System requirements for video transfer???

[BigLar]

I'd like to build one of the Shuttle XPC boxes to use for transferring Beta, VHS, and DV tapes onto DVD's. I'm struggling with just how much "horsepower" I need to do the job reasonably quickly.

Will the process be signnificantly faster with a Pentium hyperthreading CPU with an SB61G2 or will and AMD CPU in a SN45G (or one of the other cubes) be almost as good?

Any advise on what is most important for this application would be appreciated.

Thanx.

 

[WHipLAsh13]

Benchmarks Some tests Tom did with AMD's and Intel's. Intel is the clear winner for this application.

 

[capricorn]

I would think a lot of memory and a raid 0 (mirror) configuration would be definite musts as well. Can you get a pair of drives in one of those cases? (Shuttle XPC is the small - shoe box sized case, right?) Maybe dual SATA in RAID 0 would fit even better.

-cap

 

[AgaBoogaBoo]

Originally posted by: capricorn
I would think a lot of memory and a raid 0 (mirror) configuration would be definite musts as well. Can you get a pair of drives in one of those cases? (Shuttle XPC is the small - shoe box sized case, right?) Maybe dual SATA in RAID 0 would fit even better.

-cap

Hmm... I would personally go for a single drive configuration in that small of a case, those two drives are going to get pretty hot since they'll be crammed in there. Intel has hyper threading capabilities and so that will give them the lead in every video editing program taht can take advantage of it. If you really want a lot of speed, you can go for a Raptor or a 15,000 RPM SCSI setup but the latter won't give you anywhere near the space you'll need for video editing, unless you spend a whole lot and get the 72GB one, their highest capacity at that speed in a single drive. Personally, I'd either get a nice sized 8mb cache drive, whatever amount of space you think you'll need plus a little extra and atleast 1GB of RAM, if not more. Make su re to get a Hyper Threading cpu though because that'll increase performance in editing by A LOT. The HT cpus are as follows: 2.4C, 2.6C, 2.8C, 3.0, and 3.2. There is a 3.066 also which has Hyper Threading but it features a slower FSB that the other cpus I listed.

 

[EeyoreX]

Wouldn't the HT be helpful only if you are encoding AND doing something else? Are most/any video encoders coded to use dual CPUs? If not then this would only be a benefit if you are trying to encode video and, say, surf the net or work with Excel. I could be wrong, but I don't see that there would be that big, if any, benefit to HT for this singular app. I occasionally convert video to VCD and surf the net simultaneously. I can't complain too much (but I also don't do this too much) I use an Athlon XP 2800+ Barton and 1GB RAM.

Sorry if this question is answered in the TH article. I refuse to set a cyber foot there, so I can't check for myself.

\Dan

 

[capricorn]

Originally posted by: AgaBooga

Originally posted by: capricorn
I would think a lot of memory and a raid 0 (mirror) configuration would be definite musts as well. Can you get a pair of drives in one of those cases? (Shuttle XPC is the small - shoe box sized case, right?) Maybe dual SATA in RAID 0 would fit even better.

-cap

Hmm... I would personally go for a single drive configuration in that small of a case, those two drives are going to get pretty hot since they'll be crammed in there. Intel has hyper threading capabilities and so that will give them the lead in every video editing program taht can take advantage of it. If you really want a lot of speed, you can go for a Raptor or a 15,000 RPM SCSI setup but the latter won't give you anywhere near the space you'll need for video editing, unless you spend a whole lot and get the 72GB one, their highest capacity at that speed in a single drive. Personally, I'd either get a nice sized 8mb cache drive, whatever amount of space you think you'll need plus a little extra and atleast 1GB of RAM, if not more. Make su re to get a Hyper Threading cpu though because that'll increase performance in editing by A LOT. The HT cpus are as follows: 2.4C, 2.6C, 2.8C, 3.0, and 3.2. There is a 3.066 also which has Hyper Threading but it features a slower FSB that the other cpus I listed.

Agreed on the size of the case fitting two drives question. I haven't tried video editing myself, but noticed that most systems built for this have RAID 0 configurations. The newer SATA drives like the RAPTOR might make this unnecessary. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if there is a micro-ATX board with SATA raid available. A pair of those would have reasonable amounts of space for editing - not huge amounts though. There is still that heat thing, but the pair of 120 MB Maxtors (7200 RPM; 8 MB buffer) are the coolest running drives I've had yet. The other gotcha I noticed is the power supplies in those cases tend to be on the small side. (250-300W)

-cap

 

[thesix]

I haven't tried video editing myself, but noticed that most systems built for this have RAID 0 configurations

That's a common misunstanding. RAID0 won't help a bit for rendering.

I'd like to build one of the Shuttle XPC boxes to use for transferring Beta, VHS, and DV tapes onto DVD's

.

Since you're 'transferring' data from one format to another, the bottleneck will definitely be the CPU(s), i.e. the rendering process.

Even for 'normal video editting', I wouldn't recommend RAID0. Two or three 7200RPM/8MB IDE disks will do perfectly.

If you don't care about 10-30% more time ( it will take hours for a whole movie anyway ), any 2+GHz CPU is fine.
I don't recommend Shuttle XPC either, due to its limited space for disks and heat, although you can use the SCSI solution (SCSI card inside, disks outside).
The only advantage of XPC is its appearance or size. (It will be very noisy when CPU is working hard). I played with SB61G2 for 3 hours and returned it

Wouldn't the HT be helpful only if you are encoding AND doing something else? Are most/any video encoders coded to use dual CPUs?

Some of the encoding programs are HT-aware.
I use this one: TMPGEnc
and it does seem to benefit from HT quite a bit ( I haven't done any comparison myself, but at least my 2.4G CPU now shows 100% busy

 

[AgaBoogaBoo]

Originally posted by: EeyoreX
Wouldn't the HT be helpful only if you are encoding AND doing something else? Are most/any video encoders coded to use dual CPUs? If not then this would only be a benefit if you are trying to encode video and, say, surf the net or work with Excel. I could be wrong, but I don't see that there would be that big, if any, benefit to HT for this singular app. I occasionally convert video to VCD and surf the net simultaneously. I can't complain too much (but I also don't do this too much) I use an Athlon XP 2800+ Barton and 1GB RAM.

Sorry if this question is answered in the TH article. I refuse to set a cyber foot there, so I can't check for myself.

\Dan

Hehe. Its useful in all f those situations, but most major video editing apps, even the free ones for the most part including TMPGenc, are multi threaded and/or designed to work with dual CPU's or Hyper Threading. The benefit is very large if you do video editing.

Here are two links showing its usefullness in encoding:
Link 1
Link 2

In Link 2 you can see that the 2.4C outperforms the XP 3200+ and the Pentium 4 2.8Ghz (Not 2.8C) as well as the 3.06Ghz CPU which also features Hyper Threading. I assume that you will be buying a cpu with the new FSB and Hyper Threading. If you are, look at the ones with the "C" at the end, that denotes it having the new 800mhz FSB and Hyper Threading.

 

[capricorn]

Originally posted by: thesix

I haven't tried video editing myself, but noticed that most systems built for this have RAID 0 configurations

That's a common misunstanding. RAID0 won't help a bit for rendering.

Of course not - it increases the speed that the edited movie can be saved to disk. Very handy when one is transferring to disk.

-cap

 

[thesix]

Originally posted by: capricorn

Originally posted by: thesix

I haven't tried video editing myself, but noticed that most systems built for this have RAID 0 configurations

That's a common misunstanding. RAID0 won't help a bit for rendering.

Of course not - it increases the speed that the edited movie can be saved to disk. Very handy when one is transferring to disk.

-cap

You misundstand what I said, or I didn't put it well. The oiriginal poster explicitly says " transferring Beta, VHS, and DV tapes onto DVD's ", which
means he has to render the source video into a different format, and that's one operation, not two -- it's not like you render the video to somewhere first, then, move the result to the disk --- it's done in one operation: you render it to the disk, or even directly to DVDs.

For example, a typical workflow is like this:
1. Transfer DV from DV camcorder to the disk through Firewire.
That's about 15MB/sec , any IDE disk can handle.
2. (optional) Edit the movie in a video editor. Some editors scan the whole movie and build an index file first time it opens the movie,
that's the only time you will probably benefit from a faster disk if your CPU is fast enough. Again, fast single IDE disk will do just fine.
When you're actually editing the content ( trim, concatenate, etc. ), disk can hardly be a noticeable bottleneck.

Now, if you want to save an unfinished project to a new file in the same DV format without rendering ( only render it when you finish the project ),
it will be like copying a file from one place to anther, and guess what, two separate disks beats one RAID0 disk in transfering time, because
you can save the file to a different disk than where the source locates, so it will be sequential read for the source disk and sequential wirte for
for the other. On the contrary, if you made a RAID0 logical disk, you have to work within that single disk, both read and write become
non-sequential. (Unless of course, you have two RAID0s)

If you want to transfer the the whole movie to DVDs, you probably won't edit it at all.

3. Render the whole, or edited movie, to a disk, or to DVDs directly -- that's the most time consuming part, and today's CPUs are not fast enough
to make the disk bottleneck, which we alll agree.

 

[wetcat007]

You'll need a nice fast CPU if or a good hardware encoder card which would be ur best option for it to work smothly.

 

[homenetman]

Just did some tests on my system while rendering video to DVD. Using a P4 1.6 Northwood OC'd to 2.2ghz. System has a 80gig HD w/8mb cache and 512 mb of memory. I watched perfomance tab on Task Manager while rendering video. CPU went and stayed at 100% utilization through most of it. Available physical memory went as low as 50-75 mbs. Lots of page file access, etc.

I'm going to upgrade to 2.6C or 2.8C with at least a gig of memory and dual 160gig hard drives on SATA raid. Hopefully see some improvement.