Upgrade or not (1.5 to CS3) and harware costs

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Petrus

Well-known member
I have the Canon XHA1 and need to be able to edit HDV in the near future (July, to be honest). The present editing unit I have is a 3 GHz P4 system with PPro 1.5. I have ordered the 24" Dell monitor to be at least able to see what I have shot so far...

Now, to upgrade the system the full way would cost around 4000€ (almost $5000). That would include a fast PC with Intel Core 2 quad processor, 4 GB ram, 800 GB HD, the works. And an upgrade to Adobe CS3 suite.

Would it be worth it? The other route at about 500 € would be the Cineform Aspect HD plugin for PPro 1.5. I have not tested it yet, but it should work with my old PC after adding some RAM to 2 GB.

If I go the Aspect HD route first, would my 500 € go to waste when I do the upgrade after all; i.e. does the CS3 support HDV so well that the Aspect DH is worthless after that?

I do have the money for the upgrade, but to be honest, the present system works and why fix it, exept to be able to edit HDV.
 
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Petrus said:
If I go the Aspect HD route first, would my 500 € go to waste when I do the upgrade after all; i.e. does the CS3 support HDV so well that the Aspect DH is worthless after that?
Click to expand...

I doubt it. CS3 doesn't change the group-of-frame nature of HDV and it's not going to require any less powerful hardware to do it. Aspect HD deals with it in an intermediate codec and that's what you're paying for. If you're just looking for better HDV compatibility than CS3 isn't worth the upgrade; the money needs to go toward better hardware. But the features that it adds might be worth it. I use Premiere 2.0 and it's such step up from 1.5, especially in term of additional color correcting tool and work space layout. With CS3 I'm especially looking forward to the new Timewarp feature, which can make ramping a snap!
 
Thanks jade.

I installed SP2 and PPro 1.5.1 upgrades & Cineform tryout. To my great surprise everything worked just perfect!

After I get the Dell 24" display connected I'll reconsider, but now it seems that I just saved about 5000 bucks! Maybe just need a new display adapter with 2 DVI ports.
 
More tests...

While PPro can not do simple SD dissolves without rendering, PPro pimped with Cineform Aspect HD does complicated HDTV wipes etc ON THE FLY!!! Gawd! Amazing!
 
Don't know, I use PAL (25f) and have not tested that yet. My prodution is for TV and DVD anyway, no great fan of progressive.
 
As I understand it, PPro CS3 now includes both 'OnLocation' which is Adobe's name for DV Rack HD and also Encore. That makes it an attractive upgrade if you're not planning on going with the CS3 Production Studio. Beyond that Adobe says they concentrated on making Premiere a more efficient NLE whatever that means (bugfixes?).

Has anyone heard if PPro CS3 has any improvements in HDV support? I'm making the transition myself and so far I've been just using the 2.0 native HDV support. I've just finished setting up a raid 0 drive set and upgraded my graphics card to a Nvidia FX560 for direct preview to a TV monitor. So far I've only messed around with a single HDV stream and playback is very smooth so far. However, I'm expecting things to bog down once I start seriously editing. So I'm still interested in going with Cineform but the price tag for Aspect HD really puts me off. I don't have the hottest CPU on the block (Athon 64x2 3800) but shelling out $2-300 for a faster CPU will likely only get me a small boost in overall performance.

Jade, you're stating that CS3 has no improvements for HDV editing. Do you know this for sure or is that your expectations?

Thanks,
Dan
 
What I understand the Cineform Aspect HD speeds up HDV processing in Premiere about fourfold, and the 4:2:2 intermediate codec means there is no quality loss even with repeated renderings. For me at least the investment was worth it (and saved me thousands at least in the short run).
 
TeleDan said:
Jade, you're stating that CS3 has no improvements for HDV editing. Do you know this for sure or is that your expectations?
Click to expand...
It's mostly my expectation. HDV is difficult to edit because of it's group-of-frames nature and CS3 doesn't really seem to do anything to change this. You'll still be cutting and re-rendering the GOP over and over. It is possible that CS3 might better utilize your existing hardware to make editing more efficent. There was a thread here earlier comparing HDV editing in version 1.5.1 vs. 2.0, and it seems that with the same CPU, version 2.0 performs better, but with raided hard drives, version 1.5.1 pulls ahead. Bottom line though is that I wouldn't expect to see notable improvement in editing speed without a significant hardware or software (like Cineform) upgrade.
 
Thanks for the thoughts. I just found the forum for the Premiere CS3 public beta release and it seems to confirm that the Cineform products are still the best bet for HDV editing in Premiere.
Thanks,
Dan
 
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