5 years back I bought a Panasonic HMC-150 as a hobbyist, mainly to film my kids sports. (Main goal was to cut up hightlight reels of them or their teams. I film everything at 720/60p in the pipe dream I could even create some slowmotion hightlights someday. ) But love videotaping, so thought I'd go from that to some more ambitious hobby projects.
I learned the hard way how naive I was, and basically 5 years later I've got dozens of hours of AVCHD footage that I never was able to edit.
At the time I bought a top end, state of the art Vaio-all-in-one PC (even had a blu-ray burner) that the sony salesepeople swore was able to edit video. I then bought Sony Vegas 8 (specifically because it was designed to handle AVCHD.)
But when I tried to start my highlight-reel creations, the rendered product always had a very pronounced stutter on some of the clips which comprised the total output. (Render times were also ridiculously long, which made it worse to discover the stutter.) I got super frustrated and quit trying for a couple years. Then I got remotivated and based on some advice I upgraded my duo-core PC to 4gb Ram and Windows 7 64-bit to help the stutter. I also updated to Vegas 10 64bit, but still got the stutter so I quit again.
NOW HERE'S MY DECISION, AND ANY ADVICE IS GREATLY APPRECIATED.
I'm ready to buy a new PC, and want to choose wisely this time. I've narrowed it down to 2 choices, both I7-3770 intel chips with blu-ray writers. One is custom built by Dell, and one is off the shelf and $300 cheaper. Both have 16 GB Ram, (slightly different speeds, 1600 v 1333)
The choice comes down to GPU. The dell has a Nvidia GTX 660 (with 990 cuda cores) and the stock PC has a GT630 (96).
Soooooooooo......
Does the GPU "acceleration" of Vegas help with rendering the simple projects I work on?
If not, I guess I get the stock PC and stick with Vegas 10.
If so, Vegas 10 says it can use Cuda cores of the GPU, but needs the "sony AVC plug in", which I probably don't have. So does that mean if I get the Dell, I'll probably also need to upgrade to Vegas 12?
Finally, is it possible I go through all this and improve my render times, but still get stuck with my stutter? Which means it probably has something to do with my 60p format choice all along (and I just need to abandon that and film in 24p)?
Thanks again.