dv editing rig...need some advice

[dvman]

i'm putting together a high-end dv editing machine and i need some input. i've only put together gaming/budget rigs in the past so this will be something new.

budget: around $4000

these are the issues i need help with:

-dual mp's or a single p4? mainly this machine will be using adobe premier. video capture card with will be a canopus dvstorm se.

-if dual mp's, tyan or asus motherboard?

-scsi raid, yes or no? is it worth the extra cost? i'm planning on either 2 18gig x15s or 1 36gig x15. how noticable will the difference be? raid-0, by the way.

-what's a good scsi card? raid or non-raid

-what's the best dual monitor video card for this machine?

-is the pioneer a04 a good choice for a dvd burner?


well thanks for reading and any help would be appreciated.

 

[bunker]

I can only comment on the single/dual processors.

Check the specs of the software. If it is able to utilize smp, the duals will help, otherwise, not worth the $$$.

 

[Whitney]

Many of the Adobe products, including Premiere and After Effects are designed to take advantage of dual processors, so you will see a difference.

DVStorm is nice, but you might also check it against the Pinnacle Pro-One and Matrox RT2500 setups. There have been a lot of reviews of them and each one seems a little better at some things than the others, so one of htem might be bettor for you than the others.

If you want to save a dollar or two, there are lots of boards with on-board RAID-0 support now, both Promise and High-Point, though I'm not sure if any dual=processor boards have it. And a total of 36 gig is not very much for serious editing. If you go 7200RPM IDE, you could get some nice big 80gig WDspecial Ed. 8mb cache jobbies for the cost of the scsi stuff and still have very good speed.

The pioneer is a DVD-RW model. The DVD+RW is pretty hot right now. Who knows what will be supported in a year. Kind of a crap shoot.

 

[Bulldog7000]

DVMAN. I would suggest going to the Canopus User Forums and checking out what the word on the street is. CanopusCOW

I am currently using a DVSTORM with twin PIII 1GHZ and 512MBPC100 (i440BX chipset). It works well. However, I have seen a lot of people on the COW site that have done P4 <-> AthlonMP head-to-head contests with a SINGLE P4 coming out on top of DUAL AthlonXP/MPs!!!! I know, it sounds crazy. They see how many filters and transitions they can stack up with out having to render.

SCSI IS NOT NECESSARY! I have SCSI, but my machine is 2 years old and IDE has come a LONG way since then! I would get a dedicated system drive for all of you system software and then get a couple BIG drives and RAID0 them for you video. I SAY IDE! But, If you really want SCSI, get a TEKRAM DC390-U3W for a non-RAID situation or a MYLEX ACCELERAID 170 for RAID. But, with a $4K budget, I would stay away from SCSI and get yourself some really big IDEs & some NICE displays!

TYAN! if you go Dual MPs

Matrox G450 or G550. Of course the card depends on your displays! If you have two flat panels, get the G550 dual-DVI output! The reason I say Matrox is for the STELLAR 2D quality. I have a G400MAX in my machine and the picture is awesome!

The A04 is good! I have heard good things about the Panasonic drives too.

If you are outputting to analog (SVHS or VHS) get a nice TV monitor for preview. This is a must so you can achieve the look you want, because what is in the Premiere monitor window is not what is gonna come out on a TV!

NOTHING BEATS A KILLER MOUSE WHEN YOU EDIT EITHER! DON'T SKIMP ON YOUR INPUT DEVICES! Ain't nothing more frustrating than a bad mouse and keys!

Feel free to ask more questions!

BDOG

 

[Bulldog7000]

A couple more things, I edited on an RT2000 (RT2500 predecessor) for 2 years and recently switched to the STORM and I must say that I like the STORM much better. Although I don't have all the cheesy 3D trannies in realtime, I found out that I don't use those a lot. When I want some chessy 3D trans, I can bear to wait 5 seconds for my Dual 1GHZ to render it! 90% of my filters and transitions can be done in realtime with the STORM.

If you decide to go P4, fish around on the COW for MB reccomendations.

BDOG

 

[CotswoldCS]

I agree with a lot of the comments Bulldog7000 made. EIDE has come a long way and with large drives available for not a lot of money, it really seems the best decision. SCSI RAID is v expensive and you don't get many Gigs for your $ - you need LOADS of space for serious DV editing!! Although I have IDE RAID 0 in my current system I would NOT recommend it for DV editing. Although I have had few problems, RAID 0 is still a risk (data corruption, etc) and a risk not worth taking with precious DV footage. Either spend the money on RAID 0+1 or stick with UDMA133 to get best performance. Remember that stability and reliability is more important than cutting edge performance and speed.

With regard to processor, despite recommending AMD CPUs for a long time now, I am now suggesting Pentium 4s for new systems. More reliable, more scalable and you are more likely to be able to find an upgrade in future.

Another thing, I would recommend that you dual boot with two Operating Systems. Keep one purely for DV work - don't install any more apps than you have to. Keep the other drive/partition for all your other stuff. Get a copy of Drive Image or Ghost to backup the partition when you have tested everything works. That way you can restore the system when you mess about with settings or have a GPF or BSOD just before you edit some crucial footage.

What OS are you going for?

Good Luck!!!

 

[aka1nas]

bulldog7000's advice is sound, though I would maybe look at the Matrox G1000 which is coming out in the next few weeks. This card is based on the new Parahelia core and should give you much better 3D performance if you are going to do other things with this machine(you didn't specify if this was only a DV-editing machine or is going to be your main rig too, so I'm not sure if you plan to run games on it). It should also have an option for Triple-head, which would allow you to have three monitors if you are so inclined. I would wait a few weeks for reviews to come out and see if this card fits your needs better. Otherwise the older Matrox cards would probably be a good choice if you are only going to be editing with this system.

I agree with B-Dogs statment concerning IDE vs SCSI. Save yourself the money and get some nice WD 120GB 8MB cache drives and ATA RAID them. I would'nt get a board with an onboard RAID controller, IMO, even a mid-range add-in card will give you better performance and less issues. I have been running an Adaptec 1200A, which is one of their more basic RAID cards, and it's noticably faster than my onboard Promise RAID controller was.

RAM is also an issue with video editing. If you are doing anything intensive, I'd get at least 512MB, but 1GB would be better as it should definately be in your budget. With a single Proc P4, definately go with RDRAM and get a board with 4 RIMM slots, as I think it is still hard to find RDRAM modules larger than 256MB(Not sure on this, I have all Athlon Rigs). If you go Dual Athlon MP, then you'll be using DDR. I think that you will want to go with PC2700 DDR, because with two CPUs(someone correct me if this is wrong) you will probably have more demands on the memory subsystem than with a single Athlon(whose FSB would be less than than that of PC2700 DDR, and thus would not gain a huge performance increase).

I won't preach on which platform is better, though I do tend to go with AMD rigs for my own use. I think that SMP is rarely taken advantage of in software, though, like RAID, will contribute to the system feeling "snappier" as you will rarely max out the CPU load on both chips(in fact, in un-optimized software, at best your CPUs will each be 50% utilized as the OS will only try to split the load evenly.) You wil need to be running either win2k or XP if you are going to run an MS OS to take advantage of SMP. The P4 has the potential to be faster, but only if the program has been optimized for its SSE2 instruction set. Many popular programs have, which is why their are all these benchmarks showing the single P4 system beating the dual Athlon system. As you are doing video editing, you will probably be using one suite mainly(Premier as you mentioned), which actually supports well both SMP and the SSE2 instructions of the P4. Performance will be good either way with this program, though you'd have to look around for specifics.

 

[Pariah]

With a $4000 budget, I would recommend going Xeon P4 SMP. It may be overkill, but it will fit well within the budget and it won't have to be upgraded anytime soon, so why not. 2GHz Prestonias are about $250 at Newegg. The boards are a bit more expensive, between $400 and $500 for a good SuperMicro board.

It's always nice to have a SCSI boot drive for a more responsive system, but using it RAID'd for storage is probably a waste of money and won't yield much in performance over an IDE RAID array for this application. A couple of WD1200JB's RAID'd should be plenty of space and speed. Make sure to get a quality RAID controller. 3Ware is about all I would recommend, the higher end Adaptec cards aren't bad.

There really aren't any crappy SCSI160 cards, Tekram, Adaptec, LSI, ATTO are all good choices.

Matrox has the best dual monitor cards. A G450 PCI should be fine for about $100. Most Xeon boards replace the AGP slot with a PCI-X slot. This isn't a gaming system, so AGP isn't that useful.

That Pioneer A04 is fine choice, take a look at the second gen DVD+RW drives as well. Can't go wrong with either.

512MB-1024MB of RAM should be fine. DV files are so large that a GB won't get you 5 minutes of footage. For this reason you will spend the majority of the time streaming off your hard drives regardless of how much RAM you have.

 

[Fun Guy]

Matrox G550 does not have hardware overlay on its second head, so you will not be able to view video on a second monitor. I found this out the hard way. Check my rigs to see what I am running.

Canopus DVRaptor has all the features/abilities I need. A Canopus rep recommended that I get the Raptor after I told him I have a Dual PIII setup. He said that my wait for renderings would be little different compared to an RT card.

 

[Bulldog7000]

Good point CotswoldCS, I suppose the Parhelia based cards will support video overlay on all heads which would be VERY cool. ONCE AGAIN DON'T SKIMP ON YOUR DISPLAYS! PICK HIGH QUALITY AND YOU WON'T REGRET!

Pariah, I like the Xeon idea! A guy on the COW forums said that when he had hyper-threading enabled with his dual XEONs, Premiere detected 4 PROCESSORS! This will really help with stacking up a TON of filters and do it in realtime! The only thing I am concerned about is MB cost ($415 for a SuperMicro P4DME (NO onboard SCSI).


ONCE AGAIN, DON'T UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF THE COW. They may not all be hardware crazy like we are, but they have the actual experience and field testing of many of the parts that are out there!!!

BDOG

 

[pulse8]

If you're spending this much on an editing machine, don't cripple it by getting Adobe Premiere. I would suggest getting Avid Xpress DV 3.0 instead. It's a MUCH better program and will take advantage of your hardware a lot more than Premiere ever could.

I pretty much agree with everyone else about the hardware you should get, except if you go the Avid route, I would get 2 single-head cards instead of one dual-head. If both displays are run off the same card, video won't display correctly if the resolution is too high on both monitors.

Also, if you get SMP, Avid is fully SMP aware so you'll be able to take advantage of that. Avid also has real-time software effects that are very very useful while cutting.

Avid Xpress DV 3.0