4 posts tagged “video editing”

I've finally done it ... I've just placed the order with our Dell account manager for the Beast!

If you've been reading earlier postings, you'll know that I've been (im)patiently waiting for Dell to make the new Quad core Xeons available ... and they now are. The main hesitation I had was the clock speed for the processors. My initial quote from Dell was for the 2.66GHz Quads but, not only did this put the price up by £500, they run a lot hotter than the other processors (120W). I've therefore gone for the 2.33GHz processors, which are in the same "bucket" as the 3GHz Dual core Xeons, i.e. Intel are charging the same price. They are also rated at 80W like the 3GHz processors.

It was a difficult choice, though. These are very early days for the quad-core processors and there isn't really a lot of hard evidence as to how well or badly they perform. In addition, there is no information as to how how the Precision 690 gets, or how noisy as a result.

I was a bit nervous about placing the order. I don't like being as close to the bleeding edge as this. I prefer to read other people's comments and views and then make up my mind. I've done my best on the research but it is a bit closer to that edge than I would like ... but the RT.X2 card has been sitting in a cupboard for too long now and I need to get on with finishing my sister's wedding video.

I'm still intending to built a dual-boot system, initially XP (video editing) and Vista (everything else) and then (hopefully) Vista & Vista. The "everything else" partition may need to wait until the end of January at the earliest, or until I've finished editing that video :).

One snag with the ordering process is that Dell's order placement system wouldn't support the configuration of drives that I wanted - 500Gb boot, 2x750Gb data - for some really strange and inexplicable reason. So the system is coming with 2x750Gb and I've got to fit the 500Gb drive. Not a big deal but I've also then got to Ghost the XP partition off the 750Gb drive and onto the 500Gb drive as that will be the boot drive. A bit of hassle and I know nothing about SATA drives so I'm not yet sure how to change the boot order of these harddrives.

I wonder how long before Dell will deliver it ... ?

I've been persuing video editing as a hobby for quite some time now and, lately, I've been trying to push that hobby into some sort of money-earning exercise, particularly around weddings. To that end, last year I upgraded from two Sony DV camcorders to two Sony HC1 HDV camcorders. I didn't have the software or the hardware to support them but the pricing in Tokyo was good enough to persuade me to take advantage of the opportunity and worry about getting the footage off them later! That, and the fact that you can actually use them as very nice DV cameras as well.

Wind the clock on a bit and we get to the release of Adobe's Premiere Pro 2 which comes with native HDV support. This significantly improved on the previous version which needed to transcode the HDV footage into an internal format ... and that didn't work for me. Native HDV support needs a lot of processor power, though. My n-year old Pentium 4 2.8GHz PC just doesn't cut it. My new(ish) Core laptop does - just.

So it is time to replace the main video editing PC. I've been a big fan of Matrox video editing enhancements for quite a while now, starting with the 2500 then the RT.X100 and now the new RT.X2 - a reasonably low cost add-on card that provides good support for HDV footage in realtime. The downside is that you still need a fair amount of processing power - a minimum of two processors or cores.

For the RT.X2, Matrox have been persuing a policy of validating motherboards & systems in order to provide the most efficient level of support. I'm not entirely happy with building my own system so I've opted to go for a brand-name, even if that adds some $ to the cost.

As a long-standing Dell customer, my initial intention was to go for a Dell system ... but Matrox didn't have any validated. They primarily had dual-processor AMD systems. Intel were just about to launch dual-core CPUs, though, so I waited. It took Matrox a while to validate them but there are now dual-core systems on their list ... and the dual-core Xeon based HP xw8400 and Dell Precision 690.

Those two workstations are simply fantastic. I've done a careful comparison between the two and there isn't a lot between them. The primary differences are in the number of drives, the built-in RAID compatibilities, slot configuration and power capabilities. One curious thing from Matrox's testing is that the best-of-breed graphics card that works OK in other systems - the Radeon 1950 - does not work well in these workstations. Matrox are still looking into that.

With the quad-core Xeons about to be released, I'm almost set to place an order ... with Dell. As there wasn't much between the two workstations, I'm taking advantage of the corporate discount we get so the Precision 690 wins on price. What am I getting ... ?

2 x quad-core Xeons (8 cores!!!!)

4GB memory (4x1GB)

500GB SATA boot drive, 2x750GB SATA data drives

Dual-layer DVD +/- RW drive

ATI FireGL V7200 graphics card

plus the Matrox RT.X2 card. At some point I might then add the Creative X-Fi card as the default is only stereo as far as I can tell.

I'm probably going to set this up for dual-boot - XP for the video environment and Vista for everything else. In a 32-bit environment, 4GB memory is the maximum that can be used, so I'm not going to be in a rush to change that.

The rumour is that Adobe Premiere Pro 3 will be set for Vista so I'm hoping that if that is the case, Matrox will release Vista drivers and also update their compatibility test so that newer DX10 cards like the amazing Nvidia G80 are supported.

Now all I need is my own nuclear power station to keep that lot running!

If you've been following this little saga, you might just be wondering what is going on ... after all, the last report on my progress was for the completion of day 6 ... so what happened to days 7, 8 and 9?

Well, we were out yesterday and I'm not feeling too good today - not a consequence of yesterday, but I think I'm fighting something. As a result, I wasn't really in the mood to concentrate on doing any video editing. In the end, I settled on doing the last day because I'd already picked the piece of music to use and it is only about 3 minutes long so I didn't think it would take too long to edit it into place.

Given that day 10 was the journey home, and given some of my previous choices in music (see the day 6 report!), it was clear what I had to pick! Yep! "So long, farewell"! The footage has worked well to the tune, particularly near the end where the youngest child sings "The sun has gone to bed and so must I" ... to which I had a lovely clip of my mother-in-law asleep :). Additionally, I had a clip of our tour guide waving at us while we were in Cologne, so I used that for the last "Good-bye".

I'll get days 7, 8 and 9 done when I get back from China. Then, it is a "simple" case of making the DVD menus, burning the discs, designing the covers ... and then I can order my new computer for doing HD video editing with :).

Oooh ... he's on a roll! Only days 7, 8 and 9 left to do ...

I cheated big time with the music on this one. Day 6 was an all-day journey from Brig (where we'd been staying for the first part of the holiday) to Chur on the Glacier Express. So I was looking for something that would work for a sequence of a reasonable length. I had something like 30+ minutes of video to reduce.

In the UK, the BBC have been running a series every Saturday trying to find a fresh new star to play the part of Maria in Andrew Lloyd-Webber's stage version of the Sound of Music. Yep, you've guessed it - I used some music from that. Yes, I know it is set in Austria and not Switzerland but, frankly, it works so well, I just couldn't not use it!

To get the timing vaguely in the right direction, I chose to use "Climb Ev'ry Mountain", "Edelweiss" and "Climb Ev'ry Mountain (Reprise)" - totalling about 6 minutes. Another mega trimming job later and some cheeky fitting of footage of streams to pertinent parts in the vocals and we've got ourselves Day 6.

Phew!