9800 pro vs. 5200 FX

[kylebisme]

sure you can hook a 9800pro up to a tv, all of them come with tv out. i think you mean you need a aiw for tv in, which is totaly different.

 

[modedepe]

Yeah this guy might have meant that he wanted an aiw so he could hook cable up to his computer. Not sure though, just guessing since that's the only real reason you'd get an aiw.

 

[Cawchy87]

Originally posted by: keysplayr2003

Originally posted by:
What does your friend use to capture the video to the computer? Firewire? dedicated TV/Capture card? ATI AIW?

What method does your friend currently use to capture video?

He has a mini DV camera (couldn't tell you what model). He uses a fire wire to transfer it to the computer.

Originally posted by: TheSnowman
sure you can hook a 9800pro up to a tv, all of them come with tv out. i think you mean you need a aiw for tv in, which is totaly different.

He just wants to be able to use his TV screen as his computer screen to "enhance" his video editing. Not for TV in or to use as a tv tuner.

And thanks for the help guys, i'll tell him to get 1 gig of ram insted of the 512 dual channel!

 

[Childs]

If he's serious about video editing he'll get a Mac and use FCP, so he shouldn't spend any money and save up!

 

[Cawchy87]

I have mentioned that to him, and he knows of them himself, but he also wants to use it for general use. Flash, dreamweaver, etc. As well as some games.

 

[batmanuel]

If he really wants to throw around some money, he could go for something like this. Not a dedicated video card by itself, but a add-on card that accelerates video encoding and some filters in hardware (if you use the bundled Adobe software, of course). Not sure if this type of hardware makes as much a difference now that we have 3GHz P4s to chew on the video files, but back when a GHz was fast these cards shaved a lot of time off of your video projects. Pricy, but if you tallly up the seperate cost of the included software (Premiere Pro, After Effects, Audition, and Encore DVD), it ain't so bad.

The only bad thing about these Real Time editing cards (besides cost) is that they can be notoriously buggy. I don't know about the Matrox cards, but the old Pinnacle RT cards used to be very, very touchy about the hardware they were installed on. Probably why Final Cut Pro gets so much love on the Mac platform.

/edited to fix my bad linky.

 

[Schadenfroh]

get a matrox

 

[Cawchy87]

Actually, he is getting it through dell so the vid card options are limited there. I offered to build his computer numorus times with another friend of mine, but his parents want "tech support" so they won't let us. His old computer's hard drive just came to a grinding halt (literally) so he doesn't feel like waiting for a new computer. The number of times i have heard "It's better than what i have now." Makes me want to strangle him. But thank you very much for all of your help and suggestions.

 

[Blastman]

Video editing. Dell sells a 9600XT AIW. Just get the 5200 and add the AIW to the cart.

 

[DanZee]

Originally posted by: PCTweaker5
Well wouldnt that be the video card making it run smoothly? I am in no way arguing that 1GB isnt better than 512MB I just want to know how and why.

I work in the 3D animation industry and the more ram you have the better. Example: I need to render an indoor scene of a... erm... restaurant (just off the top of my head). The geometry in my scene takes up around 2 MB of storage space. The textures take up about 400 MB (hi-res+bump+specular+diffuse+masks+etc.). Since I have a fire place in my restaurant (rural German type) I need additional MBs for my fire made out of particle systems or Fluid Effects (Maya), say another 50-80 MB. I should stop here or I will bore you. Now I press the "render that stuff" button and all of that crap is dumped into... you guessed it - RAM. Now a quick calculation will give you: 2+400+80+200 (the last is for various mysterious stuff that happens during rendering) = 682 MB. Now imagine that I have only 256 MB RAM. Half of it is taken by the OS, another 30-40 MB by the 3D program itself, some more RAM is eaten up by pointless little progs like ICQ and stuff. So now I have less than 100 MB free. That means only a fraction of the scene will be loaded into memory and the rest will have to be swapped from the harddrive on-the-fly. I don't know about your HD, but mine is a few thousand times slower than RAM. Therefore the rendering times increase dramatically, I lose time and money, nerves, weight, my wife, sanity, etc. On the other hand if I had 1 Gb of RAM all of the crap gets dumped into memory and the HD is left alone for the duration of the rendering process. I do my work faster, I get paid more, me and my wife live happily ever after gaining weight, reading smart books and not once calling the family psychiatrist. Same sittuation with video editing. A 5 minute clip of uncompressed PAL resolution (768x576) video (without sound) may take upwards of 1.5-2 GIGABYTES of storage space (if it had been edited). So there you have the reason for large amounts of RAM for graphics and video editing. Hope this helped and I made SOME sense...

Enjoy.

 

[Tango57]

Originally posted by: DanZee

Originally posted by: PCTweaker5
Well wouldnt that be the video card making it run smoothly? I am in no way arguing that 1GB isnt better than 512MB I just want to know how and why.

I work in the 3D animation industry and the more ram you have the better. Example: I need to render an indoor scene of a... erm... restaurant (just off the top of my head). The geometry in my scene takes up around 2 MB of storage space. The textures take up about 400 MB (hi-res+bump+specular+diffuse+masks+etc.). Since I have a fire place in my restaurant (rural German type) I need additional MBs for my fire made out of particle systems or Fluid Effects (Maya), say another 50-80 MB. I should stop here or I will bore you. Now I press the "render that stuff" button and all of that crap is dumped into... you guessed it - RAM. Now a quick calculation will give you: 2+400+80+200 (the last is for various mysterious stuff that happens during rendering) = 682 MB. Now imagine that I have only 256 MB RAM. Half of it is taken by the OS, another 30-40 MB by the 3D program itself, some more RAM is eaten up by pointless little progs like ICQ and stuff. So now I have less than 100 MB free. That means only a fraction of the scene will be loaded into memory and the rest will have to be swapped from the harddrive on-the-fly. I don't know about your HD, but mine is a few thousand times slower than RAM. Therefore the rendering times increase dramatically, I lose time and money, nerves, weight, my wife, sanity, etc. On the other hand if I had 1 Gb of RAM all of the crap gets dumped into memory and the HD is left alone for the duration of the rendering process. I do my work faster, I get paid more, me and my wife live happily ever after gaining weight, reading smart books and not once calling the family psychiatrist. Same sittuation with video editing. A 5 minute clip of uncompressed PAL resolution (768x576) video (without sound) may take upwards of 1.5-2 GIGABYTES of storage space (if it had been edited). So there you have the reason for large amounts of RAM for graphics and video editing. Hope this helped and I made SOME sense...

Enjoy.

wow! ...i'll never look at RAM the same way again.

 

[boran]

for anything rendering, video editing and photography related, the video card speed is of no importance whatsoever. video card accuracy IS an issue with precision 3D rendering with realtime viewports, and there an accurate card can help a lot, but that is not the case here. hence an MX420 could handle the job just fine, and if he wants TV connectivity he can just take the lowest card available that has that.

 

[PCTweaker5]

You're a funny guy Danzee, thanks for the reasons to have more RAM. But now I need to go to sleep because I have to ship 3 packages tomorrow and I feel pretty light headed already so goodnight all!