Will an SATA III SSD enable me to edit five HD streams?

[k8_fan]

I'm finishing a concert season, and am looking to upgrade my systems. I edit on a desktop and will be putting a RAID system together with the intention of being able to play 5 HD camera streams at once, and not have to use proxys.

But I also edit on a laptop that supports two hard drives. I was thinking about adding another 1.5 terabyte hard drive for storage space, but I am also considering installing a 256 gig SSD drive, and moving projects to that one to edit. But the second option only makes sense if it will enable me to play five cameras in multicam mode.

According to HP, the hard drive controllers are only SATA II, but this discussion on a Crucial web site says that there is a hack to get my HP 8560P to SATA III.

Assuming it does, can I edit five 1080 x 1440 HD streams in real time in full res on my laptop?

[GrassValley_BH]

The critical part we need to know is what format/bitrate HD streams you're talking about...

Five 4 Mbps H.264 streams would be no problem for the drive, but problematic for the CPU. So it's not so much a matter of resolution, but rather of bitrates and decompression load.

[k8_fan]

Ah, OK. I'm shooting with a Canon XH-A1 using Adobe OnLocation which records an MPEG2 Transport Stream, 3 Canon HF-S100 cameras which record to SD card in H.264/AVCHD and one Canon HF-200, also H.264/AVCHD.

Right now, I have to make proxys, but I'd be happy to convert from the transport stream and AVCHD to some other, less processor-stressful HD format.

[Jerry]

What is the rest of the system specs?

[k8_fan]

What is the rest of the system specs?

It's an HP 8560P with an Intel Core i5 i5-2520M 2.5GHz processor, with a AMD Radeon HD 6470M video chip. I've upgraded the memory to 16 gigs and the system hard drive to a 750 gig hybrid SSD/mechanical one.

It's not the fastest laptop made, but it was one of the only ones that still offers a Firewire port. And it's as rugged as all get out, which means a lot in my business.

Update: I forgot to mention that I record at 24 mb/sec on the Canon HF-S100s and 17 mb/sec on the Canon HF-200.

[Jerry]

The h.264 files are driven by processor speed. Your mpeg 2 files will play fine, but you are asking your processor to do something it can't do. The SSD will help only on
the backside where the drive comes into play.
I would suggest that you load your files into the
bin and convert to HQ to enable your processor
to be able to process your project with some head room.

[Ron Evans]

Are you talking about upgrading your laptop or the desktop ? You say you edit on the desktop but record from the XH-A1 HDV to the laptop and to an external hard drive or internal hard drive on the laptop. Do you then connect up this hard drive to the desktop for editing? Transfer all the AVCHD files to the desktop and edit? For a modern PC ( like my PC in my signature) multicam with 4 or 5 tracks native AVCHD is not a problem and that is what I do all the time. HDV is less of a problem than AVCHD. I mainly edit multicam with 4 tracks native AVCHD and 1 track EX3 files. All source files used from a 2T hard drive on my PC. So one 7200rpm SATA drive is enough to feed the CPU for 4 tracks AVCHD and 1 track EX3 files without a problem. CPU is still the important part. I have a RAID but really used because its there from the past and do send output HQ files to the RAID as I arrange never to read and write to the same hard drive during editing or encoding.

If you edit on the laptop I have to agree with Jerry that you should convert to HQ to edit. Your laptop does have USB 3 as well as eSata I think so you could use a fast external hard drive that could then be used with a powerful desktop PC for editing.

Ron Evans

[k8_fan]

Cool, thanks for the info. I'll have to experiment with one of my current shows and convert the four H.264 tracks to HQ and see. I doubt it will take a lot longer to convert than making the proxies, which I normally do overnight after making the show.

I record to the laptop, and dump all the raw footage to it. And right now, I'm editing the shows on it as well. This last weekend, I shot four concerts in two days, and only Edius' Multicam mode makes it possible for me to complete it.