[sterankin]

Specs of my Dell vostro 200, how will it handle editing HiDef footage?

Intel Core 2 Duo E4500 2.2GHz
Dell Mobo P35/G33/G1 Chipset
Graphics: NVIDA GeForce 8600GT 256MB
Ram: 4gb DDR2 PC5300
Also putting in another HDD - 1TB Hitachi
O/S Windows Vista Business

Comments?

[sterankin]

I'm going to bump this as I would like to hear peoples thoughts. I downloaded a 1080 .MTS file from a canon camcorder that someone had posted up.

Playback was very choppy in Moviemaker and premiere. Scrubbing the video was choppy also.

Seriously like - what kind of system do you need, Alienware?!
With regards to my system, what is the limiting factor? Or is it just a combination of everything?

Are there any laptops that can edit HD Avchd - as I might need to consider investing in one!

[senu]

HDV is Hi def on tape which is mpeg2 ,1440 x 1080 ( may be downsampled from the recorded 1920 x 1080) 25Mbits/sec

AVCHD is h.264 AVC , a variant of mpeg4 which uses less bitrate encoding anf resut in smaller file sizes: more compressed but arguable similar quality ( some would say beter)

the price you pay for this quality is the prosessing power needed to edit

You system shold playback fairly easily but with editing a 4Gb RAM is a good minimum and a decent Quadcore helps.. Some have found i7 systems will fly
This is a bit tongue in cheek as it is also dependent of software but most software would be happier with more grunt
Also you will find the software recommended specs are the more reallife editing requirements, not the minimum specs
It is processor intensive.
Some Software do actually use GPU power but this is specific to such software and the hardware is specific as not all GPUs can accelerate encoding. ( most recent ones can lend hardware support to playback)
Im sure there are laptops that can edit AVCHD but they would be the very top end ones

Mac takes a different approach to AVCHD editing and uses an intermediate format which is less hungry for hardware so an equivalent mac system will edit with a little less grunt

[sterankin]

Thanks for that - the title of the thread should have read "HD Video" not HDV. My mistake.

I opened the avchd file in premiere also and the same thing occurred. Playback was very chopping, almost like watching a picture slideshow. Audio was playing back fine.

I'm not sure what to do with this since I was considering purchasing an HD camcorder in the next few weeks. Would a better graphics card help?

[MarkE19]

A graphics card upgrade may help a little with replay - but not a lot as it is the CPU that does most of the work when playing (and more so with editing) AVCHD files. So as senu has already stated you should look to getting a quad core CPU, perhaps even an i7 to edit AVCHD video and check the recommended specs of the software as some will work better on a lower spec PC than others.

Mark.