system requirements

drjoe4321 wrote on 7/17/2006, 7:52 PM

Hi. I would like to be able to edit some vacation and grandchild video on a notebook computer. Nothing fancy. I have a HP Pavilion dv8000 notebook with an AMD Turion L-37 chip, 1 gig ram, andan 80 gb, 5400 rpm hard drive. I ALSO HAVE A 160 GB external usb 7200 rpm hdd. I read that Movie studio could work on this kind of system. Anyone tried to usee a similar system? I could add a second HDD ie 80gb internal. Would this be better than using the external drive? I'm new to video editing with one wedding video written to DVD using Premier Elements on a desktop system.

Comments

ritsmer wrote on 7/18/2006, 4:02 AM

Videos about vacation and grandchildren? Sounds good! Just what I do too.
To my opinion the dv8000 is well suited for VMS. There are 2 issues:
1. Space: What takes up the most space is the raw material - still pictures, videoclips, sound recordings plus some midis, CD rips and whatever you might fetch from the Internet i.e. maps etc. Today you can see how much space this already takes on your disks.
When you start editing, VMS itself does not use much space. A few hundred K for the .vf file.
The finished video, after rendering, is about 1,5 GB for 30 minutes in 1360x768 in wmv format - and less for a lower resoulution.
2a. Speed: your machine has plenty of power for the editing itself. When you preview the edited material you will possibly see jerky transitions etc. - this only applies to the preview and not to the finished video - but as other threads here describes you can avoid this by using a lower preview quality.
2b. Speed for rendering the finished video: your machine has also enough for this - a full rendering of a 30 minutes video will take 2-4 hours - depending of how much VMS has to do to the raw material - like colour adjustments, transitions, pan and crops etc etc.
However remember, that you can give the VMS rendering a lower priority (Ctrl+Alt+Del) and then you will not notice that the machine is rendering for hours while you are doing other work - like for instance editing another video in another instance of VMS running at normal priority... you can have several copies of VMS running on the same machine - with different priorities.

drjoe4321 wrote on 7/18/2006, 12:49 PM

Thanks for the info. I'll give it a try with the external hdd and if this doesn't work I'll get an internal, probably a 5400 rpm drive since the 72000 rpm drives are apparently much more expensive.

drjoe4321 wrote on 7/18/2006, 12:49 PM

Thanks for the info. I'll give it a try with the external hdd and if this doesn't work I'll get an internal, probably a 5400 rpm drive since the 72000 rpm drives are apparently much more expensive.

IanG wrote on 7/19/2006, 1:21 AM

72000 rpm! That *would* be expensive :-) It might be worth spending the extra to get the 7200 rpm drive - you need to handle large volumes of data, as well as capturing, so quicker = better. 5400 will work, but you'll probably find things are that much smoother with the faster drive.

Ian G.