Editing HDV

I don't believe there's been a discussion on editing HD video.

I was at an Adobe presentation yesterday on the topic of editing HD and HDV. Obviously, there is a BIG difference in uncompressed HD (huge file sizes and professional broadcasting) and HDV which uses a compressed file, but I was surprised to learn that editing HDV may be out of reach for most people.

Suggested requirements for using sophisticated editing programs like Adobe's suite (Premiere Pro?) for editing HDV are huge -

Adobe Site

I suppose you could use the manufacturers software to make simple edits.

I wonder, would this make anyone decide NOT do move to HDV? Or am I mislead into what the realistic requirements are to produce HDV video?

The manufacturers do not even provide software for editing digital video. DV or HDV. You are on your own in that area.

Everything you are talking about was one of the main reasons I avoided HDV when I bought my VX2100.

I think those specs may be a bit overboard. But I read up on the Pinnacle Systems website all the time, and they state that they can not capture, let alone edit HDV without having 2 gigs of RAM in their system, and they are using a program called "EndItAll2" to kill all unecessary apps on their PC before opening Pinnacle.

Also you have to have a 256 meg or greater graphics card to edit HDV in Pinnacle at least.

I'm pretty sure my Hyperthreaded Intel 3GHZ can handle HD. I do have 2 gigs of RAM and a 256 meg nVideo graphics card.

I have 500 gigs of storage in a RAID 0, but I'm going to upgrade that to at least 4 disks in a RAID 5.

Sorry Rob, edited your post to give a clicky link to your adobe link.

I haven't started doing any editing in HD yet, i have been downconverting through the camera as i am just shooting holiday stuff for our guests.

However...Wagsy has just done a big project in HD.

He does mention some of his system specs and what not here:

Phenom Talk

Mike

If you have a 3gig PC with over 1 gig of ram editing HDV will be fine.

You can use normal IDE drives but SATA drives are heaps better and cost the same as IDE anyhow.

Editing raw m2t steam is very very hard so get yourself converting it to an intermediate AVI etc as it's alot easier to edit and in real time. You can also edit a low res m2t stream and then render out using the full m2t quality

Wags

I was actually researching HD's yesterday @ Tom's Hardware. They have a pretty extensive review compaing a lot of the top models of SATA, ULTRA 100, and ULTRA 133 drives.

There conclusion showed very minimal gains in SATA drives over large cache ULTRA 100 drives. And that was in benchmarks. They specifically stated that the gains would not even be noticed in operating performance.

One way you can boost HD performance is through RAID 0 or better yet RAID 5 array's. Unless you Mobo has built in SATA Raid controller, External PCI-X SATA Raid controllers are expensive, while a very nice Adaptac PCI ULTRA 133 Raid Controller can be had relatively inexpensively. So it should be that a RAID ULTRA 133 solution should outperform non raid SATA drives...

I guess I'll find out soon enough.

I just bought 2 x 120 GB SATA drives. One for OS and Applications, one for a scratch and page file disk.

Along with that I got 4 x 300 GB ULTRA 133 drives with 16mb cache. I'm going to throw them into a RAID 5 array for Photo, Video, and Music storage.

I'll run some benchmarks once I have everything setup and let you know the performance.

Detonate

SATA's gains shine when striped for RAID. Not to mention the neatness and robustness of the wires. Also SATA PCI X Raid cards and ATA RAID cards cost pretty much the same.

I managed to squeeze 5 drives into my G5 for 1.2TB. Striped 0+1 about 1.5 years back. With ATA I would've smoked my machine with cable clutter. I also have a 4 1.2TB drive setup Raid 0 for uncompressed work.

As for computing power for HDV, pretty much all the processing power they want is for the real time preview. So have as much ram and VRAM as the program needs.

How much did you pay for your SATA RAID Card?

Here is the SATA Raid article I read:

http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/200510...#features_table

You can see the prices go from around $300 - $600 and they require a PCI-X slot.

The raid card I have supports up to 8 drives and was only around $100.

I'd be interested to see how SATA Raid stacks up against Ultra 133 RAID, but for me it was an easy choice.

I already have the Ultra 133 Raid card, and I do not have a PCI-X slot. So to go SATA raid, I would have had to shell out a minimum of $300 for a RAID card, and about that for a new mobo. Not to mention, most mobo I've seen that support PCI-X, also use PCI-X for their video card, which would mean also replacing my $500 AGP video card.

Damn computers and their ever changing technology!!!!

Also, a tip for cable management with PCI cards. Instead of buying rounded cables, you can use a little electrical tape and fold the cable into a W. They route very neatly without introducing the cross talk that rounded cables suffer from.

Hey you guys are right into it.

All I know is that once I put in some SATA drives, the performace of scubbing the HDV timeline improved and no hicups in video signal coming in. The IDE's even if they were empty and formatted before hand, would sometimes have dropouts in the m2t to AVI cineform captured files. Not with the SATA. Also have SATA on second computer that I can edit with through the network and can even send my render work to the other computer throught the network straight from the HDV timleine. Now I'm wondering how I could have both 3 gig computers working together in the rendering. That would be cool.

Hey Drew, after more experimenting, with lots of different software. It's amazing what little bits of software people have made to make programs work in with others. I have now come up with even more stunning quality progressive mpeg files than before.

The Conversion to NTSC is also so good that it would be very hard to pick the difference between the PAL and NTSC files if you did not know which was playing. It's taken me an extra two weeks in experimenting and tweeking , but well worth it.

On another note. DVFILM Atlanitis converts HDV 50i to 50p with outstanding results, you can then edit in a progressive timeline .

Wags

I vote for SATA RAID striping as well. I have a (relatively) inexpensive 8-channel SATA RAID card in my server, and it runs 8 drives with no problems (RAID 5).

Don't mess around with data and try to save a few pennies. If you're into photography these days, your data is your most valuable asset...

Detonate

PCI-X cards are usually backward compatible with standard PCI. I doubt IDE cables will ever be as neat as SATA ones. The only problem with present SATA cards are that too few support port multiplication, the ability to have multiple drives on one serial channel. Thus the drives hit the 65mb/s wall. SATA II drives have 300MB/s so it will take drive array performance to the next level.

Do you guys have some good links to articles on this stuff, or links to some of these cheap SATA raid cards?

I was reading up some more last night in the "Perfect PC" forum on that Digital Director site that someone posted here the other day. They all seem to concure that SATA drives do not provide the performance boost that the specs would indicate.

That jives with what I read over at Tom's Hardware and a few other PC hardware review sites. I'm just a bit skeptical that you guys are really seeing huge performance boosts when every proffesionally written article I've read says that isn't the case.

Here is an article with some benchmarks. I haven't found a good one that puts SATA and SATA raid directly against IDE, but this one has an SATA drive, and IDE drive, SATA Raid 1, and SATA Raid 0.

http://www.thetechlounge.com/articles.php?id=127&page=4

As you can see, there is very little difference in performance. Even the SATA Raid 0 config offers minimal performance advantage over a non raid IDE drive.

Detonate

I think you are concentrating too much on numbers. I'm not sure what setup Wagsy has but I'm sure a lot of the performance gains came from just faster drives with larger cache. Tests like that also depend on hardware, software and drive selection issues. It's too complicated to just go by test reviews.

I didn't say SATA was hugely faster than PATA. I said given the neater cabling and lower power consumption, SATA is better. Also the bandwidth at 300mb/s (SATA II), achievable with port multiplication and 5 drives per channel is definitely higher than PATA's 133mb/s. That plus hotswappability and tagged command queuing for some programs means SATA is a superior interface. Drives will never be able to use the interface's bandwidth fully without port multiplication, something SCSI (and Serial SCSI) and fibrechannel can do. Thus they were the de facto workstation choice for years.

I use a Netcell SR5113 card I bought for $260. It supports SyncRaid whereby 1 drive is used for parity data, working like RAID 3 but without the bottlenecks. Best of all, it's bootable on a mac. All hooked outside to an external enclosure. I also use the firmtek S4 with SoftRaid for a RAID 0 internally with 4 250GB Maxtor Maxline II. I am now looking for external enclosures again since my new G5 quad can't fit the 4 internal drives.

Wagsy, have you tried Bitvice from Innobits? The Mpeg2 conversion is very nice and I think they support HDV now.

I use two SATA drives totalling about 600gig in a non RAID config. I store the source footage on one drive and render it out to the other. My machine is a Pentium D (dual core) 3ghz with two DL burners and 1gig RAM. ]

However I have also done editing on a plan old Pentium HT 3ghz with a 160gig PATA 512MB and it works pretty well too.