Reasonable PC for HD video editing?

[Goppi]

Hi,

My father is doing a lot of HD video editing, but it takes him ages to render transitions. Therefore I'm trying to find out what the bottlenecks are with HD video editing. Some people are saying graphic cards, but I doubt that's true. My guess would be Harddisk, Memory, CPU - whereas I'm not sure about the CPU either. Does anyone have good experience in this area and can give a professional advise?

Thanks in advance,
Goppi

 

[akhilles]

Do you mean hd video editing? My guess would be the same as yours w/o looking at the specs.

 

[Goppi]

Do you mean hd video editing? My guess would be the same as yours w/o looking at the specs.

Yes, sorry - I mean hd video editing. I'm not doing video editing. My PC has a very high end spec, but for different reasons. I would really need to know what is required for video editing.

Thanks, Goppi

 

[matrixinc]

You will want as much memory as possible. Also depending on what prgrams you use to edit video with it amy take advantage of dual/quad core CPU's. Whatever the case a C2D is minimal.

 

[gagaga]

Are the source and destination files on the same hard drive? If so, adding a second to act as the destination drive would probably help. HD runs at 3meg+ a second and if you're combining streams and writing at the same time, there will be a lot of disk thrashing going on.

 

[just2good4u3434]

In my experience working with video (transcoding, rendering, editing) it is heavily dependent on the CPU.

 

[Goppi]

You will want as much memory as possible. Also depending on what prgrams you use to edit video with it amy take advantage of dual/quad core CPU's. Whatever the case a C2D is minimal.

He is using Pinnacle Studio 10.

 

[Goppi]

Are the source and destination files on the same hard drive? If so, adding a second to act as the destination drive would probably help. HD runs at 3meg+ a second and if you're combining streams and writing at the same time, there will be a lot of disk thrashing going on.

Yes, they are - on a different HD than the OS, but on the together. I thought that this will be the case. I was even thinking about a RAID 0 or 5 with 2 or more hd's. But I got some doubts when I heard from him tat he recently visited a course for HD video editing and they used Sony Viao's with dual core and he said they worked acceptable. So, notebooks don't have fast hd's!?

 

[cattbert]

I built my current system back in November for video editing. Everything I read at the time stressed CPU, memory and hard drives.

This is one area in which the video card has little impact. ATI markets the X1___ series as speeding up transcoding (called AVIVO), but when I looked into it I found out that the hardware acceleration only applies if you are using the ATI transcoder utility, not regular video editing apps.

As to the hard drives, it is not just the speed of the drive itself, but whether you can distribute the tasks ... in my computer I have 1 disk for progs, 1 for source files and 1 for output of files. The articles I read also suggested having a different partition for the video editing program scratch disk.

I think the biggest impact might be the software your father is using. I have Adobe Premiere Elements 3 and Pinnacle Studio 10. My experience is that Pinnacle is excruciatingly slow compared to Adobe. So much so that after trying it out for about an hour I have never used it since. I am working with regular DV files, not HD, but I would bet that the difference is the same or greater when working with HD.

 

[madmurph]

Yeah, the memory is important but you need at least a C2D 6600, because video editing is heavily dependant on L2 cache, and the 6600 has 2x 4mb L2 cache.

 

[joefriday]

As a general rule, video editing, like all encoding applications, is not heavily dependant on L2 cache, and this is especially so with Pinnacle studio.



...and the E6600 has 2x2MB L2 cache, for a lotal of 4MB shared.

 

[Wonderwill]

Hi,

My father is doing a lot of HD video editing, but it takes him ages to render transitions. Therefore I'm trying to find out what the bottlenecks are with HD video editing. Some people are saying graphic cards, but I doubt that's true. My guess would be Harddisk, Memory, CPU - whereas I'm not sure about the CPU either. Does anyone have good experience in this area and can give a professional advise?

Thanks in advance,
Goppi

I edit a whole lot of video editing myself (plan to be a director ), and I built a rig just this Christmas. For rendering, definately get a C2D, but anything E6600 or above will be optimal. As for memory, it really depends on what program you are using. Actually, I use Pinnacle 10 all the time, and 1 Gig seems plenty for its memory demands. I don't have any problems. As for displaying HD video, I have a 7600GT, which may be overkill, but I also game with it too. I got a 320 GB HD, which will suffice until more space is needed, but boy does it go down fast! Hope this helps

BTW my build cost me $1033, and it was worth every penny.

 

[Bruxbox]

I'm with the majority here: it's definitely CPU powerhouses that will help with HD video processing. Buy the most muscular CPU that you can afford. At the moment, Intel's Core 2 Duos are the heavy hitters.

Check out the Mainconcept H.264 encoder numbers in Tom's CPU charts. It's all there.

Next most important factor is quantity of memory installed; fill the slots up.

The graphics card is less important to video editing, compression, and burning to discs. However, a good graphics card is important for HD video playback and pushing the video to big wide screen panels.

 

[Goppi]

Hi everybody,

Thanks a lot for all the replies. It's great to get so much specific feedback.

Thanks again,
Goppi