Building new system for Edius 4.x & DVStorm

[sascho]

I am planning to build a new system around my "old" DVStorm card and my newly purchased Edius 4.0 Pro version. I used Edius 2.0 until now and edit videos as hobby rather than professionally, but I do get through quite a bit of footage over the course of the year (DV only at the moment, maybe HDV in future).

My question: Not having looked at hardware for a while now, what would you suggest as reasonably good components to achieve most effects in real time? I need the whole suit I guess, ie Processor, Motherboard, Video Card (2 Monitors), RAM and Hard Drives. I was hoping to spend max £500 for this, because as I said it's a serious one, but still just a hobby.

Thanks in advance.
Sascha

[skier-hughes]

My old pc which had a P4 hyperthreaded 3ghz processor with 2 gb dual ram and an fx5200 128mb graphics card worked very well, with 5+ layers of video, all transitions etc all working in real time.

So anything virtually in the coreduo or core2duo range will be no problem, but if you want a pc that will be vista compatible and work well, get a graphics card with plenty of ram, so at least 256mb.

XP will only use up to 2gb ram, so don't get any more than that.

HDD's that are 7200rpm will be fine, these days most mobo's will have sata connectors for hdd's, so opt for this type rather than normal ata, (ide).
No doubt you already know that one for the OS and all programmes and another for video or files is best.

Graham

[sascho]

Thanks a lot Graham.

In terms of the graphics card, I remember that the XPlode effects needed a powerful card at least in the past. Given that most graphics hardware is geared towards 3D rendering in games these days, what do I need to look for that's important for video rendering? I am a bit lost with these dozens of models out there.

[Aristotelis]

If your do a quick search on these forums you will find numerous threads about that...
A cheap ATI board will work just fine...Nowdays is not necessary to invest on a graphics card if the only think you need is to edit video fast...

[T-Bone]

like this one:
http://ediusforum.grassvalley.com/fo...read.php?t=447

also determine whther you have a newer 3.3 volt Storm card, or an older 5 volt card - if you have a 5 volt, it may limit your motherboard choices - I wish we had that thread from the old forum

[GrassValley_BH]

5-volt-only PCI boards have "notch" in the card edge farther from the bracket, like this:
<--Bracket [=========#==]

5-volt PCI slots have "hump" in the slot farther from the bracket, like this:
<--Bracket [=========#==]

3.3-volt-only PCI boards have "notch" in the card edge closer to the bracket, like this:
<--Bracket [==#=========]

3.3-volt PCI slots have "hump" in the slot closer to the bracket, like this:
<--Bracket [==#=========]

Universal (3.3v/5v) PCI boards have card edge with one "notch" closer to the bracket, and one farther from the bracket.
<--Bracket [==#======#==]

As far as I am aware, there is no "universal" PCI slot, slots are either 3.3v or 5v.

[jthomas]

I built a system using the Gigabyte P965- DQ6 which has 5 volt physical PCI slots but some on the old forum were concerned it still might not support 5 volt cards. I never did try the DvStorm in that system because my wife took it from me.

I am now building one with the Gigabyte P35-DQ6 and hope to use the DvStorm in it for a while. I emailed Gigabyte about the PCI slots supporting 5 volts and got this reply.

(Dear Customer,

Yes, the PCI slots on the GA-P35-DQ6 will accept 5V PCI cards.

Thank you for choosing Gigabyte products)

[STORMDAVE]

Isn't the DVStorm2 (the second one) compatible with both types of slots? I'm not sure.

[GrassValley_BH]

Isn't the DVStorm2 (the second one) compatible with both types of slots? I'm not sure.

Newer rev DVStorm2, yes.
Some of the early ones may not be.

[bhmm9999]

What is the rev# I should look for on an older compatable Storm2?
Thanks,
bob

[T-Bone]

bob, I think looking for the rev # just confuses things - I suggest:

use Brandon's great illustration to determine what voltage Storm board you have

then get a motherboard that has a PCI slot with that voltage

[sascho]

Thanks everyone for your responses. On the graphics card topic, I have read through other posts and remember (but can't find the post any more) that people were saying PCI-E cards don't do XPlode effects in realtime. Is that correct? Should I rather stick with an AGP motherboard like the AM2NF3-VSTA and get a fast AGP card with it?

[jthomas]

I just finished a system for my DvStorm ( which is a 5 volt card ) using a Gigabye P35 DQ6 board with a E6600 dual core. The P35 does support 5 volt cards, don't know about 3.3 volt cards but I assume it would also support them.

I just plugged the DvStorm in the first PCI slot and installed Edius 4.0 and then installed the 4.24 update without a glitch. The system seems very stable and as someone said before it is almost overkill for DV editing. I put 6 layers of DV on the timeline and added all kinds of filters and 3D pips and it never lowered the buffer at all.

I used an ATI X800XL PCI-E video card and with a little configuring it plays Xplode Pro 4.5 for Edius completely RT.

[sascho]

That's interesting. When you say "a little configuring...", what did you do to get it to do XPlode in RT?

[jthomas]

First off I could not get xplode for Edius to run RT even after installing the xplode configuration file from the GV web site, it would only show D3D universal renderer as the renderer to use. So I downloaded and installed Xplode pro 4.5 and it seemed to install its own Xplode configuration file which did show ATI hardware renderer as an option. I set it to ATI hardware renderer and selected Direct3D T&L Hal. In the ATI 3D settings I set Anti-Aliasing to 6x, set Anisotropic Filtering to Use Application Settings and set Vertical Refresh to always off. I can set an Xplode pro transition to any length and start playing in the center of the transition and the buffer fills very quickly.

The ATI X800XL is an older PCI-E card which I bought new on E-Bay about 6 months ago just for this system because it was proven to work with Xplode and Edius overlay. I have no Idea about any of the newer cards.