What is a reasonable PC hardware configuration for light home movie authoring?

Factual Questions
1

Specifically, how much hardware do I need to edit HD video, 1920x1080 shot at 60 fps progressive?

I only do light video editing/home movie making from my various excursions and own Premiere Elements 7. I just bought a new cheapie video camera (Sanyo VPC-FH1) and as I expected my current 4 year old hardware is not up to the task. They are pretty big MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 files but I can step down as far as 1280x720 at 30 fps (but then why buy the camera?).

I am uninclined to spend a lot of money on a computer (It really should be Cheap Pedant), but for only about $1200 I can get (From HP and Gateway, e.g.) http://www.gateway.com/systems/product/529668284.php :

i7 at 2.66 (the base one)
9 GB DDR3 RAM (3x2 and 3x1 in the 6 DIMM slots)
GeForce 250 or 260 with a Gig

My dilemma is an upcoming trip to India. It makes sense to wait until 22 Oct and get Windows 7 already loaded without having to bother with an upgrade. But my trip is in September.

My choices are:
Buy a computer now and test it with those size files–in that case I have bought a machine 3 months before I have to, and later is always cheaper plus Windows 7 would already be on a machine I purchased after my return, OR

Buy a computer after I have returned with a ton of video–in that case I will have constrained myself to buy a machine that can handle those files regardless of the cost of that computer.

If someone can reassure me that my $1200 config is easily up to the task, I’d appreciate it. If that config is going to be undersized, I’d rather just step down a few notches on the video camera and use a more modest mode.

I have been incompetent at finding good advice on the web. Here’s the closest I’ve come: http://www.videoguys.com/Guide/E/Videoguys+System+recommendations+for+Video+Editing/0x4aebb06ba071d2b6a2cd784ce243a6c6.aspx

I am hoping for a more specific answer than “The more processing power, RAM and a faster video card you have, the better.” I’d like to know if the specific configuration I’m looking at is fine.

If someone has a little more experience than I with these HD files from the newer cameras I would deeply appreciate a yay or nay.

2

What specs you have should work well enough. You need to take a good look at storage though. If I were building a machine for HD editing I’d use a fast OS drive. For the video working drive I’d have at least two large drives in RAID 0 using a hardware RAID card. Then either an internal hot-swap bay or external ESATA enclosure for offloading finished video and backup. And a blu-ray burner.

It’s going to be difficult to find an inexpensive consumer PC that has the case room and power supply for a setup like that. You can get by with less, but it will cost you in time spent editing.

3

Thanks.
The Gateway, surprisingly, has a 750W power supply and two removable hard drive carriers in the front.
I’ll add in a good secondary internal hard drive and use the two front-mount carriers for swapping out the additional drives, I think.

I plan to add the BluRay burner but prices are dropping fast so I’ll probably wait 6 months–it will take that long to get the movies ready anyway.

Response much appreciated.

4

You would probably save some cash if you built it yourself.

When dealing with HD video a powerful, multi-core CPU is great for encoding. A video card like the 260 is overkill (unless you plan to do gaming or add specialized and complex 3d effect to your movies as well), but you do want at least 512 MB of on board video and definitely a discreet video solution.

Now, when dealing with HD video you will probably be dealing with a compressed stream most of the time, but working with an uncompressed (or more likely, compressed in a lossless format) stream might be required from time to time. The bottle neck here will be the read and write speed on your drives, as well as the available space (RAM will also take a hit here).

My recommendations would be 6 gigs of RAM, a GTX 250 or the last gen of ATI or Nvidia cards (unless gaming or doing 3d stuff), a core i7 (the lowest model - the 920 I think), and three drives. 2 1 TB drives in RAID 0, and another 1 TB drive where you’ll backup critical info on a daily basis (automatically using windows 7 backup).

5

What is your 4 year old hardware?

All the suggestions above are great, but I still edit 1920x1080p60 with surround on a 4 year old Gateway running XP, sometimes.

But I have just recently built my own “modern” media center (my first build, it was easy, highly recommended), with 4 1.5 TB drives for storage, and another 80GB drive for OS partitions. Since I built it in January, I have run Windows 7 x64 Beta builds exclusively.

They are both up to the HD video editing task. The only difference is time and money. “Reasonable” is to your discretion.

6

Dell Dimension 9100 running XP Home SP3
Pentium D at 2.8 GHz
Radeon x600 w/ 256
3 Gigs of Ram

It won’t even play my HD files after transfer without being jerky.

I haven’t crunched the numbers but I’m not thinking I’d save much building my own.

7

Playback is different. Your current system will be able to edit them, as it is the same as my old system. With a new video card, your system would be able to playback 1920x1080i at 30 fps.

I generally work in 1080p30 with X.264 in Matroska, but I’ll often do quick encodes at 720p Xvid for previewing my work. Once I’m happy with the final edit, I will do two-pass encodes at 1080p (which even for clips of only a few minutes, can take overnight to process), and then transfer to my new system for playback.

The benefits of building your own aren’t necessarily saving money upfront (though you will save some), but avoiding all of the packaged OS bloatware, getting a non-proprietary chassis and architecture which is easily expandable, and getting exactly the options you need to fit your purpose. Spend your money on a good motherboard, video card, power supply, memory, and processor. You can skimp on the case.

I bought:
GIGABYTE GA-E7AUM-DS2H with integrated NVIDIA GeForce 9400
COOLER MASTER Elite RC-331-KKN1-GP case
PC Power & Cooling Silencer PPCS500 500W power supply
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Wolfdale 3.0GHz processor
Kingston 4GB RAM
4 1.5 TB drives and 1 160GB drive (I was mistaken above when I said 80GB)
LG Black 6X Blu-ray Disc Burner

That bill of goods came to $1,150 six months ago. I still will need to add Windows 7 when it is available. It is less powerful than the one you linked, but it is more suited to my needs. You might poke around with a comparable configuration to the Gateway and crunch some numbers. Spend some time checking the Gateway for expansion capabilities. It’s memory is maxed out (mine can expand to 16 GB), it only has two open PCI slots, and doesn’t mention how SATA ports.

8

Wow, all this and not one mention of iMovie and any new Mac. It doesn’t get any simpler.

BTW: It is not JUST the hardware that makes editing video go smooth, it is the OS and software that handles the data. Windows is just not efficient with HDV. Windows NEEDS a boat load of hardware to perform up to OSX’s standards. I have an old Mac Mini, that handles HDV, plays, scrubs and imports 1080i 30fps from my HV30. There should be no jerkyness.

If my mac mini @ 1.8Ghz can handle that… then why can a 2.66Ghz cpu handle it? It’s because Windows doesn’t handle the CPU and RAM properly for this purpose. You need to tailor Windows for this, and it isn’t the easist thing to get right the first time or to sustain.

I agree with RAID 0. You need it, Mac or Win, doesn’t matter, life will be so much better.

Unless you are using Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere or Avid, your video card has nothing to do with editing video. Your CPU takes the hit. Unless its a capture card which helps immensly but is also expensive.

visit this site to optimize your Windows environment.

The mere fact that you must *optimize *Windows tells you Microsoft really didn’t have you in mind for video editing.

9

Worth repeating.

I will mention that it isn’t necessary to build your own, though. Check out local computer shops … not the chain stores, your local mom and pop shop that sets up local business systems. If they’ve been in business for a while their prices must be competitive for parts and they can stick a system together in half an hour that you or I would spend a day or two on, so the labor charge for assembly turns out to be very reasonable.

You’ve already done some research and have an idea of what you need, now talk to someone who actually builds computers every day for local customers rather than to a drone telephone order taker. For the same money, you end up with a non-proprietary, expandable machine composed of superior components.

10

The computer you spec’d out is adequate. I use an i7 2.66 and it runs fine.

I’d also wait until after October 22 for the convenience of getting Windows 7 pre-installed (and cpu prices may drop some more too). Buying a machine 3 months before you actually need it just for “testing” your file sizes is not necessary.

Even if you get a fast i7 cpu… if you’re going to do lots of complex edits and adding special effects, you’ll want to convert H.264 to an intermediate format that takes less cpu power to process. The drawbacks are you have to wait a few minutes for the file conversion to take place and the intermediate format will take up more disk space. In this case, your limitation is hard drive size and not cpu.

If you’re just doing very simple timeline cuts, you can probably just leave it as H264 during the entire edit workflow – no conversion to intermediate codec.

11

This is just nonsense. Did you miss the title of this forum? - GQ, not MPSIMS.

The reason his old CPU wasn’t up to the task has nothing to do with CPU frequency. This would be obvious to anyone with half a clue about computers and how they work. Or in other words: I’m not surprised you are using a Mac.

OP: Please don’t listen to the above. you do not need to “tune” your windows PC for HD video.

The only + on the Mac side is the excellent software that comes bundled in. But, since an equivalent Mac would cost more anyway, budgeting in a copy of Vegas or Premier (if you don’t already have these things) is not going to break your budget.

Another point on the video card: A lot of video editing apps are now taking advantage of the parallel nature of the GPU through engines like Nvidia’s CUDA. So take that into account as well. It can significantly cut down on encoding time (specially when using a lot of complex filters) and create a smoother editing experience.

12

Thanks again, all. Input very much appreciated.

I certainly don’t want to go down the Mac track debates.
I love Macs and bought them for my kids.

I have business requirements not met by Mac; it’s not an option for me. I am so old my first computer (after my original kit-built Sinclair 1000) was a Macintosh 128.

In this case, I actually believe an i7 configuration with Windows 7 at $1200 will be faster and less restrictive (for my business and other software needs) than a Mac, and at about half the price. I’m not trying to convince anyone else of that, though.

I think I could upgrade my video card, but then I’d need to upgrade the power supply too, so that’s several hundred total which could have been spent on a new machine.

Anyway, I sincerely appreciate all the advice, and I’ll go on my way now.

13

I’ll note that the Gateway you’ve specced, as ordered through Newegg, will come with an upgrade certificate to Windows 7 when that becomes available in October - in fact, just about any Windows box you buy will have that, though I don’t recall the dates (end of June through January, I think). Check with the retailer.
Sweet rig, by the way.

14

I don’t think raid 0 is a very good idea. You’d do better leaving the two drives separate and using one to read one while writing to the other.

15

What would be the advantage of that? The point of Raid 0 is to increase the read and write bandwidth between the drives and the south bridge.

16

Raid 0 works best with continuous actions. If the drive needs to change locations to switch between reading and writing, it isn’t operating continuously. With two single drives, both may operate continuously.

17

You only need a discreet video solution if you’re authoring porn movies.