Use What Devices? Specs?

mm2k wrote on 2/15/2001, 12:47 PM

Please tell me this or that. What computer configuration
did the people at Sonic Foundry use to determin the specs
that are on the VV box? Also, what do you recommmend I use
for editing videos that will be at lease 2 1/2 hours long.
Please give details on mother boards, hard drives, video
cards, memory, etc. I can't really say VV is not working
out for me. I feel the equipment I use now does not cut
it. I have PIII 500mhz Win2k 512 Ram, 10GB 5400rpm HDD
internal 30GB 5400rmp 1394 external Sony Digital Video
Cam. I get frame drop outs all day with every compression
settings I use. I had plans to start a service video
taping & editing. If I cant get VV working in a resonable
time I have no choice but to go Mac. I really want your
help to make this work, I think this is a good product if
it would work right.

Comments

RobSoul wrote on 2/15/2001, 1:14 PM

I'm mainly an audio guy but I work with enough video houses
to give you a little bit of feedback...

The most obvious weakness in your system is your hard
drives. 5400 RPM drives don't have the throughput
necessary to handle large video files. Most pro video
places I know of use super-fast (10,000 RPM) SCSI drives -
often in a RAID configuration. The next thing I noticed is
your processor speed. If you want to use a lot of plug-ins
and filters, you'd do well to upgrade to a 1GHz or better
chip.

Rob

SonyEPM wrote on 2/15/2001, 1:47 PM

We advise a minimum drive speed of 7200 rpm.

Rednroll wrote on 2/16/2001, 8:58 AM

I don't do a lot of video work either, but I just edited a
video presentation for my employer which ended up being 16
minutes long. It was on a Pentium II 450Mhz, 256meg ram,
programs on a 5400rpm ide and Video on a 7200Eide. I also
had a "Studio DV" video card to import and export video.
We edited the video uncompressed at 29.97 Fps 720x480. I
had 4 tracks of video running, each with a filter to adjust
brightness and contrast, one track I had a picture in
picture edit. This worked very smooth, the only thing I
noticed was a lag in audio, during the Picture in Picture
scenes. I later talked to my video editor that I work with
in my recording studio and he mentioned the fact that the
video card helps a lot, because it will take the load off
the processor for playback of video. I would definitely
get a 7200rpm hard drive and make sure you enable the DMA ,
this seems to double the performance on them. I'm an audio
guy, so I don't know all the video mombo yet, but you seem
to be running a very similar setup that I had....in fact
yours is faster, and I edited without a hiccup. I hope
this helps.

Brian Franz