The SP card has been out for a long time.

Your CPU is fast enough, but you should have 2GB RAM.

Still, your motherboard may have major bottlenecks that can prevent you from using 10-bit or even 8-bit uncompressed.

Firewire drives will be fine for later backing up what you capture. Current firewire drives are not fast enough for reliable capture.

10-bit uncompressed takes up about 1.5GB per minute, and the beast needs to be fed at a rate of nearly 30MBytes/sec, even at the end of the disk. This means you need better than 60MB/sec at the beginning of a SATA drive, or more than 36 MB/sec with SCSI.

In practice, you need at least a SATA array and a workstation motherboard with no chipset or bus bottlenecks.

The hardware requirements are listed on their web site, Decklink.com.

V5 can't do preview through the card, still need firewire (sigh!).

For critical stuff, I preview through the Deck Control to component out on my Decklink Extreme card, works great. Combustion can use this as a viewport, so that's another option if you are compositing.

These are great cards, just think through which model is best for you.

You can also consider the SD Connect box from Convergent. Bandwidth / throughput requirements remain the same though. Bear in mind Vegas can read but not write 10 bit.
Bob.

To be exact, Vegas can read, write and do cuts of video with 10-bit codecs.

Transitions and effects are apparently written to 8-bit precision currently, even though Vegas thankfully uses higher precision internally to reduce rounding errors.

The SD Connect box costs 5x as much as a DeckLink SP card, but it lets Vegas handle the deck control, which saves a lot of time for those who need that.

Wow, this all sounds great so far!

My mobo is a ABIT IC7 RAID MAX
will this work? Was not listed...

To add 2 RAID drives to my existing SCSI setup, how complicated? Proceedure?

Thanks again!
Gary

You don't need SCSI, SATA RAID 0 will do but if you already have SCSI might as well use it although given the cost of SCSI Vs SATA drive it still might be cheaper to use SATA drives by adding say a the Highpoint controller.
You need to check the controllers documentation, should tell you how to do it. Although I suspect just plain SCSI should give you enough throughput. If it's a mobo controller though you might need to be careful, some of those implementations use a fair amount of the CPU to do their thing. Either way controllers aren't that expensive.

Bob.

talk to the videoguys.com or your local dealer about getting an external Medea raid system....

no hassles and will sustain 125-130 MB/second data transfer per a single unit .. and of course more for multiple systems.

In March I believe there's supposed to be a Medea SATA G-Raid coming out. Prices posted are a little higher than their regular G-Raid drives, but not too much so.

You DO need 10K rpm drives. For SATA, I'm very happy with my WD Raptors and the new Seagate drives look good too. SCSI drives cost at least twice as much.

Surprisingly, Win XP software RAID is faster (for video) than hardware RAID, perhaps due to less overhead (as long as your disk controllers are good).

Note that you need a fast PCI slot on your machine also. Didn't see any desktop mobos last year that were fast enough for Decklink cards, but maybe they exist now. Even the chipsets are critical, some are just too slow to shuffle the data fast enough. This is nearly three times the data rate of what comes out of a Varicam HD camera for example...

NOTE: Nearly all the problems I hear about from people capturing uncompressed come from their systems not meeting BMD's minimum specs.
In my experience, if you meet their minimum specs, there is no reason why you should ever have a single frame lost in capture. Ever!

Actually my hard drives are IDE0 and IDE1
Am I looking at more hardware upgrades/drives to get this to work?

Looks like the mobo site: http://www.abit-usa.com/products/mb/products.php?categories=1&model=130
says its Intel Socket 4 | 82875P (MCH) + 82801ER (ICH5R)
The Decklink says it supports Intel 7505/7525/875p chipsets
Is this the same thing?

thank you again for patience with these questions, but I may have convinced a major cable content provider to add a V5 station to is post production suites.

your motherboard is good to go .. its a 875P chip set .

there are some other chips sets/motherboards decklink will also work with , but i suspect they havent got around to testing them .. much more up to date list that the approved hardware list avid has on thier website anyway ..

That's the 875p, OK. Now you need to check the PCI bus speed to make sure you have a fast enough slot per the Decklink specs.

You definitely need new drives. At least 2x10k RPM SATA in RAID0 and a SATA controller card (in a fast bus slot).