What should I upgrade for a better video editing/encoding system

[Smithyoffline]

Hi all,

I am just wondering what should I upgrade for a better video editing/encoding system...

How much of a performance gain or what features would be good about the upgrade i should do...

I currently have the following system...

Pentium 4, 2.8C GHZ 800FSB
1Gb of PC3200 Ram
Gigabyte 81-PE1000 PRO
Western Digital 120GB Hard Drive 7200 RPM, 8Mb Cache
Asus 128mb 9600XT
Liteon 52x32x52 CDRW
Pioneer DVD Rom

Thanks for any input...

 

[NFactor]

That system looks pretty nice as it is, you could go 3.2 but I don't know whether the benefit would be worth it at all. The only real upgrade path in my mind would be going dual cpu, adding a little more ram, and some faster HD's, but that may be completely unnecessary and it really depends on how much work to do. Unless you really need the extra few seconds that the 3.2 would give you, or the power of dual cpu's, i would stick with your current system.

 

[myocardia]

You would definitely improve both video editing and encoding the most by adding a second hard drive. Also, buying a good overclocking heatsink and overclocking that 2.8C would improve the speed of everything you do.

 

[Smithyoffline]

How much of a performance difference would a dual processor would be over the 2.8C Ghz and what CPUS would I need to be compatible..

 

[charlie21]

To go dual processor, you have to buy Xeons. P4's are not SMP capable. I don't think you could justify the price/performance of Xeons over what you have now. You should have plenty of RAM, I wouldn't worry about that. The best upgrade that you could do is buy a second hard drive. Having one drive for source and another for destination makes all the difference in the world.

 

[Smithyoffline]

well it seems peoples opinion is to go for the second hard drive and raid...

what kinda performance boost will i get in an application like premiere for editing videos...

i would just get another western digital 120gb 7200rpm with 8mb cache, so what boost would i see...

this would be after getting a dvd burner of course, im not sure which brand but i dont wanna pay much for it...

 

[myocardia]

You're gonna have to buy 3 more hard-drives if you want RAID. One more hard drive, no RAID will considerably speed up encoding & editing, here's why: reading from a single drive, then writing back to that same drive, but obviously at a different part of the drive's platter is not very fast. Reading from one 8MB cache drive, and writing to another 8MB cache drive is optimal, and will speed what you do up more than any other upgrade you could make, including a faster processor.

 

[Joker81]

Buy a MAC.

 

[flexy]

you could also consider different software, eg. Sony/SonicFoundry Vegas4.0. Dont know if it is 'faster' than Preimere tho since i never used Premiere

 

[caz67]

Buy a couple of 74g Raptors, in RAID0

 

[oldfart]

My testing has shown a 0% increase in encoding speed going to a faster/2nd HD. Encoding is CPU bound, there is no problem getting the data on/off the HD fast enough with any modern IDE drive. There are some situations if the video data is already encoded and is being re-encoded where 2 vs 1 HD may be a bit better. For capture, I dont see it either. Any decent HD can keep up with the capture source. For editing...maybe a little if you have a lot of different source files.

CPU power means far more than anything else for this type of work.

 

[AWhackWhiteBoy]

Originally posted by: oldfart
My testing has shown a 0% increase in encoding speed going to a faster/2nd HD. Encoding is CPU bound, there is no problem getting the data on/off the HD fast enough with any modern IDE drive. There are some situations if the video data is already encoded and is being re-encoded where 2 vs 1 HD may be a bit better. For capture, I dont see it either. Any decent HD can keep up with the capture source. For editing...maybe a little if you have a lot of different source files.

CPU power means far more than anything else for this type of work.

he wants it for video editing in general, ram and hard drive speed means a lot for on the fly rendering.

 

[AWhackWhiteBoy]

i really don't know much about video editing in particular, but maybe you could setup two older cheaper pc and turn them into encoding slaves?

 

[Goi]

Overclock that 2.8C to 3.4GHz or more

 

[oldfart]

Originally posted by: AWhackWhiteBoy

Originally posted by: oldfart
My testing has shown a 0% increase in encoding speed going to a faster/2nd HD. Encoding is CPU bound, there is no problem getting the data on/off the HD fast enough with any modern IDE drive. There are some situations if the video data is already encoded and is being re-encoded where 2 vs 1 HD may be a bit better. For capture, I dont see it either. Any decent HD can keep up with the capture source. For editing...maybe a little if you have a lot of different source files.

CPU power means far more than anything else for this type of work.

he wants it for video editing in general, ram and hard drive speed means a lot for on the fly rendering.

I didn't see any mention of real time encoding by the OP Real time rendering also generally precludes editing which he did mention. The normal process is capture/edit/encode/author. I have a Gig of ram and have never seen more than 512 used when encoding or editing. I've never once ran into a situation where HD was a bottleneck either. It depends on what type of work you are doing. What has been your experience? What kind of video work do you do and what programs do you use to do it?

 

[Joker81]

Originally posted by: oldfart
For capture, I dont see it either. Any decent HD can keep up with the capture source. For editing...maybe a little if you have a lot of different source files.

CPU power means far more than anything else for this type of work.

Very true. In general capturing from a Firewire MiniDV cam is 25Mb/s which is about 3 MB/s which nowadays almost anybody can have. You may need to have a faster drive if you are dealing with uncompressed video. Although uncompressed video is only still as good as the source its comming from.

The only data I was able to find on uncompressed video was
HDTV 1920x1080, 30 fps, 8 bits per channel requires 1.5 Gb/sec uncompressed
Which no harddrive would be able to obtain. about 200 MB/s.

MiniDV is probably the way to go with video editing these days since it offers better Mb/s then even DVD(9.8Mb/s) and most harddrives will be able to deal with that with no problem.

If you plan on doing serious editing maybe consider a very good capture board. They are made specific to hardware encode on the fly so you don't deal with uncompressed video.

 

[AWhackWhiteBoy]

i've used premier a bit but mainly cinelerra. when getting quick peices and previews of videos on the fly(editing 4gig + files) tends to be extremely hard on hard drives, and i'd imagine if i had more ram the program wouldn't have had to use scatch disk as much as it did.