Minimum hardware specs for HDV editing?

blk_diesel wrote on 8/21/2006, 7:22 PM

I'm about to pull the trigger on a HVD camera and was wondering how well do Vegas deal with editing HDV. At the time, I have a Pen 4 2.4 ghz, 1 gb ram, 256 mb ram graphics card and about 750 gb of storage (Win XP Pro OS). My system is about 3 years old and have, so far, performed very well for me, so I don't see buying a new system anytime soon.

Comments

busterkeaton wrote on 8/21/2006, 9:05 PM

HDV will perform very slowly on that machine. Even with proxy files, you will struggle to get high frame rates. With raw m2t files, it's going to be a dog.

Renders will take a long, long time. If you do a google search, you can file HDV files to download and test your system. You can also, use generated media to render to a HD project and see how that does.

I played with HDV on a 2.66 Pentium 4 and it wasn't much fun. With the intro of Intel Core 2 Duo chips and AMD subsequent price cuts, you can get into a machine with the latest chip tech for under a grand. If you get an HD gig, hopefully that will pay for itself in the first job.

riredale wrote on 8/22/2006, 9:29 AM

I think what Busterkeaton really meant was that with intermediate files the system would still be unwieldy (Buster, please correct me if I'm wrong). With DV proxy files the system would behave as it now does with DV.

So the only downside is that you have a longish render at the beginning, getting all those m2t clips into proxy format. After that, just edit away in DV. At the end, either use the DV proxies to build your DVD, or go back to m2t and throw your masterpieces back out to HDV tape. You will get slightly better color resolution going from m2t to DVD than from DV to DVD, but the effect is slight.

Only issue with Vegas is that currently it seems to hate having to deal with more than maybe 60 m2t clips on the timeline at any one time, so you may have to render in stages. But for a lot of stuff, a 60-clip limit is not a limitation.

Another alternative is to render at the outset to both DV proxy and Cineframe intermediate. Then you won't have the 60-clip limitation and you can delete the original m2t clips entirely--the Cineframe intermediate is perfectly acceptable (better, in fact--it survives multiple generations far better than m2t).

The initial render into proxy and/or intermediate is a long one. I figure on 0.1x real-time for my Dell 1.6GHz Celeron laptop. But that's what overnights are for.

HDV is great. Go for it. I love my FX1 camera, and if money is tight you can get the Sony HC3 for maybe $1100.