HD editing computer recommendations

[RayL]

The day draws ever closer when I move into HD editing.

Since no manufacturer seems to make full tower computers any more it'll mean recycling one of my existing cases and putting a 'bundle' into it (CPU/Motherboard/PS/graphics card). To this I'll add optical and magnetic drives, etc Has anyone gone down this path recently and do they have any recommendations for the bundle?

You're going to say, "which editing package?" Ay, there's the rub. Having had splendid service from my DV Storms, I'd be very interested in the new HD Storm if it didn't mean using Edius. Sorry, Richard, but all the missing features (which have been discussed in these forums back to 2003 when Edius was introduced) mean it would be a step backwards in many ways compared to my present 6.5. Likewise, Premiere Pro is flawed because of the poor decisions at the design stage. That leaves the Vegas/DVDA package, which I have to version 8. No hardware board like the HD Storm with all those lovely ins and outs alas, but it'll probably have to be the choice.

So does anyone have recommendations for a hardware 'bundle' to match Vegas 8?

Ray Liffen

[DAVE M]

FCP Studio? !

[RayL]

FCP Studio? !

Is there an Apple mac hardware bundle that I can buy and fit into a full tower?

Ray

[PaulD]

Hi
Some of the same hardware cards original made for Macs work with Vegas - such as the BlackMagic Decklink and AJA Xena.

A Mac Pro is as much a full tower as anyone needs ;)
With SATA/eSATA its immaterial these days whether your swappable drive caddies are internal or external - I'm editing with 18 swappable external drives today - 11 eSATA and 7 FW800 (and there are another 5 fixed drives inside the Mac's case).

[DAVE M]

well,
I'm more than happy with my MacPro! you can "build" your order via the Macshop.

The only problem I'd see would be that your system of removable drives would be harder to bring over. I looked into removables with PCs years ago and was warned off (probably wrongly) due to potential contact problems with the pins.

Firewire drives would seem a decent solution.

Seriously, Ray,

I'd take a look at FCP. I've moved from Prem and love it!
It's not cheap though

[PaulD]

Firewire drives would seem a decent solution.Hi
The advantages of eSATA, such as bandwidth and SMART monitoring, means that spending money on FW400/800 is buying into an end-of-line technology.

FW still has its uses for drive portability for transfer, but don't spend money on it as an editing solution (unless you use an iMac ;) ).

But, Dave, we shouldn't be hijacking Ray's thread with Macspeak. ;)
While you and I may be enjoying the editing, that's just what pays the bills for Ray...
What he really likes is building computers, and reinstalling/rebuilding the Windows installation on all his caddies. Much more fun! :)

[RayL]

Some interesting points raised. My experience of Macs from times past left me a little confused as to why their users were so fanatical. For example, while my PC mouse had a left click, a right click, and a roller that both scrolled and gave me a double-click, the Mac only had a single click facility. Does the Mac now allow these four vital functions to be performed by three fingers? That was just one 'instant reaction' - there were others that I can't remember now but my impression was "what's all the fuss about?"

Although I'm quite prepared to spend money where necessary to get an efficient, reliable editing computer, that money is business capital and the IR's capital allowances mean that money spent now (in bulk) is only reclaimable in diminishing instalments. Having taken a look at the Mac shop, Macs seem still to have that higher capital cost (compared to a PC of the same capability) that they always used to have. There would need to be strong reasons for making the move from PC to Mac, especially since I can recycle things like a DVD burner (which will go in the tower along with a Blu-ray burner).

Back in the '90s I was interested in building computers - there were always new things coming along. These days I just want to get the thing up and running as easily as possible - but with the proviso that it has to have all the features that I need.

Ray Liffen

[DAVE M]

the first thing you should do is scrap the daft single click mouse! You can change it under the software or just buy a "proper" one

I have a mouse and trackerball

Mac are more highly priced -scale of deamnd I suppose and repairs are more expensive. I was chatting toa friend witha G4 who's scrapping it as a PSU is £150! daft or what

[PaulD]

Hi
You need four fingers to operate a Mac mouse these days - there's a sideways squeeze function. - and the scroll button is 360º directional.
All are assignable to any function you'd like to use:

http://km.support.apple.com/library/APPLE/APPLECARE_ALLGEOS/HT1581/HT1581_1-en.png

Its OS X that I think is elegant, in both design (implementation) and functionality.
That the boxes are well made is a secondary bonus.

But Mac OS X is not for everyone, because its strengths and benefits are often very different from Windows functionality (and limitations IMO).

[DAVE M]

I admit that as a (not too competent) former PC owner of 10 yrs use, although I did doa bit of Mac based editing before that on Media 100, I am finding the cobnversion harder than I though - which is to be born in mind if time is money

I still can't sort my files out in an elegant manner without being worried that a job will loose bits. But I think most of that's down to me!

[infocus]

It's worth looking at the broadcast industry. Until fairly recently, non-linear editing and Avid were virtually one and the same, and whilst Avid is still a pretty big player, many, many broadcast organisations are moving to FCP. Same with the jobs adverts, most of the jobs seem to specify FCP, and those that don't seem to be for Avid.

That's why, after only having had PCs in the past and with no knowledge of Macs, my next editing computer will be a Mac. I only wish DVC would sell them.......

[Alan Roberts]

DVC don't deal Macs because the margin on them would have to be very small, and they couldn't live on it.

[paultv]

Ray,

I wonder what you can't do in Edius 5 that you can in Premiere 6.5 ? I'm not a solid Edius fan, but it's day to day functionality is very fast indeed, and the relation with NX cards or the new Storm HD are so solid - crashes are incredibly rare, I shudder at the old 6.5 and Storm card, very unstable compared to the Edius thing.

Anyway, it's impossible to decide, what you "know" is always the best, everyone has an opinion, all valid from their point of view, it's impossible to come to a decision by debate.

Download trials of everything you can, and visit some associates and test drive their systems and see what you like best.

FCP is great, Avid is great, Premiere is great and so is Vegas and Edius - just depends how you see your workflow and your previous likes and dislikes.

I use Edius/Vegas/After Effects/Encore/Audition/Soundforge/VirtualDub/Procoder/Tmpeg4/Morphman/Vjamm/Looks/Partical Illusion .... and it goes on -

Paul,

thanks for the returned Blu-ray discs!!

[RayL]

Hi Paul

>I wonder what you can't do in Edius 5 that you can in Premiere 6.5<

Well, to start with, I can't put four synchronised 1 hour clips on the timeline and then look along to see which camera moves over from the bass guitar player to the drummer and does it happen in the second number or the third, or where and when a dancer comes on and moves to centre stage during the ballet sequence, or any one of a thousand time-saving things that can be done on a big-clip edit when the timeline has a full picture-icon (picon) display. Working without picons is, to me, rather like driving a car with the windscreen blacked out except for one small peep-hole - not impossible, but unnecessarily time-wasting. Video editing is concerned with pictures, so why not give these wonderful eyes that we have as much information as possible?

At this point there will be the usual rush of people who say that THEY never use picons and they don't see why anyone else would need to, so therefore picons aren't needed. Put as baldly as that, the absurdity of their argument becomes clear.

Premiere 6.5 has it's flaws - the 3 hour limit on the timeline and that odd business where adding a clip to the timeline makes the timeline view jump to the end of the clip, for example, but it is an excellent benchmark against which other packages can be judged.

Ray L

[infocus]

>I wonder what you can't do in Edius 5 that you can in Premiere 6.5<

Well, to start with, I can't put four synchronised 1 hour clips on the timeline and then look along to see which camera moves over from the bass guitar player to the drummer and does it happen in the second number or the third, or where and when a dancer ..........
But is the multi-camera mode in Edius not an even better way of achieving the same thing, with four synchronised 1 hour clips? As well as alowing you to do a real time vision mix from four synchronised recorded sources, watching them in separate boxes, with the possibility to go back and tweak as much as you like.

I know Avid has a similar facility, and think FCP does as well - don't know about Premiere.

[PaulD]

Hi
With one hour clips on the timeline you won't really be able to see much time-based information in the picons without zooming in on a small section of the sequence. Then you've got to scroll to see any other point - whilst the picons redraw.

In practice I'd say it was just as easy to keep the timeline zoomed out to show the full hour, and scrub the playhead whilst watching the four-up (or sixteen-up) multi-clip display in the monitor viewer window. You can probably scrub through the whole hour in less time than scrolling on a P6.5 timeline.

You can add (named, searchable) clip or timeline markers once you identify a key point.

On another tack:
Is right now a good time to be upgrading? It would be like buying a 486x2/66 computer three months before the Pentium was introduced.
The P/166 made older 486 computers obsolete in a very short time. The forth-coming 786-like Nehelem jobbies are likely to dispatch the generation-6 Core 2 Duos into oblivion sooner rather than later...
(Disclaimer: not my area of expertise ;) )

[HallmarkProductions]

Ray,

We have a few edit suites - both Mac and PC. All the PCs are Dell Precision 690s, which are full sized towers and extremely well made. They have plenty of room for expansion, and come with decent graphics cards.Best of all, they are very reasonably priced. For editing software, we use Avid Liquid, having been with it since the days of FAST. it still stands shoulder to shoulder with anything else out there, even though it has recently been made EOL. it is an excellent, robust and strong editing package, and works very well with HDV and XDCAM HD. We use it all day, every day, and its capabilities will keep us happy for a few years yet. it is nice to upgrade to the latest software, but we do not always NEED to do it - and money is getting tighter everywhere, calling into question investment decisions.

As we also work on broadcast programmes (mainly as crew rather than editing), I thought it would be good to look at and use macs and Final Cut Studio, for the occasional edit jobs. Personally, I do not find it as easy to use as Liquid, and I do not think it does anything more, or in a more efficient manner than Liquid. However, the marketing budget and effort has been much greater and much more successful. I am not knocking it, and accept that FCS and Avid Media Composer are the industry icons.

With regard to capital allowances, I do not understand your comments. As I see it, small businesses can claim 100% allowances in first year up to cap ex of £50K. Are you planning to spend more than that? :)

Hope that helps a bit

Chris

[RayL]

But is the multi-camera mode in Edius not an even better way of achieving the same thing, with four synchronised 1 hour clips? As well as alowing you to do a real time vision mix from four synchronised recorded sources, watching them in separate boxes, with the possibility to go back and tweak as much as you like.

I know Avid has a similar facility, and think FCP does as well - don't know about Premiere.

What you are describing only allows you to look at one frame from each camera at any moment in time. Picons, by contrast, lay out the whole of the clips like filmstrips so that the complete pattern of recorded action is revealed. A real time vision mix is not what I'm looking for. As an example, a sudden one or two bar fill by the drummer(as a cutaway from a guitar solo) will be too unexpected to cut live. In any case the vision cut has to be about 6-8 frames ahead of the related sound to look correct to the viewer so a 'live cut' at the moment the sound is heard will look too late.

In the televion gallery for a music show, the Vision Mixer and the Production Assistant work together. The PA 'calls the shots' ahead of the action and the Vision Mixer cuts on cue. The PA is working in a 'predictive' role, telling all those on talkback what is going to happen in the immediate future. Picons have a similar role in a computer edit. They enable the editor to look into the future while simultaniously working in the present. There is no need to "go back and tweak as much as you like". Working with picons is more efficient.

So, yes, picons ARE necessary.

I'd be very happy, of course, to have picons AND preview screens for each video timeline

Ray L

[RayL]

Harry

Thanks for the coments re PC and Mac

Regarding Capital Allowances, Page SESN4 of the Self-employed tax return says (regarding Capital Allowances)

"For new items which you have bought you can claim 'first year' allowances. Small businesses can claim 50% first year allowances on their investment in equipment and machinery excluding cars, long life assets or leased machinery". After the first year the percentage is 25% of the 50% brought forward.

You can claim 100% capital allowances only for 'environmentally friendly expenditure' .

Where does your figure of 50K come from?

Ray L

[HallmarkProductions]

Harry??????? I think you mean Chris!
Capital Allowances are being replaced by AIA (Annual Investment Allowances) this tax year.

http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/budget2008/bn12.pdf

What do you think of the Dell solution, by the way?

Chris

[RayL]

Paul

With regard to your comments about working on the timeline, see my message above.

With regard to new processors coming along, there is another factor in my reasons for buying in the near future - the turmoil in the banks and the money markets means that money will be flowing from the East to the West as the Western governments (particularly the USA) borrow from places like China to prop up the western banks.
This price of goods from China is going to go up in the near future as the yen rises in value to reflect it's more dominant role. It would seem that now is a good time to buy electronic goods in the UK.

Ray L

[RayL]

Harry??????? I think you mean Chris!
Capital Allowances are being replaced by AIA (Annual Investment Allowances) this tax year.

http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/budget2008/bn12.pdf

What do you think of the Dell solution, by the way?

Chris

Yes, I did mean Chris - sorry, it's getting late!

Thanks for the update on allowances - that's a bit of good news for a change.

Regarding the Dell solution, the 690 has been replaced (I've just read) by the T7400. The spec looks nice but the case only has three external bays - half the capacity of a full tower.

Time for bed!

Ray

[HallmarkProductions]

Hi Ray,

Is 3 bays an issue?
Internally, we fit 4 HDDs (that can be up to 4TBS or more), we only use 1 of the bays for a DVD burner (leaving 2 spare). What do you use the others for? Hot swappable drives are not really needed for most these days.

Chris

PS can still get 690s if you know where to look! :) Contact me by phone for details.

[RayL]

Hi Chris

Use of bays? Two optical drives (a burner and a reader) and a monitor loudspeaker (one of those neat little units with twin LS and a volume control - quality non-existant, but excellent for identifying that sound is present (both L and R) and avoids external speakers and trailing wires). That's three.

Number four is the C: drive. The aim is to have the C: drive as a separate physical drive to any of the project (data) drives. This has worked wonderfully well for me over the last 10 years. It provides a degree of safety for every job that I do because the job data is on a separate physical disk from the operating system and the programs. If a fault occurs in the C: drive, just plug in a backup. If I want to use XP or Vista rather than Win2K, plug in a different C: drive.

Five and six? Data drives

Ray L

[PaulD]

Hi
Sounds like a Mac Pro - except that the four quick-swap caddied drives are behind the side door, rather than a door to the front. Two optical bays to the front.
Won't run Win2K though, only XP or Vista... ;)

[StevenBagley]

Ray,

Is this the kind of display you are after?

http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~srb/filmstrip-fcp.jpg
(Note: parts of the image blurred for copyright reasons)

That's in the latest Final Cut Pro...

Steven

[Nigel Longman]

Ray

I have noted in the past that my progression through video editing software and hardware has been very similar to your own - sticking with Premiere with, progressively, the Fast FPS60/AV Master/DV Master/Canopus Storm.

When I started HD editng Adobe and I parted company and I was stuck with a choice between Edius and Vegas. What I really wanted was 'Vedius' - a combination of the features of both. Clearly that wasn't going to happen so in the end I bought both and run them on the same machine, using each as required.

Your original post asked about hardware and I note that no-one has yet mentioned the ACEDVio card from Canopus. This card can be used with Vegas and will provide a SD output of the timeline when working with HD material - albeit at less than the full project frame rate when the timeline gets busy and in less than perfect sound sync until you adjust the sync delay in the output device preferences of Vegas.

I trust this may be of interest to you.

Regards NL

[RayL]

Nigel

Very interesting indeed. I'll send you a PM.

Ray