[BingoBongo275]

Hi,

I've decided that I need a new PC as my 4 year old Advent is just tooooooo slow for AVCHD.

I've got a Sony TG3 (wonderful!) and want to ber able to edit the footage, hence need something fairly quick, something like a fast-ish Dell would do I suppose.

Software-wise I've previously used Adobe Premiere but will probably jump ship now to Sony Vegas since Adobe dont seem to be up to speed with AVCHD.

I presume I'll continue to dump onto DVD (like with Picture Motion Brownser) as writable Blu-Ray drive's are going to be expensive.

So any PC suggestions????

Cheers

Jez

[jagdeepp]

Adobe CS4 in fact supports Avchd without any difficulties. However, you need a seriously fast pc to keep up.
Sony Vegas Pro is the cheaper option and is more user friendly though it has less to offer in terms of functions and effects.
I've got a core 2 duo and it seems to cope if and only if previews are graded down to draft quality.

[BingoBongo275]

Interesting - so "core 2" doesnt sound enough then.

So what kind of spec PC do you need for editing AVCHD files?

Any recommendations?

Cheers

Jez

[Bomag]

I have been looking at moving to AVCHD and it needs a serious step up in speed. A Quad core CPU is a good starting point but an I7 (quad core and hyperthreading) is requied unless you want to relive DV editing of 2001.

The choice of software can help. If you have an fast nVidia or ATI graphics card and software which supports CUDA for nvidia and the equivilent ATI this can give a significant boost.

Who's nicked my post count!!

[mmace]

Originally Posted by BingoBongo275

Interesting - so "core 2" doesnt sound enough then.

that's not true, I've heard people with Core2Quad processors have been fine with editing and playing AVCHD, the next step up from Core2 is i7 but the price jumps up too, if you can't afford i7 then Core2Quad should be fine

[Wronghole]

Hello

Having previously used a core2duo Dell xps laptop this couldnt hack it.

Friend has a Q6700 and handled it fairly well

In early Febuary I built a new i7 920 and it breezes thru it very easy

[bobe]

Hi

I have a intel core 2 Duo E6750 @ 2.66GHZ with 3.5GB RAM and a Nividia Force 7300LE graphics. I to would like to move across from Mini DV to AVCHD,would my system be good enough ?.
Thank you.

[Ikki]

AVCHD is highly compressed and requires a lot of computing power to edit on the fly. If you are going to end up putting the video onto DVD, then the best way of doing this on lower powered equipment is to transcode to another format such as mpeg2 or mp4 at DVD resolution (720x576). This can be edited in all NLVE's such as Vegas with ease.

For transcoding try:

Tmpgenc 4.0 Xpress (about £50 but very good and allows adjustment of things like noise, sharpness exposure, saturation etc)
Nero 8 or 9
Handbrake (free and excellent) transcodes to mp4.
WinFF (Free)
On the command line ffmpeg is quick and efficient.

p.s. I use a 3.1 GHz quad core Q6600 intel processor and it handles this work with ease. If I want to do editing for a product that is to remain at HD resolution, I still transcode to mp4 as it requires less processing power (but takes up more space). However, rendering at HD resolution is still close to real time. I don't think that you need an i7 processor but if you can afford it, why not.

[Giblets2]

I assumed when he said 'dump onto DVD' he meant as AVC-HD to be played on the BR Player or PS3 in HD. Only about half an hour per disk or course.

[mmace]

probably no help, but this weekend I edited a music video on my i7 920 machine, it was all shot in AVCHD, I had 18 video tracks and 2 graphic overlays in Premiere and 2 tracks linked to After Effects and there was no stuttering or problems, not bad to say it was a full PC (minus monitor) for £629

[senu]

Originally Posted by mmace

probably no help, but this weekend I edited a music video on my i7 920 machine, it was all shot in AVCHD, I had 18 video tracks and 2 graphic overlays in Premiere and 2 tracks linked to After Effects and there was no stuttering or problems, not bad to say it was a full PC (minus monitor) for £629

What exactly do you output to?
And how much Ram do you have?
Also does the graphics card help in any editing rendering or is it mainly playback where the GPU simply kicks in with Nvidias Pure HD decoding?

[mmace]

Originally Posted by senu

What exactly do you output to?
And how much Ram do you have?
Also does the graphics card help in any editing rendering or is it mainly playback where the GPU simply kicks in with Nvidias Pure HD decoding?

I have an ATI HD card, it's not used in rendering (or even playback), the CPU does it all (100% on all threads when encoding)
I have 3Gb DDR3 RAM (never seen it go above 80%)
I outputted to h264 720p @ 5mbps for youtube/vimeo as well as 1080p h264 30mbps for Blu-ray/PS3 and 576p MPEG2 at 8mbps for DVD