If you are editing video it is always good to have a good sized hard
drive.   But, video editing is always very cpu intensive whether you
know it or not it will use up all of your cpus floating point processing
power with out you even knowing it.    And if youyr cpu isnt fast than
having a fast hard drive isnt going to do you any good.  A lot of they
guys that I know who are on a budget will upgrade there pcs from single
proc to dual.  Using there origonal cpu and finding another on ebay and
finding a dual cpu mobo on ebay or somewhere.  And usually they will be
on top of the game   for video editing.  I do video editing on my pc
(dual xeon 1.8 2gb RDRAM 1060MHZ 5 100 GB seagate barcudas in raid 5
giving me aporiximatly 380 GB of usuable space.) all of the video
editing that I do is digital I have 2 4 port fire wire cards ( I have no
clue what manufacturer they were recommended due to having a separate
procesor for each port) they runn purfect on windows 2000.    but I can
with out a problem capture from 4 sources at once in full mpeg format.
But I think more than anything else it is the software that  you use   I
tried premire it was limiting the software didn't let me do things that
I wanted to do  like capture more than one source at once.  I found
vegas video and it has been the best viseo editing software ive ever
used.
Just some thoughts
Evan


-----Original Message-----
From: PCBUILD - Personal Computer Hardware discussion List
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Max Timchenko
Sent: Friday, June 21, 2002 5:38 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [PCBUILD] my video editing experience - in response to
[PCBuild] Video Editing


Hello Mark,

Monday, June 10, 2002, 3:42:55 AM, you wrote:

MR> I have recently been learning about video editing myself. I'm no
MR> expert, and I am as interested in replies to this thread as you are.

Video editing... Done a little of that, let me share my feelings :-)


To capture videos, you need a quality capture card. Cheap TV cards will
capture analog video for you, but the results are sub-optimal (to be
fair, I use a cheap TV card and am satisfied with the results).

Watch out for the drivers. They are fairly complex, and may not run well
under all OS. For example, my card only captures well under Windows98 --
2000 and XP drivers are bad. Pinnacle Studios' DV10, a professional
solution, AFAIK until this day only supports Windows 98.

If your source (VCR/camcorder) is analog, you need an analog input / TV
card. If it is digital and has a Firewire (IEEE-1394) port, then you
need a digital input card which is cheaper. I've heard new ATI Wonder
card has both -- this is one thing I'd love to get my hands on (
http://www.ati.com/products/pc/aiwradeon8500dv/index.html ), of course
the price tag is quite intimidating. (but: TV card $50, reasonable video
card with TV-out $150, DV input card $50 -> $250, not too far from $300
for the ATI product).

I'm not recommending any particular manufacturer/brand since they change
and I haven't been following the market that closely.


Since I worked with analog video sources only, I will not discuss DV
(digital video) further.

There are three approaches to capturing analog video. First, for
professional capture cards that do hardware processing and turn out a
compressed MJPEG (or other format) stream, there is no need for fast CPU
and hard drive -- reasonably modern PC and an UltraATA-66 drive shall
do. But the professional cards that can do that are expensive.

With a regular TV card, the approach I prefer is to get all data
unchanged to the harddisk and then process. Requires: little CPU power,
but very large (2 Gb per 5 minutes of uncompressed video of Hi8/TV
quality, which has twice the resolution of VHS/Video8) and very fast
hard drive. For example, I use a 30Gb 7200RPM Ultra-ATA 100 drive for
that purpose.


The last approach is to capture and compress on-the-fly, approach that
requires most CPU power but little hard-disk capacity. Example: my Duron
800 MHz CPU encodes with quality I would consider good for further
editing (3Mbps DivX5 video) at the rate of 12 frames per second. This
means that to encode real-time at this quality with this codec, I would
need at least an 1,6GHz CPU (new Athlons or Pentium-4)
-- which turns out to be around 1.8 GHz with the overhead of capture
process and sound recording.

Of course, DivX5 is a very CPU-intensive coder, and there are codecs
that do lower (but acceptable for regular hard disks) levels of
compression with less CPU use, so the example is somewhat extreme. But
still, IMHO, big and fast hard drives cost less than new and fast CPUs.


OK, this post is getting too long so if there is interest in the topic
I'll cover editing and output in separate posts. Very interested in your
comments and experiences :)

P.S. Video editing questions pop up regularly on PCBuild. Maybe we
should compile a F.A.Q on the topic?


Yours,

+=-.
| Max Timchenko [MaxVT]
| [log in to unmask]
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| Freelance website and graphics designer
|
| Editor - Graphics artist
| NOSPIN group
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