[d0od]

Hey - what would be the best optimal specs to edit HD - obv the faster the better, but say u were building your own that you'd use to edit hd occasionally what would you chose? [i'm talking cpu, ram amount etc, not a ready made]

I was looking at an AMD Athlon 64 x 2 6400+
4gb ram
"a" motherboard with hd out?

what kinda graphics card?

thanks!

[Cew27]

first off intel is the route to take at this moment in time
a quad core would probably be best as video editing programs use all 4 cores
secondly you would need an ok graphics card probably an 8600 for best hd
4 gig of ram would be plenty and enough

[spot]

If you choose the software you want to use first that will give you a far better clue what your hardware requirement will be. Once you choose the software you like most then you've a good idea what operating system it uses. Most people have done this on Apple kit so far.

Are you planning to edit your HD with compression or virtually lossless? If it's the latter and full-spec 1920×1080 at 30fps 12-bit you can expect disk transfers of up to 100 MB/sec in and out, 6GB/Min, 360 GB/hour. You need to balance your SATA-2 drives and keep your operating system somewhere off the data disks. You need to think out your backup strategy carefully - the price of the footage is presumably orders of magnitude more than the price of the post-production computer.

This is one of those applications where two monitors works but one monitor is just impractical.

[Lawsonmh15]

Originally Posted by spot Are you planning to edit your HD with compression or virtually lossless? If it's the latter and full-spec 1920×1080 at 30fps 12-bit you can expect disk transfers of up to 100 MB/sec in and out, 6GB/Min, 360 GB/hour. You need to balance your SATA-2 drives and keep your operating system somewhere off the data disks.

No offense my good man, but your nomenclature would lead a lamen to believe that a SataII drive is capable of achieving 100 megaBYTES/second.... That's nowhere near accurate. We're talking 3 gigaBITS = 3 megaBYTES. I agree, it's sad that manufactures feel the need to dupe the average user, but you're not exactly helping. That being said, there ARE drives capable of up to 100 megaBytes/sec.... They're Solid State, Mitron drives, that max at 64GB and run about $2k a piece.

I build a lot of custom rendering, capture, and edit boxes for a living, and for what you're doing, your best price/performance would be as follows. Keep in mind, if this is just a hobby for you, you won't like the price tag attached, but if you're a professional, you shouldn't settle for anything less.

Board: P-35 chipset. Abit IP-35 Pro is great for price/performance.

CPU: Q6600 G0 stepping
Ram: Gskill DDR II (lower latency is better)
Storage: CARD: Adaptec 3805
- DRIVES: Ideally, you'll be able to pop for the SAS drives as the read/write times are 2.5-3 times faster than ANY SataII drive available. However, a 300GB Fuji SAS will run you about $470. REALISTICALLY, and what I've seen more often than not, considering the amount of storage you'll need, taking redundancy into consideration, I would begrudgingly recommend you get 8 750GB SATAII's in twox2TB RAID 5 arrays with a 1MB stripe size. Make sure you're on a battery backup. If NOT, you'll need to disable write-caching which will drastically decrease performance. Enable write caching provided you're using a battery backup.

Also, I would recommend you do your work in XP x64. For the OS, applications, and storage for files you don't care about losing, I'd stripe two 320 Barracudas in a 0 array for max performance.

Lastly, I don't know if you're doing this professionally or not, but if you're doing quite well, you should settle for nothing less than SAS, provided your projects will not exceed the amount of storage you'd be limited to WITH redundancy. There are a plethora of factors involved, and there are many reasons why I have chosen the P-35 chipset to mate with a G0 6600. If you're interested in knowing why, feel free to PM. Hope this helps.

[spot]

My good man? As in "you speak insane gibberish"? I think it's up to you to demonstrate that surely. There's a bit of a problem with your "3 gigaBITS = 3 megaBYTES" to start with. You're dividing by a thousand and it's really more like ten.

What I said was that the data transfer requirement for that quality raw uncompressed graphic stream would approach 100MB/sec, not that SATA-2 could achieve it. SATA-2 drives can actually get there these days, the graphic shows read times across the entire surface of the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST3320613AS. It shows sustained reads for a continuous uninterrupted 200GB at between 140MB/sec and 100MB/sec from the plain drive, no RAID, just a SATA-2 interface and a £50 drive.

What baffles me is that non-linear video editing keeps going on year after year, hardware keeps going up in specification and the sellers of video editing suites continue to insist that only the most expensive rig can possibly do the job. What you're ignoring is that the editing doesn't need to happen in real-time. As it happens the graphics quality I listed can be processed in real-time on a standard PC with SATA-2 (though, as I said in what I wrote, you have to juggle to do it). I'd agree that higher specification can't be.

"No offense my good man"? How can you possibly say that to anyone and not expect to offend, or even be seen to be hoping to offend?

[Lawsonmh15]

Originally Posted by spot My good man? As in "you speak insane gibberish"? I think it's up to you to demonstrate that surely. There's a bit of a problem with your "3 gigaBITS = 3 megaBYTES" to start with. You're dividing by a thousand and it's really more like ten. What I said was that the data transfer requirement for that quality raw uncompressed graphic stream would approach 100MB/sec, not that SATA-2 could achieve it. SATA-2 drives can actually get there these days, the graphic shows read times across the entire surface of the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST3320613AS. It shows sustained reads for a continuous uninterrupted 200GB at between 140MB/sec and 100MB/sec from the plain drive, no RAID, just a SATA-2 interface and a £50 drive. What baffles me is that non-linear video editing keeps going on year after year, hardware keeps going up in specification and the sellers of video editing suites continue to insist that only the most expensive rig can possibly do the job. What you're ignoring is that the editing doesn't need to happen in real-time. As it happens the graphics quality I listed can be processed in real-time on a standard PC with SATA-2 (though, as I said in what I wrote, you have to juggle to do it). I'd agree that higher specification can't be. "No offense my good man"? How can you possibly say that to anyone and not expect to offend, or even be seen to be hoping to offend?

As you can plainly see, you're arguing "burst" speeds... If you look at SUSTAINED speeds, there's NO WAY that a SATA II can outperform a SSD. Honestly, this is a ridiculous argument as NOBODY is going to buy 64GB SSD's for $2k.

Nonetheless, if you want to see WHY SSD will be at the forefront down the road, here ya go. HD Tach Scores Make WD Scorpio Seagate Barracuda WD Raptor Mtron MSD-P25016 Avg. Read 45.5 MB/s 48.4 MB/s 75.4 MB/s 92.4 MB/s Random Access 17.7 ms 14.2 ms 8.2 ms .1 ms Burst 112.5 MB/s 116.8 MB/s 127.4 MB/s 93.8 MB/s CPU Utilization 2% 1% 5% 2%

Link: http://www.maximumpc.com/article/is_...ure?page=0%2C1

[spot]

What do you think sustained means? How on earth can you have a burst that lasts 200GB? Burst speeds are the length of the drive's buffer!

I haven't claimed that that SATA II can outperform a SSD, I've said that it can transfer 200GB of data at an excess of 100MB/sec. There's no point in you inventing things I said, we're in the same thread and people can read.

'As you can plainly see, you're arguing "burst" speeds'? Go on, explain yourself. I don't often fall out with newbies but you're plainly just having a go here. The chart has a boxed off section for burst speeds. The graph can only possibly be interpreted as a sustained transfer.

Now tell us about the reason you insist on the real-time aspect of real-time non-linear editing anyway. What difference does it make to the final product?