Video Editing PC

I am purely talking from my own experience as far as video editing goes.

5 years ago all our MAC edit suites would have kicked any PC's ass. And I am talking about 1Ghz PowerPC machines. There was just something about them.

But I cannot see any difference between any of our current edit suites (we have 3xPC and 2xMAC systems).

What makes one faster or perform better over the other, all comes down to the person operating them.
 
WonderBob said:
Not so much these days.

With the proper hardware, a pc can compete quite well with any MAC setup.

For me PC versus MAC in the video editing world has become more of a software choice issue than performance issue. i.e. AVID versus FINAL CUT PRO versus PREMIERE PRO versus OTHER VIDEO EDITING APPS.
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I agree with WB.

Oh dear. Now the Mac fan-boys have it in for me. hehe :D
 
Thanks for all the info so far. It's for a client in SA, so I'll be buying it in SA. I'm trying to get more info out of him (what kinda formats etc.) then I'll post the info here. He's budget however is R 25 000 so I don't think he'll go the Mac route.
 
56kMan said:
Not only analog. Also uncompressed digital like SDI/HDSDI. The max you can capture over firewire is DVCPro HD, I think.
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Unless I'm wrong you can capture off firewire from the Panasonic HVX200
which does full HD (1920 by 1080 Progressively at 25 or 30fps) in uncompressed form. The stream comes off the P2 card/store. Of course if
you're going above that $6000 setup you're probably really pro and you
can afford a dedicated HD capture device and a farm of Mac Pros to do
distributed Compressor rendering. :)

Final Cut Studio 2 has also introduced a new HD codec which gives you
uncompressed 10bit HD quality in SD file sizes, supposedly.

Then there is the software cost.

Final Cut Studio is substantially cheaper than the Premiere Pro 2.0 Kit, although once you start buying those Boris and NoiseIndustries plugins the $'s rack up :(.

BTW where do you blokes buy your DV/DVCam tape? Adorama? B&H? Expandore in SG?
 
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PeterCH said:
Unless I'm wrong you can capture off firewire from the Panasonic HVX200 which does full HD (1920 by 1080 Progressively at 25 or 30fps) in uncompressed form.
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The reason you can capture the HVX200 footage via firewire is because the HVX200 uses DVCPro HD as it's codec. DVCPro is not uncompressed, although it is less compressed than HDV. HDV is MPEG2 which uses a GOP structure and runs at 19Mbps(720p) & 25Mbps(1080i), whereas DVCPro HD uses inter-frame compression and runs at 100Mbps. Uncompressed HD's requirements are far beyond firewire's capabilities. Firewire's max transfer rate is 400Mbps and HDSDI is 1.5Gbps.
 
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bdt said:
A pal o' mine has 4 Raptors in RAID-0 as his system drive - it's ..breathtaking. (yes, he also has way too much money to spend on PC hardware!)
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Aagh, I don't even want to think what happens when one of those drives fail! :eek:

RAID-0 came straight out of Satan's playbook!
 
XCalibre said:
Thanks for all the info so far. It's for a client in SA, so I'll be buying it in SA. I'm trying to get more info out of him (what kinda formats etc.) then I'll post the info here. He's budget however is R 25 000 so I don't think he'll go the Mac route.
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Just go to http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/index.php forum. There are a bunch of South Africans there.
 
PeterCH said:
Unless I'm wrong you can capture off firewire from the Panasonic HVX200
which does full HD (1920 by 1080 Progressively at 25 or 30fps) in uncompressed form. The stream comes off the P2 card/store. Of course if
you're going above that $6000 setup you're probably really pro and you
can afford a dedicated HD capture device and a farm of Mac Pros to do
distributed Compressor rendering. :)

Final Cut Studio 2 has also introduced a new HD codec which gives you
uncompressed 10bit HD quality in SD file sizes, supposedly.

Then there is the software cost.

Final Cut Studio is substantially cheaper than the Premiere Pro 2.0 Kit, although once you start buying those Boris and NoiseIndustries plugins the $'s rack up :(.

BTW where do you blokes buy your DV/DVCam tape? Adorama? B&H? Expandore in SG?
Click to expand...

Unfortunately you are wrong :)

The Panasonic P2 cards does not capture uncompressed HD. And if you shoot on P2 you wont be "capturing your video" anyway you would be copying the files from the P2 card/store onto your PC/MAC and that would be your capture. You can only capture DV or HDV via firewire.

There is no real fully uncompressed HD recording format out there. Just some slightly compressed and then some more compressed.

Your top end, close to uncompressed recording formats is crazy money anyway, and there is not a lot of people in SA shooting high end HD.
 
XCalibre said:
Thanks for all the info so far. It's for a client in SA, so I'll be buying it in SA. I'm trying to get more info out of him (what kinda formats etc.) then I'll post the info here. He's budget however is R 25 000 so I don't think he'll go the Mac route.
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If your client's budget is 25k, I think you can safely assume that he/she wont be looking at a HD capable system.

I can point you to some people in cape town who sell and support video editing systems for a living. Both on the PC and on the MAC side.

Also, the best source of information for anything digital media related (in my opinion anyway) is www.creativecow.com There is a lot of industry professionals and representatives from most of the companies on those boards.
 
56kMan said:
Maybe you can edit HDV for that?
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Yes, definitely, but editing HDV is not an easy task. The way that HDV video is structured (GOP structure and compression) makes it quite difficult to work in HDV.

What most people do, is capture the HDV footage via SDHDI or analogue HD into the edit system as uncompressed footage or some other codec and work from there.
 
Ja. You have to transcode it to an intermediate format for editing. I think Aspect HD does that. I've used Aspect HD with Premiere and it works very well.
 
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