Priority Of PC Hardware Upgrades

The more cores the better, even if slower. Quad core will definitely outperform a duel core, probably in 1/2 the time (roughly). Second would be core speed. the rest don't matter, although it seems Intel is much better at video processing/multimedia then AMD.

you will need 4GB's memory for editing, it's not a lot of money, 4GB's is $200 as opposed to 2GB's being $100, it's worth the extra $100 because Vista takes between 900MB and 1.5GB's all on it's own. HD Videos are gigs of data for a few minutes. the less paging you do the better.

I would recommend a faster HDD, todays $100 hard drives are 500GB's and 10X faster then those of just 1 year ago. the RAID0 of 1 year ago is slower then todays single drives... I'd just get a 500GB 32MB cache 7200 RPM drive, or if you wan to go bigger go for 750 or 1TB of size.... Don't bother with the 10K drives because they are all small in size. Point is, if your current hard drive is less then 500GB's or older then 1 year then yes you should upgrade and use the old drive as your storage/archive of video you have already edited.

I agree with the fact that Intel > AMD for the video processing.

I currenty own an OLD sony Vaio desktop and I run AVID video editing software to edit HD video from my HDR-HC3. I am using XP, but i'm only running 1 gig of ram on a 3.6ghz Intel P4 processor.

bumping up to Vista would require at least 2gb of RAM on a Core 2 Duo processor. I do get a bit of lag when i try to edit or throw in effects but it gets the job done. A lot of store stock desktops will have plenty on board to edit videos but of course as kring said, a quadcore would definately run better than a dual core.

i work retail and understand the "budget" system. So if you're looking to get started now spending as little as possible, you could probably get by with a store stock desktop with 3gb of ram on a Core 2 Duo processor with a 500 gb hard drive. Desktops are pretty easy to upgrade later on.

I recently got a quad-core (Q6600) desktop with 2 gig of RAM and Vista x32 for $650 after rebates. I've since seen similar budget quad-core PC's for as little as $600. You don't have to blow the bank to have a kick-butt editing system. Sony Vegas uses all 4 cores, so quad-core is definitely more important than clock speed. Adobe's Premier Pro, as I understand it, doesn't use all the cores, but instead leans heavily on your graphics card, so if and only if you're using that software, a higher end graphics card might be the better upgrade.

If you've got a quad-core and are rendering that quickly, having one hard drive would be a huge bottleneck. I did an experiment and literally rendered THREE TIMES as fast by rendering out to a USB external hard drive vs. rendering to my lone internal hard drive. Those who are very serious about speeding up their renders have a third hard drive for the source files, and use the slightly more expensive (and faster) firewire or sata external hard drives. Although, the biggest bang for your buck comes from just having any old external hard drive to render out to.

Here is where it gets tricky. During editing software install, it is a good idea to have your hard drives all plugged and ready to go. There will be a question to map the drives so that the proper data sets will go to the proper drives for maximum efficiency. I strongly recommend that the App and source drive be internal (two drives)to get fast transfer rate. The post edit data can be put to an external drive. Don't even think of using USB2 port for this, just inefficient and will cause drop-outs. Minimum to go is Firewire 400.

Right now the best bang for your buck is the intel Q6600 . Its $270 . With that buy 4 gigs of ddr 800 ram which is currently $80-$115 bucks . Buy a motherboard that has the features you like.

If you care to go to another site like hardocp.com or a similar place you can read up on overclocking. I have my Q6600 up from 2.4ghz stock to 3.5 ghz . Its a breeze when editing high def content.

My understanding (and correct me if I'm wrong) is that a good USB 2.0 drive can support a sustained data transfer rate of 40mb/s - faster than realtime output of a 1440x1080 video stream (25mb/s on the HV20 for example). Even the slowest external USB 2.0 drives have a sustained data transfer rate of 4-5mb/s. Personally, most of the time that I'm rendering out, I'm rendering to a much smaller 720x480 DVD resolution file. Even with a quad core chugging along on all cores with minimal "editing", is the processor really creating an output file faster than USB 2.0's sustained data transfer rate?

There are articles that tests these real-life situations WRT USB2 usage. The sustained rate is not all that constant. The behavior of USB is unlike Firewire. Firewire has separate controller while USB is more CPU dependent. The nature of design is also different. Firewire was meant for exactly such purpose, USB not so, tends to be an all purpose connection. I have used both USB2 and Firewire 400. There is a definite hit on performance with the USB. The firewire is smooth as silk. I wouldn't chance it, even with SD video edits. Why find out later when you edit after all that video getting corrupted. I had to upload few hours worth of materials after the USB2 showed skips on the video streams.

I agree with Head Shot, theoretical capacity vs. realworld is far from the same on USB. USB is not a good interface and suffers horribly from poor consistency and is very easily impacted by other activities, i.e. browsing the web actually slows down USB.

USB is fine for mice and scanners, or using an external drive as a backup device, but I would never trust USB.

Thanks for clarifying. I guess my next hard drive will be firewire or SATA.

does 2 sata drives in raid0 count?

No.

Two drives in a RAID config is considered just one drive.

What you need is at least two drives that work independent of each other.

For instance, DRIVE1 will have the OS, Apps, and related plug-in programs and other accessories to make your video production creative and powerful.

DRIVE2 will have the archived video/picture data from the video capture.

Having two separate drives is the minimum one should have for a more enjoyable multimedia work experience. Current motherboards have boatloads of hard drive ports that you should have no problem managing your expanding data.

In my case, I also have DRIVE3 that stores the gigabytes worth of digital images that I often use for the video as well as for background images of DVD menus. This is repository of ripped audio and music tracks that will be used for video and photoslide shows.

DRIVE4 is my external hard drive that is used to store clips that are no longer needed fro recurring projects and other images. It provides safer backup and for redundancy.

I will also have blank internal SATA drives ready to exchange with currently used one once the drives get filled up.

This has been a lot of help... Thanks!
Just one question, if the core speed, say, 2.4 GHz, what will the difference be between a 1 core and 4 core cpu, does it do 4 times the work.
Thanks!
Also, would the Q6600 be a good choice if I wanted to make a pc to edit AVCHD, if I wanted to overclock it, what cooling should I use. and one more thing, what video card is the best?

The current quad core is actually two CPU , and each is divided by two, thus quad. The actual performance of quad is not four time more faster than a single core, rather, it's a significant jump from a single. Where it shines is its ability to process 4 pipeline of calculation at the same time. When using an application software that takes advantage of 64 bit multicore, quad core will take another leap up in terms of speed and efficiency. Only then will quad really mean "almost" four times the speed.

The bottleneck occurs in many places in the computer chassis. One place to reduce a bottleneck is at the video card. You would want the videocard's GPU to bear much of the video data calculations during output, allowing the quad CPU to perform other work intensive matters.

Q6600 would be an excellent choice to start your custom comp for editing AVCHD. The cooling of this CPU is less breathtaking than in years past becuase it's running at lower cycle speed (2.4 vs 3.2 ). Typical copper finned Zalman's are good except you have to be careful to have the internal space for it. Those mushroom shaped fins can and do interfere with the other stuff around the motherboard. Be sure you have better ceramic/alumina paste to interphase the CPU to the heat sink or cooling device. If you want to go overboard and show off the internals, I'd go with water-cooled, neon glow tubings and add black lights

Video cards, that is highly debatable and tend to be heated in arguments. For me I've been going with nVidia for the last 5-6 years. ATI has given me too many and too often issues. My current card is the 8800GTS , 320 MB, overclocked. I use it primarily for gaming but is just highly suited for my video editing needs. I edit HDV clips onto HD DVD disks.

I just finished upgrading my HTPC that I built almost two years ago with the following components. This system will be used for video editing as I just purchased the Sony SR7 and I needed something with horsepower to work with AVCHD. I posted a seperate topic asking about software recommendations because I want to take advantage of my new system. I don't want to purchase AVCHD editing software that won't fully utilize my system.

This system is screaming fast. Right now the only thing I've really used it for was converting DVD's to wmv formats so I can stream to my xbox360. My single core system with 2GB of memory would take me about 5 hours or more to convert. This system will convert a entire DVD from the DVD drive to wmv format in less than 30 minutes.

As you can see below I'm getting upwards of 170fps during the movie conversion.



Upgraded system

Q6600 running @ 3.6Ghz per core
Abit IP35 Pro Mobo
8GB G.Skill DDR2 PC1000 RAM
Vista Ultimate x64
HDD - 2 x 500GB WD 7200rpm SATA II (RAID 0)
HDD - 2 x 250GB Maxtor 7200rpm SATA II (RAID 0)

I'm glad I found your post. You just answered my question. I downloaded the Sony Vegas software but I was comparing it to other AVCHD editing software and I couldn't confirm if it would utilize multi-core systems.

The only thing I noticed is that there isn't any software to utilize the x64 architecture. Even the Sony seems to run in a 32bit emulation mode. Therefore I don't think the application will be able to take full advantage of the 8GB of memory.

I caught a special a few weeks ago at Fry's and got the Q6600 and a ECS motherboard for $270. I didn't use the motherboard for this particular system but I basically got a $90 motherboard for free. I ended up going with an Abit IP35 Pro board.

Thanks HEAD SHOT for the reply,
So, would water cooling work better than fans? Or is it just mostly for show?
Do you like your video card?
Also, what motherboard and is soundblaster good for audio?
Thanks for the help!

Is vista or xp better for editing anything (mostly avchd)?

Ok, so here are some parts I wanna buy,

GIGABYTE GA-P35-DS3P OR Asus P5e x38 board (Which one?, or is there a better one?)
INTEL Quad Core Q6600
nVidia 8800GT
X-Fi Sound Blaster

Does it sound good? Give me suggestions
Thanks!

If your planning to overclock stay with a P35 board. They seem to overclock better than the othe chipsets at this time. Not sure about the GIGABYTE motherboard but I'm sure it's on par with Abit or Asus.

Check out overclockers.com and read up on their motherboard recommendations.

I went with the Abit IP35 Pro because it's one of the best overclocking boards for the P35 chipset.

While I agree with others that firewire is a faster and more CPU-efficient interface, USB is plenty fast enough for all of the applications cited. Even your quad core will output edits at only a fraction of a USB HDD's capability.

First, let's eliminate the common confusion between bits and bytes - a byte is 8 bits - and the ambiguity in "mb." Sizes are commonly expressed in MBytes (or GBytes) such as a 500GB HDD and data rates in MBits (per sec) such as the HDV rate of 25 Mbits/sec (mbs).

My USB-attached 750GB HDD does sustained data transfer at well over 20MBytes/sec, which while less than half of the quoted burst rate of 440 Mbits/sec for USB, is over ten times the data acquisition rate of my AVCHD HDR-SR1 of about 2MBytes/sec.

Similarly, video download from my camera to my PC over USB goes at the >20MBytes/sec rate, which is over 10x the acquisition/play rate of the video. This is one of the huge advantages over miniDV-based HDV, which transfers video at the acquisition/play rate.

Pinnacle 11.1 on my 64-bit quad-core dual-SLI media system creates AVCHD output at less than 1MByte/sec (less than half the play rate of the video and less than 5% the USB HDD throughput). Thus, a USB HDD is no where near being a bottleneck for throughput.

With that said, I only use my USB HDDs for data backup and long-term storage. I use the internal SATA drives for all processing on my many systems. USB for backup and storage is good enough and very cheap; firewire-based drives are generally more expensive. Yes, firewire is faster, especially firewire 800, and eSATA is faster still, but USB is generally more than good enough for its proper applications.

Watercooling works better than fans. Not all watercoolers are efficient and quiet. There is a design where the radiator is placed within the case, hardly improving the overall ambient temperature. The more efficent fan/fins are quiet, but usually noisier than watercooled- radiator and fan can be remotely placed. My editing comp is very noisy but I cannot put watercooling in this room, for obvious reasons. So watercooled units tend to run a bit quieter, less fatigue over the long haul.

Video card has run flawless, F.E.A.R. and newer games are a breeze to watch.

I use the Intel MoBo $ 200 model out over a year ago. For me Soundblaster has always been the go-to brand. It will give the least amount of headaches, because this is the standard card that all designs are tested against for compatibility. It's good enough for my Home Theater Audio System.

The reason I'm staying away from Vista is because I don't want to be a guinea pig until everybody else has helped to iron out the kinks

Eventually I'll get there. Right now I'm having too much fun without the headaches.

I actually changed my mind on what I plan to get....
I am going to get:

XFX nForce 680i

XFX GeForce 8500 GT or 8800GT (Depends on how much cash I have)

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600

OCZ SLI-Ready Edition 4GB(2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM
DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory

Thermaltake CL-W0121 2U

COOLER MASTER Real Power Pro
RS-750-ACAA-A1 750W Power Supply

Western Digital Caviar SE WD3200JBRTL 320GB