Software only system

[Andy Tejral]

Well, that was stupid. I bought a Canon HV20 HDV camcorder. My system worked just fine with DV and, well, it almost works with HDV. I can capture an MPEG stream but can't do HQ. Playback--not so good. I'm using Edius 4.5

And I just upgraded my old system too...

Here's my old system: ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe w. P4 2.6 GHz now with 2 gig ram. And, as I said, it works well with DV.

What do I need to get decent performance with HDV? I'll define 'decent' as under $1k

Thanks!

Andy Tejral

[Bluetongue]

Andy
The minimum requirement for HDV is
P4 3.4Ghz or AMD XP3000+
Your RAM is OK
The best bet is to see if you can get a P4 3.4G or even a 3.2 with at least 800mhz FSB to fit the socket on your MB.
There is one other way that may help
Capture the files from the camera in HDV *.m2t files
Set up a "Watch folder" with Procoder Express (Part of Edius) to convert the files into Canopus HQ AVI
Drag the files into the watch folder and they will be converted, will take some time and this will take the load off your processor.
The min requirement for CPU is to facilitate the conversion to HQ during capture
Regards Barry

[shueardm]

Great words of wisdom there. !! Spot on.

[Andy Tejral]

Great words of wisdom there. !! Spot on.

Yeah, well, might be words of wisdom but I tried a couple of places and the highest proc I can find is 3.0

I was resigned to getting a new computer. Might have to move old HDDs to this new one to do it. I'm a hobbiest so I really can't justify more money.

But how do you compare a single core to dual or quad cores? Reading stuff here, it doesn't sound like you get to use a dual core 1.7, right?

I was pondering an Asus P5W DH DELUXE/WIFI-AP with Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Kentsfield 2.4GHz. Will that do the trick or should I get a faster clock with dual core?

(plus, I played with the 'watch folder' thing and it kept processing the new file over and over and over---Oh. I bet you need to put the AVI in a different folder than the M2T)

[gdame]

Asus P5WDH Deluxe Mainboard (Aprox. $200.USD)
Intel E6850 Core2 Duo CPU (Aprox. $300.USD)
2GB Crucial PC2-5300 (2 x 1GB Low Density 16chip design) (Aprox. $80.USD)
Asus EAX1950 Pro (Aprox. $150.USD)
2 - 500GB SATA-300 Hard Drive Striped Raid 0 (1TB) connected to the two orange SATA connectors. (Aprox. $250.USD for the pair)
1 SATA-300 System Hard Drive connected to SATA-1 Red Connector (Aprox. $50.USD)

Total = $1080.USD for a really strong and stable system.

This is a proven recipe that I have built nearly 100. It is also a certified by GV/Canopus if you ever want to add an NX Express PCIe board set.

You also get dual Gbit Lan, Built in WiFi, eSATA, Optical & Coax digital audio out, and plenty of USB 2.0 ports.

You will be a happy editor!

George Dame
Grass Valley / Canopus System Integrator - 10 Years

[Bluetongue]

It's difficult. You can buy Core 2 Duo CPU E6850 (3 GHz, but easly can work at 3.5GHz). It's a very good processor, because of the clock and it's better (at this moment) than Quad 2.4GHz, because most of the application can't use properly 4 cores, yet.

Quad Core is more future proof, but in your case (for now) I think Core 2 Duo E6850 is better. It also depends what are you mainly do. 4 Cores are good only for heavy encoding with aplications which properly use it. If you do editing and sometimes final encoding than Core 2 is better. The price is almost the same as I remember.

Andrew

Just for the record my Quad uses all 4 cores on everything even MS word! They dont light up like when encoding to Canopus HQ or back to HDV and for good old MPEG2 for DVD they only run at about 25-30%.
It depends on the program and what is needed or what can be done in parallel as to how much they are used.
I read all the poppy **** about all cores not being used by Win XP but I can assure you they are, and it was a good future proof
Regards Barry

[Andy Tejral]

Thanks George, that looks great. With instructions for hooking it up even!

Except: Newegg doesn't have that graphics card. Got a second choice? (I found it: "deactivated item." Bummer.)

And why PC2-5300? Would that work better than PC2-6400?

Is there any reason I'd actually want 2 (or really 3) nics? I've used them at work to bridge two networks--I can't see that need at home. I can't imagine I'd get faster transfers hooking two ports up to the router. I think I read that someone got better performance after disabling one of them?

And as long as I'm yapping, could I just move my raid 0 from the P4C800 to this thing? I'm pretty sure it is on the Intel raid. Or would I have to reformat and recreate it? Its only 160 gig but it will have to do for now.

Thanks again for your (and everyone's) help,

[Andy Tejral]

They dont light up like when encoding to Canopus HQ or back to HDV and for good old MPEG2 for DVD they only run at about 25-30%.

Yeah, I guess that's why I'd prefer two faster ones than four slower ones. I'm assuming that any encoding, HQ or MPEG or whatever, disk speed has as much to do with it as proc speed. I notice that with my current system--I'll render something to a slow USB drive and it takes forever. I don't know how much the raid speeds it up but I think its substantial.

I'm not even going to pretend I'll buy another processor later: I intended that with this computer. Buy a speedy one when the prices came down. But they never really did. A lot of money for seemingly little gain. And now, I can't even get 'em! Spending $85 on a 3GHz seems like throwing good money after bad. Well, maybe not exactly that but...

Its kind of a shame because I just bought a new gfx card and ram for the P4C. I seem to be good at buying incompatible ram: I started with 512 of Geil. That wouldn't work with the 1gig of Mushkin and then that didn't work (well) with the 2 gig of Geil. I don't know if messing with bios settings would make it work.

If that wasn't bad enough, I could overclock the 2.6GHz w. mushkin up to over 3Ghz. Now with the Geil, the ram speed drops down if I OC more than 5%.

Speaking of overclocking, is it 'acceptable' to do that now? I've only just tried it because it was always considered unstable. But I've had pretty good luck with my attempts.

[Andy Tejral]

The local Compusa is going out of business. I picked up a Antec power supply that should work nicely. This one 40% off of their inflated prices--but I think it was still a reasonable deal. (Shipping to Alaska is a killer so that's a savings right there)

Slim pickings elsewhere. Only 20% off the ram. They had a couple of graphics cards left. ATI HD 2400Pro and HD2600PRO. PNY 7600GS 512mb.

CoolerMaster RR-LCH-P9E1 "Hyper L3" for LGA 775--will that work on the E6850?This one

I'm not a big AMD fan but they have several Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe.

Will any of this help me?