Questions about new system, DVCPRO-HD and Raylight

Pesie

Pesie

Well-known member
Hi everybody,

I'm moving from my little workroom at home to and attic-office for my video-work. My video-work is becoming serious business ;-)

I want to do a couple of investments. I'm heading for the Panasonic HPX171 (I'm located in Europe) and want to have a proper PC, using it for editing/dvd-authoring (Vegas, DVD-Architect) only.
Here are my questions:

1. Is a Dell Workstation Precision T7400 with Intel® Xeon X5460 (3.16GHz,1333MHz,2x6MB Cache, Quad Core) with 4 GB of RAM good enough for proper editing power and render times with DVCPRO-HD footage?

2. Which kind of external harddrives should I consider? I'm thinking of external Firewire800 drives, or should I choose eSata sytems? I'm not handy with special hardware, I'm looking for something plug & play.

3. Is Windows Vista with Raylight and Vegas Pro 8 a solid combination? And should I choose the 64 bit version of Vista or not? What about drivers (Matrox) and Raylight? What combination will work and what not.

4. Is the Raylight plug-in just as easy as editing with other formats (HDV, DV) in Vegas? Or does it give you the idea of a 'nice work-around' solution if you don't want to switch of NLE when starting with DVCPRO-HD? Are there limitations, when you work with PAL footage, in 720pN (Native) format with Raylight, or are all modes of the camera supported, including PAL?
 
1) Yes.

2) Faster is better, but I wouldn't worry about it too much.

3) Should be fine. I wouldn't go with 64-bit yet. Not sure what drivers you mean -- but you do need the Matrox DVCPRO 50 codec.

4) The Raylight plug-in is for Panasoinc P2 support. It doesn't matter with other formats (though you can use it to convert 1080i HDV to 24p Raylight AVI). PAL is certainly fully supported, though there was a codec issue with some PAL. I think that's been resolved.
 
Thanks al lot, David.
Yes, I meant the DVCPRO Matrox codec. I read that it works with Vista, although it's not officially supported for Vista by Matrox.

Thinking about the 4:2:2 colorspace of DVCPRO50/DVCPRO-HD: when you render your project to MPEG2 for a SD DVD, the colorspace becomes 4:2:0. is there still any benefit in the workflow having filmed the source material in 4:2:2 that you can see that back on the DVD (4:2:0) footage?
 
The benefit will be clear any time you work with the color, including in color correction and any chroma keying. Plus, a higher color resolution can give you a higher apparent resolution.
 
Raylight and Vista 64

Raylight and Vista 64

Can you use Raylight and Vista 64 bit. I just bought Raylight and thought you could use it. I'm not being very successful right now. I just loaded it though. I just saw this forum entry and thought I'd better ask. If Vista 64 bit does work can anyone tell me if there are additional patches, or codecs that I need to make it work together. Thank you.

Larry[MOVIEHD][/MOVIEHD]
 
I'd go with a 64 bit OS and add more RAM - another two 2GB sticks, depending on what config is currently in there. should cost around $200, but its worth it if you want to do heavier tasks such as work with 4k .r3d files or do heavy aftereffects work, or if your a heavy multi tasker like me and want to be able to run 2-4 instances of vegas at a time.
 
I agree on the 64bit OS. I have it on my laptop and my primary editing machine, and it's quite a bit better. No stability issues either, but I am using XP64 and not Vista.

I also agree about more RAM. I am upgrading my primary editing machine in a couple months, and will probably go to 16GB of RAM. When trying to view smooth previews on Vegas, sometimes the only way is with a dynamic ram preview so the more RAM the better.
 
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