Ive got a fast enough computer (Q6600 with 8 gigs of ram) and im using premiere pro cs3. what do i need for smooth playback of video? the graphics card? hard drive?
For half HD you would need 2 or 3 hdd raid together using raid 0. If you using full HD you might need more depending on how many layers you have going.
so its all dependant on the harddrive then.
For video editing, it’s still pretty important to have drives capable of sustaining the IO of multiple uncompressed (or lossless compressed) streams without thermal recalibration in between reads.
A single stream of PAL (720x576) uncompressed footage is 32 MB/sec, so it’s likely in the range of 50megs a stream for a 720p, while normal PAL action goes down in the range of 10 MB/sec when RLE encoded, so likely around 15 for 720p.
That’s likely the reason why SCSI raids are still at a premium, and still selling fairly well.
If compression (of MPG type) comes into play, the single core may not be able do decompress in between full frames quickly enough, so unless the codec is fully multithreaded, you may still run into bottlenecks there.
hmmm. that could be one of the things. sure ive got a quad core chip but if the codec isnt multithreading im screwed. its something called Calibrate XD for the sony cameras.
it’s all in HD’s and the Codec…
We used FCP and it would playback 2 streams off a regular fast SATA HD, but only with HDV…
Prorez or uncompressed formats needed RAID drives…
We have a workstation, dual xeon 8GB, with an external ESATA RAID enclosure that houses 6 500GB drives in RAID 0. We tried a cheaper RAID card at first but ended up having problems and settled on a decent Adaptec card around $500 I think…
This is a pretty blazing setup but getting multiple streams of full HD playback is still difficult. More RAM would help for RAM previews. For SD stuff, it’s no problem. Rendering from AE is so fast, especially using the multicore functionality, each core renders a frame, then we compile the straight frames. On some projects this method is faster than a straight render.
Use HD Tac to measure your HD performance. As I remember, our RAID box was off the chart at something like 550 MB/s… I’d have to check it again to be exact.