My current (aged) computer with 512 Mb of memory and a Centrino chip is struggling with what I'm asking of it. I'm converting all my old sports videos to digital and am trying to give chapters at appropriate points etc. For a 45 minute video, there is no problem. However, when I'm dealing with a full 2 hours worth of motor racing (~5Gb), it just gives up. What do I need to enable me to edit such large files? Would a new machine with a C2D with 2Gb of RAM do it? Or can I somehow use some of my 80Gb HDD to act as RAM? Thanks very much.
What system to edit 2 hours of video?
- Thread starter judder
- Start date
Thanks for the reply. I know that money is a factor. I could push £1000 if absolutely necessary, but if I could get away with half that (or less) I'd be happy. I suppose my question is really, what is the cheapest way of being able to handle these large video files? Further, which is better for this purpose, to go for a higher spec chip (e.g. faster dual core or, as you suggest, quad core) or more memory, e.g. 4Gb? Thanks in advance.
Gigabyte GA-P31-DS3L Intel P31 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard £55.21
Intel Core 2 Quad Pro Q6600 "Energy Efficient SLACR 95W Edition" 2.40GHz (1066FSB) - Retail £168.01
Corsair 4GB DDR2 XMS2 PC2-6400C5 TwinX (2x2GB) £72.84
Shipping cost assumes delivery to UK Mainland with:
City Link Parcel Next Day (Delivered Mon-Fri)
(This can be changed during checkout) Shipping : £8.25
Total : £305.76
Even at stock this will process video files faster than a fast thing and will realy fly if OCed (even just a little).
I built a system recently based around an E2180 at 3.3ghz, 2x2gig pc5400, and the GA-P31 and it was very fast at video encoding, faster than my E6300 at 3.4 and 2x1gig Ram.
It replaced an Athlon XP 2Ghz, 2x 512gig machine, the difference was astounding and was cheap as chips as well.
It replaced an Athlon XP 2Ghz, 2x 512gig machine, the difference was astounding and was cheap as chips as well.
Best off asking in the cases thread as there some very knowlegable people on there.
I would get yourself one or two new, fast hard drives. Store the unedited videos on one, then save the edited ones to another - this will prevent a single hard drive from trying to read and write at once, again speeding it up (and increasing your overall storage capacity at the same time).
Would be interesting to see the time difference as modern HDD are very fast at reading and writing to the same disk. I had a 'burn off' between my rig in sig and the E2180 i built as mentioned earlier.
Both machines used Shrink DVD to rip and encode the same film.
The E2180 machine }{My rig
E2180 @3.3ghz }{[email protected]
4 gig Ram at 333mhz }{2 gig Ram at 460mhz
Vista 32 }{XP home
1 HDD }{3 HDD (1 for OS, 1 for progs, 1 for data)
The E2180 machine finished nearly a minute faster than the E6300 in about 30ish minutes(cant remember the encoding settings) and spent considerably less time accessing the single HDD.