Newbie question - slow system

[Murrayim]

Hi Guys,


I've got my self into a pickle and what some advice on running video editing on a slow system...


I've have AMD K6 - 550Mhz. Which had a G200 Matrox and a SVHS camera, before the video card blow up. Now I have a firewire card and a miniDV camera.

I had been using ulead Media Studio Pro V6. Slow but ok. In a mad rush I've just crossgraded this to VideoStudio 7 to add writing DVDs.

My problem is that VS7 don't run on my system :-(. Stupid I know but I didn't check the requirements. P800 minimum.

One solution I've found is to use WinDv to import the video and TMPENC to encode to Mpeg 2. Will this work and produce acceptable results on a system as slow as mine?.
(I would try this but... I had already installed an older version some time ago and each time I launch the trial version of TMPENC it says that the MPG codec has expired and wont encode).
Before I spend another $100.00 I would like to know what you guys think...

OR: Should I wait a few months and buy an AMD64 / FX6800 video card and use VideoStudio on that ?.


Cheers Murray

[Brian Ellis]

Your G-200 Marvel had the video processing on board, so it ran OK on a slow system. Your new rig relies on the CPU to do the video work and, as you say, it ain't fast. If I were you, I'd upgrade to a faster system with plenty of RAM ASAP, but you don't need to go to 64 bits. A P4 2500 with 1 Gb 800 MHz RAM or the AMD equivalent would be more than adequate, cheaper and well proven.

[junkmalle]

One solution I've found is to use WinDv to import the video and TMPENC to encode to Mpeg 2. Will this work and produce acceptable results on a system as slow as mine?.

If you can capture the DV stream from your camera without dropping frames you should have no problems. For DV capture disk write speed is more of an issue than CPU speed. It is basically a real time file transfer. Your CPU just receives the data from the camcorder and writes it to disk, there is very little processing going on. You're looking at 13 GB/hour to capture DV format. Any drive that's big enough to be working with that will be fast enough. Be sure DMA is enabled for the drive.

Obviously, a faster computer will speed up the conversion from DV to MPG. But the quality of the conversion is not dependent on CPU speed. A slow CPU will just take longer.

[Frank Marshall]

Render while you sleep! Transitions will take a while to build while you edit as well. All you need is patience. Isn't that a Guns'n'Roses song?