720p & 1080p video editing

[yottabit]

Hi everyone! This is my first post on here and I hope it is in the right section. My friend and I just went halfway on a canon vixia HD camcorder and are looking forward to the world of HD video. I've been editing with a probably 5 year old samsung miniDV camcorder forever now.

My question is, I have a less than stellar computer for video editing and was wondering how you guys thought the experience for editing 720p or 1080p would be. I'm using a Dell Studio 1535 laptop with Core 2 Duo T5750, 4 GB ram, and a Radeon HD 3450. It's pretty decent for editing SD video, I just wanted your feedback on what to look forward to. I guess I'll know soon enough, the camcorder comes in next week!

I'm definitely going to need more hard drive space, and I'm thinking a reasonable upgrade may be an external 1 TB or so 3.5"/7200 RPM drive. The laptop has an eSATA port so I figure that would be faster than USB also. And hopefully much faster than the 300 gig internal drive.

I'm sure he won't have any problems with his rig, he's running a Core i7 920 with 8 GB ram, gtx 285...

Thanks for your help all!

 

[mmntech]

Depends. If your source clips match your output, editing programs don't need that much power. The real tricks comes with rendering non-matching clips or outputting the final cut to a different format. I use my laptop for SD video editing but I'm working with broadcast quality files (30mbps) so I don't think you should have an issue.

What editing program are you using?

 

[yottabit]

Hi once again,
Thought I would post an update. So there is some good news and bad news for my situation. The good news is the footage with the camcorder looks amazing! For only about 500 dollars I can't believe the quality.

The (sorta) bad news is it seems to only be able to record in 1080i/p, with varying detail levels. I spent the day yesterday recording some footage of my team's project (we built a weather station as an engineering project) in full 24mbps and came home to find out I couldn't even play it back!

I use vista 32 bit right now I tried with VLC media player... dismal. Tried downloading some programs (ffdshow and haali media splitter) to play it in WMP and that worked slightly better but still not good. I installed the built in canon software (Pixela crap) and using that I can actually play the files back, although its just barely tolerable when I have the screen size set to "half". (Probably doesn't help that my monitor is 1920x1080) CPU utilization is approximately 98-99% on both cores when playing this back but at least it keeps the audio synced. There are dropped frames however if there is lots of action on the screen.

If I record in a lower quality setting on the camera (such as SP 7 mbps) it works fine for playback and still looks great... for my purposes of uploading to Youtube HD that setting will be perfect. I feel the only real need for the 24 mbps would be if I would be burning Blu-ray discs which I have no ambition to do.

That being said, I thought the Radeon 3450 in my laptop was capable of hardware decoding H.264, but maybe that was in my imagination? I thought the AVCHD format the camera's used was the same, but am I mistaken?

I'm looking for a new editing program now, I suffered through the "Pixela Image Mixer" because it was the only thing I had that worked for my first project... probably will look at acquiring something like Sony Vegas (I used an older version of it once long ago and was pleased)

Can you guys recommend any free or cheap video editing programs that can handle HD? I've used t@b video editor before and like that but I'm not sure how it would handle HD. Preferably I'd like something simpler like windows movie maker for just throwing clips together for now. This canon thing won't even let me insert pictures or do fades...

Here's the link to the project video if anyone's interested, at the moment it's still processing and I'm crossing my fingers that the HD option will pop up:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjFZr5snrL0
One note is I recorded most of the video in 1080 60i so there may be some interlacing visible because the software I was using cannot do deinterlacing... this isn't the camera's fault

Thanks!

 

[yottabit]

Update once again... so upon further research all Radeon HD series support hardware decoding of H.264 video (which is the codec used by the AVCHD standard for camcorders). The software/codec I was using just didn't support it. I downloaded "Windows Media Player Classic", a stripped down version of media player with this codec support, and now can play the 1080p 24mbps full screen with < 20 % cpu utilization. It can also deinterlace with <25% utilization. Good stuff!

Now I just need to find a decent video editing program to go along with it. The ones I'm using right now certainly aren't accelerated in the preview window which makes trying to figure out where I am in the clips near impossible.

 

[Cattykit]

As for a media player, try KMP. It comes with built-in codecs and has tons of setting you can mess with. If you're on Win7, you can use KMP to use Win7's built-in codec(H.264) which uses GPU acceleration. In my case, I use KMP+coreAVC and it works damn well. Really, try KMP. Out of all the players I've tested, it's the best thing and it's free.

Also, if you're into video editing, get Sony Vegas.

I'm sure about your cam but my 5D mk2 makes H.264 1080p 40mbps! footages. In my case, it runs okay for what I do but many uses Cineform Neoscene transcoder for real time editing.

Also, if you plan to upgrade, get nvidia GPU for CUDA. Though AMD GPUs are much better for gaming, they won't do shit when it comes to video editing stuffs.

One more: http://eugenia.gnomefiles.org/category/filmmaking/
There, you can get some great advices.