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System optimized for Video

J

JeffreyK

Junior Member
I'm looking at building a system designed for rendering/capturing video for DVD's. I'm looking at an Asus P5AD2 with 3.4ghz, 1GB Ram, 2x WD250GB SATA Drives. Where will the bottleneck be?

Is there a big advantage in running at raid-0, or is standard SATA arrangement fast enough to write video data?

Any advantage in more RAM? Most of time when I check the process list in XP, I'm never close to using the full 1GB in the system (AMD XP1800) I have now.

Any opinions appreciated.

Thanks
 
1Gb should be enough, but basically as much as you can afford. You will probably find that the bottleneck(s) will be hard disk speed and CPU speed- you can never have enough of either.

[Edit] I have 1Gb RAM and I occasionally run out when doing video editing.
 
What programs do you intend to use for video encoding? Are you planning to do any video mastering or just reincoding an AVI into MPEG? Are you planin gto do any Real time capturing, is there a hardware capture / encoder board?

If you use major software like Adobe Premier and after effects... then more ram can be be utilized.. Professional video spftware expects serious system resources and it CAN store video in the ram as it is redered, which improves performance significantly. And if you are working with DVD sized files, meaning 2-4 gigs at a time , then you could potentially use up to those amounts of ram.

However if you are only converting prerecorded DVDs to AVI or some other format... then you do not need any additional resources to what you already have. It will not change the quality of the output, and will not speed up the process by a very significxant amount.

Hoever in either case, Make sure you get Low latency RAM. As fast as you can afford. 2x2x2x2 is ideal(that does get pricey)
 
I agree, it depends on exactly what type of video you will be doing. If you are planning to render and compile your own videos then more RAM could be useful. Other than that, it looks like your biggest bottleneck is the hard drives. Probably the fastest thing you could do is go with SCSI Raid, or Raid several 74gb WD Raptor drives together. That will significantly reduce rendering times and performance while editing.
 
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