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A few general questions about hardware for video editing.

I

IamDavid

Diamond Member
I have been getting into video editing quite a bit lately and have a few questoins..

1.) Everywhere I read I see different opinions on which is faster for video editing, Intel Vs. AMD. I never see actual stats though. Is there a place that benchmarks Video encoding\rendering?

2.)I've heard many times the reason video rendering is so slow is because of the CPU bottleneck. What part of the CPU is the problem when it comes to video editing, what slows everything down? The FSB? Core?Something else?

3.) USB 2.0 is supposed to be 480Mbps, how fast is that compared to a standard ATA-100 IDE cable? I want to get an external enclosure for my Hard drive but I don't want to bother if its going to be slow. I'll be using it to store video files of 3-5GB..

4.) Any where to buy just the adapter part to make a drive IDE to USB 2.0? I'd rather build the enclosure myself.

4.) Would RAID increase any performance of video editing?

 
1. The disk subsystem is what I would think is the biggest bottleneck, but Anand has some recent CPU numbers for media encoding here.

2. The faster the better to get anywhere close to real-time encoding. According to the above linked article, memory bandwith is a major factor. As much as I hate to endorse the dark side 😛, a P4 coupled with RDRAM may give the best performance, but with the new NForce 2 Athlon boards using dual channel DDR, an AMD system might be able to compare well. [speculation] If you wait till spring, I bet a dual Opteron using dual channel DDR will be unbeleivable for video editing. [/speculation]

3 and 4. A USB 2.0 drive will still be slower than an ATA 100 IDE drive. For best affordable hard drive speed, get a couple WD or Maxtor drive with the 8MB cache and use RAID 0.
 
Wow, looks like Intel is way ahead of AMD now.. Thanks for the link.

I have the hard drives already but what would it improve using RAID?
 
Just edited with more info there. With a RAID 0 setup your write speeds will close to double. If you're really looking for some major hard drive performance, get 4 IDE drives and a dedicated 4-channel RAID card. A 4 drive RAID 0 array will rival a SCSI setup.
 
I've never seen disk performance to play a role at all. All you need is enough speed to capture the file, which any decent drive can do. What takes the time is the final rendering to MPEG/1/2/4. That is where you need as much CPU power as you can get. Writing that file to the HD is trivial. It's all about CPU power.
 
1. USB 2.0 is crap. If you want an external HDD go Firewire and get one w/the Oxford911 chipset.

2. What format are you editing? If you are editing DV then going RAID is a waste of $$$.


Lethal
 
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