Video Editing Systems

[BChico]

I am looking to buy a new video editing system. Want a dual processor and a dv storm. What site will offer me the most custom options, best price, and have really good support. I will look at all suggestions.

Thanks,

 

[Pariah]

Probably your only option is Alienware. DV Storms are not a common option in prebuilt systems. SMP is not important for video editing. Looking at Alienware, a 2GHz Northwood is cheaper than an dual 1GHz PIII and will perform better as well. For some reason unknown to me, a dual 933 PIII is $112 more expensive than a dual 1GHz PIII, odd. 2.2GHz Northwood is $184 more than the SMP PIII rig.

 

[MadRat]

Pariah-

But if he is using Adobe Premiere with SMP support then it will be a difference than the single P4/Northwood. Plus you have to consider the motherboard and how Intel P!!!/SMP chipsets are better thoroughput than the vanilla non-Intel P4 motherboards. If I remember right the P4/845D combo has poor PCI throughput compared to the highend P!!!/SMP boards. Lag the capture card in the slightest and all his work will be no better than so-so quality.

 

[BreakApart]

Pariah could you provide some evidence/links that prove a 2G P4 out performs a dual P3 in video editing? Everthing i have EVER read about this disagree with you. MaximumPC ran some tests between P4 and dual P3 and the dual P3 only lost in single cpu gaming apps.

 

[AluminumStudios]

www.dvdirec..com sells prebuild PCs for video editing. Digital editing is their buisness, so I bet that their machines are decent. You might want to check them out.

I bought a Pinnacle DC10+ from them about 2 years ago and had a good experience with their service.

 

[c0rv1d43]

I think that link should be http://www.dvdirect.com/.

- Collin

 

[IamDavid]

Why's everyone suggesting Intel based systems? Every article I've read says AMD beats Intel hands down every time...

 

[Pariah]

"Plus you have to consider the motherboard and how Intel P!!!/SMP chipsets are better thoroughput than the vanilla non-Intel P4 motherboards."

A P4 with RDRAM will destroy a PIII in memory throughput, I don't think that is even debatable. Considering PIII's have to share bandwidth between CPU's the performance gap is increased even more.

"Lag the capture card in the slightest and all his work will be no better than so-so quality."

DV requires 3.6MB/s, no more, no less. The PCI bus is not a concern in the slightest with that amount of required bandwidth. My laptop with a 4200RPM HD can easily handle DV transfers, and I'm sure it doesn't have top of the line PCI performance. DV is a digital transfer anyway, if there is a hiccup it can go back and re-request the frame with zero loss in quality, so I don't know why you even brought that up in the first place.

"Pariah could you provide some evidence/links that prove a 2G P4 out performs a dual P3 in video editing?"

A P4 was designed with A/V applications in mind, that is the one area where it has no rival. You can't add the MHz up in an SMP rig, as such, the P4 has such a huge clock advantage that even if it wasn't faster to begin with it would still win out. I don't think there are any benchmarks around to prove either way, but you might want to take a look at The Video Guy's Handbook system recommendations (A very good site for video editing info):

Video Guys

The chart up top is a bit dated, you have to scroll down a bit.

"We highly recommend Intel's P4 processors.
We feel that these systems offer you the highest level of performance and compatibility. We've found that our cards are easier to install on a P4 based system. Intel has also added a bunch of special performance enhancers to the P4 CPU and it's chipsets that give it outstanding performance for video editing.

Video CODECs and non-linear editing software are being optimized for these new processors. Not only will they give you better performance, but they will encode dramatically faster into MPEG2 for DVD authoring and the various streaming CODECs. Next year we expect to see real-time MPEG2 encoding and additional real-time performance based on further optimizations for P4."

If you look further down at their Feb 2002 recommendations, it's a P4, and not even a Northwood which we all know performs even better. If you look at the top chart, for DV editing, they recommend a PIII 700 or a GHz Athlon, basically saying you don't need incredible amounts of CPU power to perform the required tasks. Those are the same recommendations for a Prosumer system. Only on the professional system are top of the line CPU's recommended. I doubt a system like that is what is required in this situation. Large amounts of RAM and fast storage is more important than top of the line CPU power.

 

[MadRat]

<<DV requires 3.6MB/s, no more, no less.>>

You have never captured in MJPEG then. Besides that, he's talking rendering - not playback. Audio alone is a bear on the overall system to render quality product on the fly.

 

[wepopfresh]

Get a Mac and Final Cut Pro 3.

I wouldn't rely on Premier alone to take up space on my hard drive.

 

[Pariah]

"You have never captured in MJPEG then."

BChico requested a DV Storm which means he probably has intentions of using the DV portion of the card. Also, I've owned a Pinnacle Systems DC30 Pro for a few years, whose native codec is MJPEG, so you're wrong that I haven't. Using the highest quality settings or 2.5-1 compression results in a stream under 10MB/s which my 3 year old 5400RPM IDE drive could easily handle and is still not even a remote stress on the PCI bus.

 

[BreakApart]

<< Why's everyone suggesting Intel based systems? Every article I've read says AMD beats Intel hands down every time... >>


Many of the popular Video Editing/Capture equipment choices has been known to have issues with AMD systems. When building a system for Heavy Video use it's much smarter/less headaches to just avoid AMD and use Intel. However, i would agree a Dual Athlon would be great to edit video AFTER it has already been captured by another computer. Too be honest if your SERIOUS about Video editing you'll most likely jump on the MAC bandwagon, they still have the best systems in this area.


Pariah you still haven't defended your argument that a single P4 is better than Dual P3. If i have to choose a single CPU setup, sure P4 is the way to go, but Dual P3 is still a better choice for heavy Video Editing.

inqst.com
"Under such SMP friendly circumstances, a fast single processor P4 cannot really stand up to a comparison with a Dual P3 or Dual Athlon platform. Merely raising the clock speed of the P4 a few more notches cannot compensate for the performance deltas we have seen in this project.

tech-report.com
" Our tests on a dual-CPU system indicate that both Windows XP and Windows 2000 run better on an SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) configuration with relatively slow CPUs than on a single-CPU system with a screamingly fast processor. As we added more and more load, the benefits of a dual-processor configuration became more apparent. Both OSes (using Office 2000 and optimized UIs) handled the heaviest workload (scenario 3) nearly 40 percent faster on the SMP client machine [a dual 1GHz PIII] than on the [1.5GHz] single-CPU Pentium 4."

If you have any benchmarks that prove a single P4 beat a Dual P3 i would love to see them.

Good Luck

 

[KrispyKremer]

http://www.krysalisproductions.com

This company designs systems specifically for video editing. Haven't used 'em, don't work for 'em, but it looks like they put quality first. The cases look stylish.

 

[Pariah]

Those benchmarks prove nothing, BreakApart. Can you even buy a 1.5GHz P4 anymore? We're talking about a 2-2.2Ghz Northwood, not a revision 1 P4 1.5Ghz. Secondly, the benchmarks they use are in no way related to A/V editing. In fact, if you look at the benchmarks again, the only test related to A/V, windows media encoder, the lowly 1.5 P4 wins. You can imagine how bad the beating would have been with a Northwood.

I think the last post in the second link you posted is rather telling:

"People in the know realize that InfoWorld doesn't know how to measure things."

 

[wepopfresh]

Just get a Mac.

 

[BreakApart]

Pariah, interesting you took the "opinion" of an "Anonymous Gerbil" over the benchmarks, i find that confusing.

Perhaps if you looked at the benchmarks you'd understand why your misinformed. During the media player encoding the single P3 was DESTROYED as it does NOT have the enhancements the P4 does, however the handicapped P3 in a dual rig still matched the P4.

Guess you can't provide any benchmarks or evidence a single P4 out performs a dual P3, besides of course "Anonymous" opinions and your own "You can imagine " opinion. That's too bad i was hoping you could provide some real information that i had missed somewhere.


To the original poster, i build my own home video setups so i can't provide any recommended shops, hate to recommend a shop from rumor if i have never purchased from them. Good Luck to you.

 

[MadRat]

<<Also, I've owned a Pinnacle Systems DC30 Pro for a few years, whose native codec is MJPEG, so you're wrong that I haven't. Using the highest quality settings or 2.5-1 compression results in a stream under 10MB/s which my 3 year old 5400RPM IDE drive could easily handle and is still not even a remote stress on the PCI bus.>>

I have a Miro DC30 Pro, too. And I can say without a reasonable doubt that the DC30 Pro cannot capture without dropped frames on low end motherboards. You said it uses 10MB/sec, which sounds about right for the capture stream. But you forget about overhead and other peripherals on the PCI bus, like a NIC. And then the PCI bus often shares bandwidth with the IDE controller, which is another hamperence to quality.

Alot of the latest Intel 81x/84x, and all of the VIA chipsets seem to have this same fatal flaw in design as far as the PCI slots go. That 10MB/sec doesn't magically go from point A to point B and remain a constant 10MB/sec. By the time you get to point B the system can be taxed to where even an ATA100 controller means nothing to performance.

 

[BChico]

Thanks for the info guys. I was really looking at dual Piii 1.2 or 1.0, or dual amd xp 1700+ or 1800+. Check out this system. System, its the sister kahuna...lol. Looks real nice, i dont need the dvd-rw either...

Thanks

 

[hoihtah]

i'm not sure what sort of work you're trying to do...
but instead of spending over 1k on a nle card...
have you considered getting a watercooled p4 northwood oc'ed to the max
and hooking it up with vegas video 3?

lots of the pros are recommending that direction... of course if your source happens to be analog..
then you'll need a card to capture...
but if it only deals with dv format...
then a simple firewire card can be your best friend.

i was very skeptical at first,... of going software based nle machine...
but from what i hear... with p4 3.ghz machine... you can achieve real time rendering as well as most cards

think of those mpeg decoder cards that use to be a must for dvd watching on a pc.
nowadays... you don't see a computer with 2ghz machine with a decoder card.
simply cause cpu is fast enough to handle it without much stress.

same logic here.

so far i've heard nothing but good stuff about Vegas Video 3.

i'm planning on attempting this with a P4 northwood 1.8a oc'ed at 2.6ghz.

i'll let you know how this works out... i'll take about 2 weeks for the parts to come and for me to set up the whole system.
you can pm me then.

currently i have dv500+ from pinnacle. it ain't bad for what it does.

 

[hoihtah]

for your pleasure
review

 

[Bulldog7000]

These guys look promising

DVLine

 

[Pariah]

BChico, if you're seriously considering one of the systems you linked to, then you're posting in the wrong forum. Try a site more geared towards video editing. If you have that kind of budget, go with a Mac.

"And I can say without a reasonable doubt that the DC30 Pro cannot capture without dropped frames on low end motherboards."

The original system I used the card in, was a FIC (I think) socket super7 board with a K6 233, 64MB RAM and 2 5400RPM IDE drives. If I had no performance problems with the card in that system, I don't know how you are going to claim that a top of the line P4 system is going to have problems.

"You said it uses 10MB/sec, which sounds about right for the capture stream."

I looked it up, actually it's only 7MB/s. Any system can handle that. Anyone trying to do any serious A/V editing knows putting a NIC in your systems is highly unrecommended, unless it is onboard and unavoidable.

Pinnacle Systems cards are notorious for having horrible compatability records. If you ever visited their bbs when the DC30 was more common, all you would ever see was posts from people who couldn't even get the card recognized, let alone running. I've had multiple systems since my original configuration that I could not get the card to install in at all. None of that had to do with PCI latency bugs or performance issues. If you could get the card installed and setup, performance was never an issue.

"By the time you get to point B the system can be taxed to where even an ATA100 controller means nothing to performance."

I'd like to know what it is you are doing while you capture that is stealing all your resources. Are you playing Quake 3 and encoding DivX files while you are editing? Adobe Premiere won't let you do anything while it is capturing. Rule #1 for successful captures is have nothing running in background and do nothing while it is happening. Under those conditions all your theories fo resource stealing are eliminated.