Another PC spec question! « Videomaker Community Forums

eggplant
Member

Hi all,

I'm not all that well up on video editing but fine with pc hardware etc. I am quoting for someone for a dedicated photo/video/audio editing machine, this is mainly for teaching premiere and small amounts of in house editing, nothing for production or broadcast.
The basic spec is Intel E6600, 3 gig ram (4 gig often causes probs in XP 32) GF 7600 512mb, Pinnacle PCI 710 cap card, soundblaster audigy paltinum ZS.
I believe tha above spec should be fine, what I'm concerned about is the drives, scsi drives push it over budget so SATA it is. I have often seen that adobes (forgot to say, they will be using photoshop CS, premiere pro and audition) software likes its own scratch file on a drive other than the system drvie which makes sense, but is there an issue with having the scratch file on the same drive as the projects themselves?
I was thinking 120 gig system for windows, programs etc, and 2 or 3 400 gig (raid 0 or raid 5) for the projects and scratch file. Can anyone see any issues with this arrangment, or offer a better solution to both the system spec and the drive arrangements.

Many thanks for taking the time to read.

Regards

Posted 5 years ago #
compusolver
Member

With harddrive prices low as they are, I see no reason to use a 120 gig instead of 160 for system and programs. Editors often use lots of different programs.

Adobe claims that "it's usually best to dedicate a different disk to each asset type.." (for scratch drives).

You don't mention (or I missed it) whether this is for hi-def editing or standard. In practice, if standard, a single SATA drive for all project files (separate from the system drive) is sufficient. I use a rather dated AMD 64 3400+ 2.21 GHz with 2GB RAM and three harddrives (SATA 2), and frankly, I was doing fine a year ago with IDE drives.

Not sure why you want the capture card. Many, if not most, digital camcorders have analog inputs to allow direct digitizing from analog cameras.

Posted 5 years ago #
Video-maniac
Member

eggplant Wrote:
... but is there an issue with having the scratch file on the same drive as the projects themselves?Regards

A scratch drive does nothing more than take the pressure off the main working drive when processing complex and intensive tasks. As a by-product, you will get a little performance because you are splitting up the workload.

In short, you can have everything on one drive if you want but for a scratch drive setup to really pay dividends, you need to use a different physical drive for it. Not the same drive with a different partition. A drive with multiple partitions still shares the same read head so youÃ¢Â€Â™re not gaining anything.

RAM

Posted 5 years ago #
eggplant
Member

Thanks for the replies,

The reason I have put a cap card on is because they want one ! Cant really say fairer than that!

The scratch drive issue, I did mean I would be putting it on a seperate drive from the system, but having the scratch on the same drive as the projects.
Which would be the best option, a system drive of 120 (I know the price is neglegable between a 120 and a 160 but we have loads of 120 sata drives in stock and might as well use them up) and a raid 0 or single drive for the project and scratch file, or, a larger system drive that will also be used to store the projects and a (what size do you reccomend?) seperate drive for the scratch? or another arrangment altogether?

Thanks again

Posted 5 years ago #
jcschild
Member

HI,

this is what i recommend for ideal drive use.

For video editing systems we recommend a minimum of three hard drives. One for the operating system and programs, one for source files and capturing, and the third for rendering (both temporary and final output).

You may also want to consider adding an archival or backup drive to protect your work from disaster. An internal drive is slightly faster, doesn't take up space on your desk, and in a pinch it can substitute for a source or render drive if needed. However, if anything truly nasty happens to the computer, its internal drives can all be damaged. An external drive, though it does take up some desk space, can be easily detached from the computer and stored in a safe location until it is needed. A removeable hard drive bay combines the best features of these two types of drive. The drive bay connects as an internal hard drive for speed and space, but it can be easily removed (from the outside of the case) for storage.

When it comes to hard drive space, more is usually better, especially as hard drive prices continue to fall. While DV video doesn't really take up all that much space, if you are running uncompressed and/or HD video, you can easily fill a drive or two. The following chart shows the approximate drive space usage for several common types of video:

DV/Firewire 13 gigs/hour
Uncompressed 77 gigs/hour
1080 24p 330 gigs/hour

For an editor who works with uncompressed or HD video, we recommend using two pairs of SATA drives, with each pair in a RAID0 array. RAID0 stripes two or more hard drives together for increased performance, combining their capacity into what the operating system and video editing software will see as one large drive at the very minimum.
depending on your format you may need 4 drives per raid array.

Scott
ADK

Posted 5 years ago #