New PC setup - any card to recommend?

[cyaw]

Thinking of a new PC for video editing & DVD burning. Any must-have specs?

Two HDD, 1GB maybe 2GB of RAM. Good sound card necessary? Just need something to drive 2.1 speakers.

The long encoding/transcoding times on my present admittedly aged rig bugs bigtime. Anyone knows of any graphics card with hardware encoding built-in that can cut coding time?

TIA!

[ilovehouse]

Originally Posted by cyaw Thinking of a new PC for video editing & DVD burning. Any must-have specs? Two HDD, 1GB maybe 2GB of RAM. Good sound card necessary? Just need something to drive 2.1 speakers. The long encoding/transcoding times on my present admittedly aged rig bugs bigtime. Anyone knows of any graphics card with hardware encoding built-in that can cut coding time? TIA!

Black magic, matrox?

[jaegersing]

Hi cyaw. May I know what you are editing (DV, HDV, ?) and what sort of editing it is (longform, shortform, few effects, many effects, PIP, composites, etc). Also, what NLE are you using?

For most DV work a card is not really needed on a modern PC, unless you are using Magic Bullet plugin, Boris, or something else that is a render hog. (By the way, MB as a vegas plugin actually uses Nvidia graphics card to accelerate playback and rendering and it works great.)

[melvinch]

For uncompressed video for broadcast, go for Decklink video capture card.

For realtime DV editing and accelerated mpeg-2 encoding go for Matrox RTX2 video capture card.

Can try Pinnacle Liquid Edition 7. It uses your graphics card to process effects though have to render when output to tape or mpeg-2.

Get the fastest Intel Core 2 duo with minimum 2Gb ram. 4Gb better but XP will only recognize 3Gb max.

Get 1 hard disk for apps and OS (120Gb will suffice)

Get 2 identical hard disks and raid them as Raid-0 to increase read/write speed.

You can use built-in soundchip on the motherboard. Just make sure mobo is Intel chipset. Stay away from VIA or Nvidia chipset for compatibility issues.

Cheers !

[cyaw]

Thanks ilovehouse, jaegersing & melvinch for your advice!

I dabble mostly with DV tape to DVD. Started yonks ago with Pinnacle Studio and haven't ventured further.

Recently got a nice HDD camcorder - not HD - so playing with little mpeg2 files now. Super convenient!

Use effects quite sparingly so it's mainly cutting & joining.

Still transcoding takes way long. Even with the mpeg2 which are supposed to be quite DVD ready!

Responding to melvinch
HDD speed hasn't been an issue for some time so a RAID 0 is nice for other tasks but won't help encoding speed that much. Thot it's the CPU w RAM & graphics card that are the bottleneck. Read about graphics cards that do hardware encoding so I asked you folks. But then they probably cost a nice holiday in nearby country so might be a little rich for my blood

[jaegersing]

Ya, rendering MPEG2 source files is not for impatient people! I'm getting into similar area with HDV and it is very slow compared with DV.

[cyaw]

Leaving aside the "professional" graphics cards, how much difference would a graphics card make to encoding speed? 256MB or 512MB or the graphics chipset - which would matter more?

[melvinch]

Graphics card has no impact on encoding speed.

Just get the fastest Intel Core 2 Duo CPU you can afford and plenty of ram.

[cyaw]

Thanks melvinch! Think I'll go for 2GB RAM. Guess RAM speed would not make much of a difference?

[tommon]

Whatever softeware and hardware you have determines your PC Config. Recently bought a new custome build 6600 Core 2 Duo with 2Gb RAM(Still very ex), 3 HD, 7600 Video, DVD RAM burner, 2x 20" monitor. Suits my needs. Can't keep chasing the technology race never ends.

[melvinch]

Originally Posted by cyaw Thanks melvinch! Think I'll go for 2GB RAM. Guess RAM speed would not make much of a difference?

Ram speed helps, but not significantly. Not worth the extra outlay either.

I'd rather have more ram any day. It makes your computer more stable.

Run msconfig to disable those apps that starts up automatically but aren't important.

[pierceteo]

Go for a Mac...

Its all you need..for a start

Pierce