What can I do so my pc can better handle HDV? « Videomaker Community Forums

Michael Hackney
Member

Ok, so I have an Intel D915PBL motherboard with the 915P Express Chipset. My cpu is a Pentium 4 3.0
and I have 3gigs of ram. My video card is a Radeon 9200I have two sata hard drives. One 300gig and one 200. The 200 has the O/S and apps on it partitioned to 75 gb. I have 20gb of that dedicated to the Adobe Production Studio. The rest is for media. My other hard drive is one partition dedicated only to captured media. I defrag daily and everthing is running very nice and smooth. My problem is that when I try to watch a clip in HDV (even in VLC) player the video stutters a bit. I have been told that I need to get a Core Duo processor, but that would mean I have to get a whole new motherboard, since mine doesn't support Core Duo. So I don't know what to do, to not spend a lot of money. Maybe a video card with 512 of memory? Thank you in advance for any advice!

Posted 5 years ago #
;0)
Member

the best advice your gonna get is to use that pc for target practice and buy a mac.
not everybodies cup-o-tea.
but my emac g4 plays hd content just fine with only one gig of ram.
my g5 imac works fine
and so does my macbook core duo
I'd suspect a software problem if I were you.
perhaps vlc settings.
Although, many people mistakenly think that multitudes of viruses attack the winows operating system. I feel that is incorrect, and that windows itself is the virus, and your computer s simply going into anaphelectic shock.

Posted 5 years ago #
Ken
Member

Michael,
The 3GHz P4 might be OK, and the 3GB of system RAM sounds great! You're using SATA drives, which is good.... but what speed (7200 RPM?, 10K RPM?), and how much cache (8 MB?, 16 MB?). Also, I'm not familiar with that video card....is it AGP, PCI-Express, or ??? Seems like the high performance video cards are PCI-Express with 256~512MB of video RAM, and costing $200~$600.

BTW, read the review of the Sony Vaio VGC-RM1 Editing Computer ($3500) here on the Videomaker website, in the Hot Gear section, just below the Forums section.

Hope I've been of some help, :)
Ken Hull

Posted 5 years ago #
Michael Hackney
Member

If I weren't a computer tech for the last 7 years and know so much about pc's, I'd do the mac thing. I'm not one of those who's pro or anti any specific company, I just like what works best and I know how to use well. Since I can fix my pc and any software problems it has easily, is why I stay with it. Now my excuse before this month would be that mac doesn't support Premiere Pro 2.0, but now with the new CS3 suite, I can't use that one.. I tried over clocking, but it's not entirely safe without extra fans and it didn't really seem to work anyways. It's might just be the specific HDV clip I tried to play, which was the 720p sample of the HV10 you can get from Canon's web site. It's just like a small buffering lapse (like 1 - 2 seconds) as if I were streaming it from time to time.. Oh and my drives are 7200rpm 16mb cache, but I wouldn't imagine that to be the problem.

Posted 5 years ago #
Johnboy
Member

if you are not beholden to Adobe, take a look at vegas, I don't do any HDV, but from what i understand from other users, version 7 handles native HDV files very well, your current system should be adequate.

John

Posted 5 years ago #
jcschild
Member

HI,

1) you need 3 harddrives to work properly. (not a partitioned drive)

A) OS drive and programs only
B) Cature/work drive (most important to be by itself.)
C) Render to drive render time is hampered greatly by using the same drive that your work is on)

the biggest issues i see
1) your video card is not designed for HDV, if you added just 1 overlay you would have major issues. Minimum Nvidia 7600. (quadro 1500 recommended)
2) with the 915 chipset (the first "PCIE" from intel the faster the video card the more it took from your PCI bus)
this included you firewire and harddrives as they are also on the pci bus.
you might be ok with the newer video card i would try that first as no matter what you need it.

Scott
ADK

Posted 5 years ago #
Andrew Burke
Member

Editing MPEG may be the bottleneck.

Your system sounds really beefy!

You may want to look into an Intermediate Codec for better HD performance.

-andrew @ videomaker

Posted 5 years ago #
compusolver
Member

Some good advice above.

I'm not doing hd with my FX1 just yet, but I had a "stuttering" experience yesterday while doing a four camera weddng edit.

My temp files drive was 85% full and I hadn't defragged in two weeks (two big projects ago).

I cleaned off the temp and video files drives so they had over eighty gigs free and defragged both. That totally solved my problem.

Unfortunately, my wife saw that the defrag would take hours and was delighted to inform me that this would be a good time to fix the lawn tractor, mow and weedeat our ten acres. Needless to say, this defrag was a bit more painful than most.

Posted 5 years ago #