have not upgraded to AspectHD yet. Its enough to experiment with.

What I’m finding is that very little of this crap works as advertised. X-san works pretty well if all that’s plugged in are Macs, plug in anything other than a Mac and it’s a dog. I’m looking at a NAS solution which is gigabit on the front side and infiniband out the back which could easily feed 25 users – a bit pricey though. The set up that I have now is fiber channel based [some stuff left over from another project] I can easily scale up both the performance and the quantity with cheap SATA drives but I would not build this if I didn’t already have the fiber switch etc.

Have you looked at iSCSI? I read an interesting article but I haven’t spoken to anyone who has actually used it. Wouldn’t it be great if Panasonic licensed the DVCProHD codec so we could build an entire facility, NLE’s, monitor, and output all natively…

I’ll probably get the AspectHD codec in the next week or so to see how well that works.
 
Fellas,

This is over my head. I'm mostly making short movies. Even with stuff that's longer than and hour I have never had any serious problems on my regular PC, and we use external firewire drives so that we can take them to different computers. Any new system I put together will be SATA drives in a RAID 0 or 5 array, or WiFi network storage in a RAID 5. I know FCP pretty well and I like it, but I really can't spend the money to change platforms. The truth is I like Vegas better anyway. The only editing I have done is with DV or DV transfers, and I just need to know if editing HD is so processor demanding that it really requires more horsepower than I can afford in the near future. ChuckS, you mentioned being able to get more GPU power cheaper on a PC, but does this affect the editing process? I am really not involved with heavy graphics, 3-D or animation.
 
Carlitos said:
Fellas,

This is over my head. I'm mostly making short movies. Even with stuff that's longer than and hour I have never had any serious problems on my regular PC, and we use external firewire drives so that we can take them to different computers. Any new system I put together will be SATA drives in a RAID 0 or 5 array, or WiFi network storage in a RAID 5. I know FCP pretty well and I like it, but I really can't spend the money to change platforms. The truth is I like Vegas better anyway. The only editing I have done is with DV or DV transfers, and I just need to know if editing HD is so processor demanding that it really requires more horsepower than I can afford in the near future. ChuckS, you mentioned being able to get more GPU power cheaper on a PC, but does this affect the editing process? I am really not involved with heavy graphics, 3-D or animation.
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As I mentioned earlier HD/HDV editing on these lower end PC's and Macs is still relatively new so a lot of the accesories you will ultimately need don't really work as advertised yet. If products like the G-SATA work as advertised I don't see why you couldn't edit 2 or 3 DVCProHD streams easily. I'm not really interested in a video card on stariods either,but one of the challenges is external monitoring, I have not tried this but you might want to check out the Nvidea Quadro FX540 - I believe it enables you to output component [analog] HD to a monitor in real-time, so it would be just like editing DV. I can engest and edit fine now but I can only view it on my cinema display which is not the same as viewing it on a HD CRT. Also like I mentioned earlier I have not tried the full version of CineForms AspectHD codec yet, but I have no problem digitizing HDV over 1394 with a single 3.7GHz processor [I do have 4GB of RAM, but I don't know if that acts as a buffer] The CineForm codec converts the 4:2:0 HDV to an intermediate 4:2:2 codec which will consume about three times the bandwidth (25Mb to 75Mb) and disk space.

I hope this helps a bit. :)
 
Gotcha. Now I see why you would want a nice graphics card. I had not even considered external monitoring HD in real time.
 
Avid for PC, FCP for Mac

the rest is prosumer ;)

P.S. i don't really believe this, but it seems like the professional gigs i have i'm cookin' with either/or.

i personally prefer FCP over Avid, but i like them just the same... i like how FCP5 is ready to go on all these new formats... but in turn i hate my G5 and only use it for editing. everything else i do is on my PC (like now).

Macs, is seriously like 'sharing the experience' -- you never fully know what it's doing, you just hope it's doing the right thing. haha.
 
ChuckS said:
As I mentioned earlier HD/HDV editing on these lower end PC's and Macs is still relatively new so a lot of the accesories you will ultimately need don't really work as advertised yet.
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Quite true Chuck, for some. Liquid and FCP have a little bit of an advantage when It comes to HDV because they are both native Mpeg2 editors, but still. It takes a horse of a computer to work with HDV. For FCP you need a G5 and for Liquid you need at least a Pentium4 3.2 HT and a PCIExpress MOBO for handling multiple HDV streams RT for editing.

Last year ('04) I was on the DV25 treadmill and then Pinnacle came out with v6 and HDV support. I though I could keep on working with the infrastructure the way it was and include HDV in the regular operations. Boy was I wrong. I ended up upgrading everything to support the new format robustly. I'm glad I did. Now with P2 I see more hardware needs going forward (if we select the P2 solution from Panasonic).

With new technology comes new need for updated infrastructure and dealing with P2 will be no exception. If you're a DV25 and you want to go to HD in any shape it may cost you more than you think.

@Kyle, Please don't start a pissing war, we just avoided one...
 
G-SATA. I just looked that up. That's pretty cool. I didn't even know such a product existed. Now it looks to me that transfer rates for this product are slower than an internal SATA Raid array. Is that correct or am I missing something?
 
Carlitos said:
G-SATA. I just looked that up. That's pretty cool. I didn't even know such a product existed. Now it looks to me that transfer rates for this product are slower than an internal SATA Raid array. Is that correct or am I missing something?
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I don't know the specs but you are probably correct, internal would be faster than firewire attached storage.
 
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