P4 3.2, 2GB ram, WD SATA Raptor for C: drive, couple of SATA drives, lots of firewire drives. XP pro

Cineform intermediates works great for slow processor. Get lots of storage.

(semi)Final rendering of a 100 min project is slow, but only have to do that a few times.

Not my main business, but definitely will target a quad core soon.

Quads seem to help, contrary to what a lot here seem to think RAID does help but in subtle ways. The more streams of vision and audio you have the more it helps.

Bob.

while were here, a passing question (bob?)

for strictly preview purposes (forget rendering), would i be better off with a c2d e8600 (3.33) or a quad q9400 (2.66).

leslie

I just finished a two-camera HD shoot, one camera was HDV, native on the timeline, and the other AVCHD, converted to Cineform. My computer is six years old, and is a single-CPU, P4 2.8 GHz with no multi-core, and actually doesn't even have multi-threading.

I was able to edit at 29.97 fps for cuts-only edits. The performance slowed down some when I added color correction. I did use a fairly small preview window. My drives are old-fashioned IDE drives. No RAID or anything else.

However, the render time was HORRENDOUS (rendering down to widescreen DVD, using "best" because of the resolution change). Thirty-nine hours for a 1:50 project.

Moral of the story: unless you plan to work with uncompressed HD or with 3-6 cameras, the disk drives don't matter much. The video card doesn't matter much (although you still should get a video card that works with Premiere, in case you need to switch to that).

However, the CPU matters -- a lot. That's the one thing you need to concentrate on, above all else.

I'll have to disagree if you're trying to edit multicam especially.
The difference between drives in RAID 0 and without RAID is quite noticeable. At the cut Vegas drops a frame or two until you play the cut a couple of times which is quite a PIA when you're cutting really tight and fast on something moving quickly. This is with a quad and vanilla HDV, the CPU isn't the problem. On the other hand there was 3 cameras and no scene detection so the disk heads would have to move a long way. Higher capacity drives might help.

All said though RAID 0 is on every motherboard these days and it's better than it used to be, CPU load is much lower than it used to be and unlike the past I haven't lost a byte yet. Just how much it really helps one could argue all day but I've yet to find a compelling reason not to use it. Heck with my mobo SATA RAID, Vegas will playback 8bit YUV 720p at full fps, nice.

That said some disk tech could work against us. NCQ which seems to trade latency for throughput might not be what you'd want. Probably the ideal would be for Vegas to Look Ahead.

Bob.

That's a difficult one. I'm quite happy with my Q9300.
Have you thought about an i7 CPU?
The OC'er prefer the c2ds because they OC better and 4 cores doesn't seem to help with games.
You'd really need some input from people with c2d CPUs doing the same as you to really tell what the difference is going to be. My Q9300 is loafing alone playing a track of HDV at Best/Full.

Bob.

Raid 0 will help on renders where the CPU isn't the bottle neck in the rendering but the drive is- but I personally wouldn't use it for anything but work in progress - problems with one drive and you can lose all of your data. Raid 5 is good if you want redundancy but not as fast. A Raid card with on board Cache and processing is good for single drives as well as Raid arrays as it can take load off the CPU for processing - about 7% boost in capacity depending on your set up.

An i7 is the way to go if you have the money to spend, wait about 9 months and prices will drop quite a bit - 64bit OS with V8.1can make a big difference. For a fast less expensive system a Q6600 or Q6700 and the right motherboard can overclock with good cooling easily and safely to 3Ghz or higher and will smoke a core 2 duo in rendering.

The best way to go is build your own - it's not hard to do - and then you have many more options on how you want to configure the system. If you build your own - Newegg is great place to by components as is Ebay. Video card is less important as long as it doesn't borrow RAM from your mainboard for processing and slow things down. In a 64 bit OS with V8.1 - 8Gb of RAM is about perfect on a quadcore - you don't need fast RAM as much as you do quantity.

Bob, what is on your RAID 0 drives? Source footage, OS and Vegas program, rendered footage, Vegas project?

I have a system with 3 drives currently not RAIDed. The first drive has a small partition for the OS and programs, another partition for my data including Vegas projects. The second drive is used for rendering to. The third drive holds captured media. Would I be better to put the last two drives in a RAID 0 array? If so, where should I place the source and rendered files? Both on the RAID 0 array?

Jerry

>The difference between drives in RAID 0 and without RAID is quite noticeable.

"Bob, what is on your RAID 0 drives?"

Source footage. I do have an Antec twelve hundred case, plenty of room for lots of drives.
I was never a fan of mobo RAID until I got this PC. The previous one I'd tried mobo RAID on it was a disaster. After the third rebuild of the array I gave up, too much time wasted. This one is much faster and hasn't hiccuped once.
I don't seen any point to using RAID for the system disk, too much risk for no gain that I can see.

Bob.

Where do you store your vegas project files, on the output drive, source drive, or OS? I currently have my source in Raid 5, OS on a single drive, and output / DVDA projects / Vegas Projects all on another drive - that takes up my 6 SATA II portss (one is used for the BD Burner). Have been debating about getting a RAID card with single disc capability to add more SATAs but won't for a while unless there's an advantage beyond reducing load on the CPU.

AMD Phenom 9600
4gb DDR2-800
WinXP 32
ATI 3850
Sony DVD+-RW
250gb IDE OS/program drive
500gb SATA drive (for media)
500gb WD My Book USB2 drive (for media and project files)