upgrade advice

storyp24

Well-known member
I am purchasing the HVX200 camera and need to upgrade my system.
Starting with PPRo 2 HD version software. To run the software I plan to use a

Inter Core 2 Duo E6400 CPU (will that work and if not what is the fastest alternative)
Nvidia Quadro fx 540 Vidoe card

Not sure of best computer monitor but hear good things about Dell 2405

Finally, how do you view the edited HD footage with customers? Are there HD players?
 
I personally would go for the 6600 instead - more bang for the buck. But I'm not really sure about how it'll handle HD footage. As for me, maybe i'll wait it out until core quad comes out, then I'll laugh at the dual corers :D
 
If you wanna really screw around and get the best bang for your buck you can buy certain models of the 6800 and make it be a quadro fx4000. It involves downloading a program and installing the quadro drivers instead. There is a thread about it I found on another site a couple of weeks ago. I posted a link here, but no one seemed interested :) Anyways, check it out if your curious. I haven't tried it, but some folks that have were reporting their benchmarks. In some cases, depending on the card, they were reporting better performance than a fx4000. If you do look into it, make sure you really read up on it though. It doesn't work with just any 6800 card.
And get at least a couple of gigs of ram, and as much hdd space as you can. Some people recommend going with 10k internal drives instead for editing, and just get slower, larger external drives for storage, etc. Different strokes for different folks.
Jason
 
I have the fx-540 and it works well. Took a bit to set it up correctly, I'm not a big fan of nVidia's drivers, however once I set it up correctly I could display 1920x1080 in real time through the DVI out to a Dell 24" LCD [editing monitor] and through the compnent out to a 42? plasma. Customers love it.

I have several customers who wanted to display HD in their businesses so I got the JVC JY100 ProHD HDDVD player. I edit using Cineforms AspectHD intermediate codec and this DVD player can play Cineform 1080 and 720 AVI's. I can write about 20 minutes of HD on each DVD. If I need more time I use WM9HD. The reult is stunning, especially when you consider the player is approximately $300.

You don't need 10K drives, there nice but you don't need them. You shoud have a seperate media drive. I have an SATA RAID which consistantly provides three HD streams with no dropped frames, sometimes four streams are OK.
 
In you original list of items, you didn't mention which codec you will use. PPro 2.0 will not edit HVX200 HD footage natively. You need a codec that works with DVCPROHD and a method for converting the MXF files to AVIs.
 
Not sure of the codec yet. Just reading about the DVRack option but Cineform or Raylight seem to work OK .

For the media drive with Sata Raid, is that an external or internal drive? Also, what does 10k refer to? Thanks for all the help. Plan to buy the camera next week after returning from Bilouxi, Miss to build houses with Habitat.
 
My Sata RAID is external, you can check them out at - http://www.g-technology.com/Products/Products.cfm

There are other manufacturers of these types of drive, these were the best available when I purchased mine. I have been very happy with it.

The 10K refers to the disk RPM. 5400 RPM is a bit slow but ussually what you get in laptops, 7200 RPM is pretty much the minimum for editing HD and 10000 RPM is about the fastest and most expensive. There are other variables, how much cache etc.., but generally speaking the faster the rotation the faster you can retrieve the data.

Good luck building the house - Driver move that bus...
 
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