Will this be a problem?

F

Foster Kane

Well-known member
I have a Studio XPS 9000 with Intel Core i7-920 processor (8MB L3 Cache 2.66GH
It has 8GB DDR3 SDRAM at 1066MHz, ATI Radeon HD 4350 512MB, Serial ATA II RAID 0 With Dual500GB Hard Drive
and with Windows 7 Home Premium, 64bit, English.

Is this a good fit to edit footage from a DSLR? Will I have any problems editing? I would like to know now because my friends
I am being asked to do post-production once my friends get their T3I DSLRS.
 
That should be fine, but it will also depend on what NLE you are using and what workflow you plan to follow.

If you use Cineform (you can now download GoPro Cineform Studio for free to do your intermediate conversions and basic corrections) then you will have no problems at all, though depending on what you are shooting you may find yourself running out of hard drive space pretty quick. My wedding project folders are approximately 300GB each for the footage once converted, so 1TB won't get you far depending on what you're doing.

I don't know if your graphics card is supported by CS5 for GPU accelleration, but neither is mine and I get along just fine.

I'm using CS5.5 on a very similar setup to yours and I've never actually tried native editing with the DSLR files, I've always converted to Cineform as I did before I upgraded to CS5.5. I can't comment on native DSLR workflows, but I can say that if you use Cineform, CS5.5 will run nicely on your system.
 
CPU and RAM is fine, only 512 on the video card might not be enough for some software packages. You'll definitely want more disk space.

The big question is what software are you using?

I'm able to edit footage from my 7d, T3i, GH1 and GH2 on my i7 laptop using only Adobe PSE and Cyberlink PowerDirector.
 
to me, it looks very nice - if you need more HDD space, you'll notice soon enough - if you're editing in Premiere, having a video card that supports CUDA would be nicer, but it's not mandatory (or even that important, given that your processor is very fast and you have lots of RAM)
 
I edit 5D footage with both Vegas and Premier Pro on a laptop with nothing but a dual core i5 and 6Gb RAM. Would I like to have more, sure, but don't really encounter major problems, occasional issues scrubbing, but that's it.
 
Like it's been said - you should be fine. But I'd definitely say you'll need a new drive, and use it only for video (or non-system/program related files). Also, your GC won't be supported by the majority of NLEs. Not a big issue, your CPU should keep up.
 
Depending on what software you use, you may want to change your graphics card to a nVidia GTX series card.

Also, you don't have a true video output to monitor with. Take a look at the Black Magic Intensity for low cost HDMI monitoring.
 
Foster Kane said:
I have a Studio XPS 9000 with Intel Core i7-920 processor (8MB L3 Cache 2.66GH
It has 8GB DDR3 SDRAM at 1066MHz, ATI Radeon HD 4350 512MB, Serial ATA II RAID 0 With Dual500GB Hard Drive
and with Windows 7 Home Premium, 64bit, English.

Is this a good fit to edit footage from a DSLR? Will I have any problems editing? I would like to know now because my friends
I am being asked to do post-production once my friends get their T3I DSLRS.
Click to expand...

I used to have a $1008 system custom built in 2009, with 1st gen i7 920 CPU, 3GB DDR3 RAM, Raid 0 with 2x 500GB hard drives, ATI 4850 512MB, and Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit. It's powerful enough to edit Canon DSLR video footage "natively" (meaning: no coversion ever needed) with Adobe CS5.x, and to play all PC games released by 2010 with decent frame rates. Upgrading from 3GB RAM to 12GB later does not speed up anything in a noticeable way. It only allows more programs to be loaded in the computer memory without resorting to memory swapping. Your 4350 card is much slower than my 4850, but that doesn't matter very much unless you plan to play demanding PC games or need to play a lot of 1080p60p footage.

Suggestions:

- Use 1 or 2 SSD drives to replace your RAID0 startup hard drive. This will cut down your system startup time significantly and makes nearly everything disc-intensive to run smooth and fast. And you can use your current RAID0 for editing.

- Replace your 4350 card with a 6xxx card or better. A 6850 card (or one with similar benchmarks) can be had for about $100 or slightly more nowadays, but will allow all your 1080p60p video (if you have any) to run smoothly. There is no point to switch to a nVidia card, unless that's what you want and you don't mind the possibility of having to reconfigure your motherboard (tho that might not be hard if you know what to do or have someone do it for you). However, before upgrading, you have to make sure your computer's power supply will provide enough power to run a significantly more powerful card.

- Buy as many external USB hard drives as you need. They are cheap, very cheap if on sale. If they are not fast enough, then just try to edit your footage only on your internal drives, ideally on a RAID0 drive built with 2x SATA3 SSD drives. Be sure to buy such drives only from reputatious manufacturers. Also build a workflow to handle sync and backup on a routine basis. There is no point to buy more expensive extenral hard drives that support eSATA and other connections, unless you plan to edit footage right on the external drives all the time. Your internal drives with equivalent disk configuration are always faster or even much faster.

- You need a decent monitor to color proof your (final) edits. A dirty cheap monitor is not going to make it. Ideally dual monitors, with at least one of them being a decent color-accurate one. If you are picky on colors, you'll have to calibrate your monitor(s) too.

Hope the above helps.
 
I have an i7-920 system. It does quite well. With that said, the test scores I've seen lately show the newer i5-2500 to be very close to the i7-2600 and faster than most all i7's. Here's a look at some of the benchmarks I've seen. http://www.anandtech.com/bench/CPU/27

Cheers,
Pete
 
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