PC for mr. ugly shoes

[DocBedford]

What's a good configuration for a PC to edit on with Avid Express Pro? How much will it cost and where's a good place to hook up?

P.S. I have an HVX, Firestore and will probably get a back-up card. I shoot interviews, narrative films and, quite often, forget to turn off the cam and shoot my own feet.

My god, who's ugly shoes are THOSE?:undecided

 

[devjt2]

Depending on how many streams of footage you plan to edit on the machine simultaneously, you are going to want at least a two drive disk array (RAID 0), perhaps even a four drive array (RAID 0). See these results over on tomshardware.com to see how many drives make for an optimal RAID 0 array. Given the low cost of hard drives, I would recommend nothing less than 500GB of total media storage space. This total does not include your system drive.

Avid Xpress ONLY runs on Windows XP Pro sp2 32-bit. Therefore you will want 3GB of RAM. (If someone knows how to get Windows XP 32-bit to operate with 4GB of ram tell me!) If you have the cash go for DDR3 RAM. It is not cost effective (yet), but I suppose it is a bit more future proof than the old DDR2 standard. If you don't have the cash, DDR2 will serve you just fine at 800mhz+ speeds. Of course all of this is moot if you choose to go with a workstation that requires FB-DIMM RAM (Server processors like Intel's Xeon and AMD's Opteron require this specific kind of RAM).

I'm told that with Adobe Premiere you can output HD video to an HDTV live from the timeline with a nVidia Quadro series video card. I don't know whether avid supports this or not. If it doesn't (or you don't need that function) get a high end gaming video card. nVidia 8800 series or ATI Radeon 2900 series. I'm still not convinced that these "workstation" cards (being the Quadro and FireGL series)are any better than standard gaming cards for video editing. Someone please prove me wrong.

Also in regards to a procesor, Intel chips seem to beat AMD chips across the board. I would recommend nothing less than the Core 2 Duo E6400 chip. You can get a Q6600 for less than $300 now.

On a final note, many people skimp on the case and power supply for their systems. Keep in mind that proper airflow/adequate cooling and stable power will make a huge difference in the stability of the system.

 

[devjt2]

If it helps, I always use www.newegg.com for all my computer parts. They have just about anything you could want.

 

[Freezo]

Video is 2D imaging, which hardly puts any strain on the gfx card at all. The professional cards are meant for 3D workstations. Just look at the Mac Pro - it uses a passively cooled NVIDIA 7600 GT, which is not even a good card for gaming but it gets any 2D job done quite nicely. And without consuming much power, so heat and noise are no problem.

If you're going for a PC, a 8800 or 2900XT is overkill for pure video use. Why not get an ATI 2600XT card? You can get them with passive cooling, they allow connection of HDMI screens with built-in audio and/or two dual-link screens.

They also incorporate circuitry that accelerates the decoding of SD and HD video by the graphics processor. That feature is hardly used by editing software but nice when you kick back and want to play a BluRay or HDDVD disc on the machine. With this generation of gfx cards, CPU use can drop to below 10% when playing back HD material like that. NVIDIA has something similar on the latest crop of cards (get 8600 GTS in that case) but ATI currently has the lead in that department.