Awl--

Looking to set up a small video studio for experimental instructional
videos, just to rough things out, before bringing in professional guns. So
the setup does not have to be expensive or fancy, perhaps just a little
versatile.

I went to B&H, which sells computers set up for video processing, with
Vista--HP, 2.4 GHz, 3 gigs ram, 2x320 Gb drives, dual core, etc.

VideoGuys.com (in LI, NY) however, says *not* to go with Vista, and to avoid
RAID like the plague, at least in basic systems.

Any opinions on how a computer should be set up for this type of work?
Thinking of using it with Premier Elements, a Panasonic PV-GS500 (3 ccd,
about $700), with dedicated computer.

Also, does the choice of camera affect the capturing process, etc, or have
any bearing subsequent editing chores?

Any other good vendors in the metro NY area? Web?
--
------
Mr. P.V.'d (formerly Droll Troll), Yonkers, NY

entropic3.14decay at optonline2.718 dot net; remove pi and e to reply--ie,
all d'numbuhs

"Pre-Meltdown" wrote ...
There are likely more cost-efective places to get computers than
B&H. Most modern computers are likely competent for doing
video editing. Who is the main source of PCs for small business
in your area?

I would have to agree that you DO NOT want to go with Vista.
There appears to be nothing that Vista gets you except perhaps
compatibility problems and horsepower-wasting eye-candy.

I would also have to agree that RAID is likely not a good idea
for a situation such as you describe. DV and MPEG editing
do not require RAID. In the opinion of many of us, RAID is
a complex solution to a problem that doesn't exist anymore.
RAID is also more risky unless you are using one of the
redundant versions (which negate most of the flashy features
flogged for RAID).

I prefer to use a small (40-80GB) dedicated drive for C: (boot,
system, cache, programs) and one (or two) larger (320GB)
drives dedicated for video.

Why a dedicated computer? You could likely add one of those
320GB drives to an existing computer and get on with it.

Editing DV vs. editing MPEG may pose some differences.

"Pre-Meltdown" <entropic3.14decay@optonline2.718.net> wrote in message
news:OQk2j.71$eI2.7@newsfe08.lga...

Just my opinions....

Do not buy a complete NLE system from B&H. Cameras, lighting, equipment just
fine as they have nice prices. A complete NLE no. You will not find the
personal service and support needed to maintain something as delicate and
powerful as a modern NLE.
If you have a problem with your investment you want to call and talk to a
person with a name, preferably the same guy everytime.

Do not believe everything you read at Videoguys site. Some of what they say
is suspect in my opinion.
RAIDs are simple to set up and maintain, provide wonderful performance and
are perfectly safe to use with proper back up techniques
or raid striping set up. They are not needed however for basic standard def
cut and dissolve editing as long as you use nice fast SATA 3G drives. You
really need a raid for composting, layering or high bandwidth HD use.

There is no real reason to go with Vista for your NLE. I am not a Vista
hater or lover, but there is nothing there you need for
NLE uses and most programs are playing catch up for compatibility.

If you are going to be doing basic standard def editing, a nice core 2 duo
(NOT dual core) with 2 gigs of ram, a 7xxxGT series nvidia card, a 80 gig
drive for programs and a big sata 3g drive for video storage will do fine.
This is assuming basic to slightly moderate spending with basic SD uses.

If you are doing HD then things of course step up.

He specializes in higher end HD systems, but Blaine at www.Videohardware.com
will consult with you and build whatever you need.
Straight up honest guy, knows his shiznt, will build and thourghly test your
system before he sends it to you. Everything inside cable wrapped, hot
glued, and made to last. He usually does a little tutorial walk thru video
for you also. Includes it with the system.
(Disclaimer: I don't work for Blaine, but do personally know of his work and
rep very well)

Jim

Oh yea.. and hire a script writer...


"Pre-Meltdown" <entropic3.14decay@optonline2.718.net> wrote in message
news:OQk2j.71$eI2.7@newsfe08.lga...

On Sun, 25 Nov 2007 15:23:12 -0500, "Pre-Meltdown"
<entropic3.14decay@optonline2.718.net> wrote:

The former is true, but the latter is non-sense. Most professional studios
use tons of RAID-systems. So if they would be bad, they would not use them.

It depends on what you mean with "roughing out". You have to think what you
will do with the material when handing it to the professional guns. Things
to keep in mind are ways of exporting; OMF, EDL etc etc

Yes and no. If you want to simply do some rough editing, you can record on
any type of camera, up till the RED or scanned 65mm negatives, but if you
make proxy-files (capture in low resolution), you're good to go.

I'll pass on that one (not my hood).

cheers

-martin-
--
Official website "Jonah's Quid" http://www.jonahsquids.co.uk

On Sun, 25 Nov 2007 12:43:36 -0800, "Richard Crowley" <rcrowley@xp7rt.net>
wrote:

That depends a bit on your situation. If you can easily allocate time to
recapture, keeping your project-files seperatly, then when the array
crashes, you recapture and continue working (the material would need
time-code for this to work correct).
However, it's not that difficult or expensive to set-up failsafe RAID.

And if you split: if you do audio, it would be a good idea to have a
seperate drive for that as well.

cheers

-martin-
--
Official website "Jonah's Quid" http://www.jonahsquids.co.uk

I think you are confused by what you are reading on our site about
storage. All our DIY machines have a dedicated drive for your OS &
programs plus a RAID 0 SATA stripe for your video and media.

This is directly from our system recommendations page
http://www.videoguys.com/system.htm


*** Video Storage recommendations
With todays powerful processors, lightening fast memory, super 3D
graphics cards and huge ATA hard drives you can capture, edit &
playback single stream DV video with your system drive. That said, we
still urge you to get a dedicated hard drive (7200 RPM or faster) for
all your video clips. This will produce the best results - especially
for video projects over 1 hour in length. If you are going to be using
one of our Real-Time NLE solutions then we still recommend a dedicated
SATA Raid or SCSI for best results.

We recommend Serial ATA (SATA) drives for NLE. While these drives do
have a cost premium, the improved sustained data throughput is worth
it. We also like the new cables which allow for better air flow inside
your computer case. We have not yet had the chance to test any SATA
Raid controllers, but we're confident that they will work great with
our software based NLE solutions. RAIDs are great! For the best
results set up a dedicated RAID 0 stripe for your video & media files.
This will give you a huge capacity with the fastest possible sustained
throughput for your editing.

RAID Warning! We do NOT recommend setting up your computer with a
single RAID 0 array as your boot drive and video storage. This will
actually give you poor performance for video editing. The constant
reading and writing of small bits of data to the boot drive works
against the need to read & write large continuous video files. Add in
the overhead of the RAID controller and you get potential bottlenecks.
For video editing you always want to have a dedicated drive or RAID
array for your video files.

Gary
Videoguys.com http://www.videoguys.com
The Digital Video Editing & DVD Production Experts
800 323-2325 or Free DTV tech advice (516) 759-1615

All DTV purchases include our 30 day customer assurance program
and FREE tech support

Ouch - that';s pretty harsh. What areas of our free on line tech
support section are suspect? I realize some of the pages may need a
refresh (I've been doing this over the past few weeks. But suspect????


Agreed. We do however warn customers that setting up your system with
a single RAID0 configuration can lead to troubles. We had to issue
the following warning because several computer vendors, following
Dells lead, starting offering gaming systems with a single RAID0
storage configuration.

RAID Warning! We do NOT recommend setting up your computer with a
single RAID 0 array as your boot drive and video storage. This will
actually give you poor performance for video editing. The constant
reading and writing of small bits of data to the boot drive works
against the need to read & write large continuous video files. Add in
the overhead of the RAID controller and you get potential bottlenecks.
For video editing you always want to have a dedicated drive or RAID
array for your video files.

Agreed. For now I am not aware of a single benefit Vista provides over
XP for NLE .

Agreed again. We've been big fans of Core 2 Duo for NLE since first
shipments well over a year ago. With our DIY5 article we declared
that:

Intel Core 2 Duo Strikes Back! Intel regains the top spot for NLE
workstations. http://www.videoguys.com/DIY5.html

We then published a DIY5 update back in April and Core 2 Duo is still
king. http://www.videoguys.com/DIY5updateNAB07.html

Agreed. Blaine is a top notch system integrator. We recommned him to
our customers in the New England area all the time.

Gary
Videoguys.com http://www.videoguys.com
The Digital Video Editing & DVD Production Experts
800 323-2325 or Free DTV tech advice (516) 759-1615

All DTV purchases include our 30 day customer assurance program
and FREE tech support

"Pre-Meltdown" <entropic3.14decay@optonline2.718.net> wrote in message
news:OQk2j.71$eI2.7@newsfe08.lga...
I don't know what their price would be but a computer like this would cost
around.. $1000 to put together. With a 2.4GHZ QUAD core instead of the dual.

On Sun, 25 Nov 2007 12:43:36 -0800, "Richard Crowley" <rcrowley@xp7rt.net> wrote:

This is an incorrect statement. RAID is very simple and not complex. You wouldnt want to use RAID 1
or 5 for editing because it lowers your performance. However, you sometimes NEED RAID 0. How else do
you expect to have 3, 4,5 or more layers going at one time? It isnt going be happening without a
RAID.

Just use an external firewire or USB drive for backup. 500 GB costs $100.

Tony

"Tony" wrote ...
You are entitled to your view of the world.

That is a very remarkable statement. Many people who
have used RAID would disagree.

And somehow those are the two most popular levels for
data protection. It would appear that speed/throughput
is your goal and data integrity is not important to you.

You will have to explain what "3, 4, 5 layers at one time"
means in your world. I've never had a problem rendering
any number of layers without resorting to RAID.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID#Standard_levels
"Provides improved performance and additional storage but
no fault tolerance. Any disk failure destroys the array, which
becomes more likely with more disks in the array. A single
disk failure destroys the entire array because when data is
written to a RAID 0 drive, the data is broken into fragments....

" When one sector on one of the disks fails, however, the
corresponding sector on every other disk is rendered useless
because part of the data is now corrupted. RAID 0 does not
implement error checking so any error is unrecoverable.
More disks in the array means higher bandwidth, but
greater risk of data loss."

This is exactly what I meant by "more risky". You apparently
have not seen as many hard drives crash as I have. Good
luck. Glad to know that RAID is working so well for you.
But remember that your particular situation (or mine, either)
is not representative of every video NLE user.

You can tell Tony is a VT/SE user ...

What he means by 'layers' is layers in a composite.

1-Background layer. (Digital Juice BG maybe)
2- Talent keyed over DJ footage
3- Over the shoulder resized pip
4- lower third graphic
=
4 layers.

All of Newteks NLEs are made to run real time. Meaning if you have the cpu
to process the clips and the bandwidth
to pipe it thru there is never any rendering or waiting for a preview.
So as an easy example if all 4 of the above were DV clips (grfx prob wouldnt
be but....) we are looking at 25Mb/s x 4 =100Mb/s.
Only a Raid, and maybe only a raid 0 will play that in real time.


Jim


"Richard Crowley" <rcrowley@xp7rt.net> wrote in message
news:5r1k5mF12i4qsU1@mid.individual.net...

"Jim" <nearly_normal_jimmy AT hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:474ba0a4$0$19661$4c368faf@roadrunner.com...
100 megabits a second? Only a Raid 0? Check your math. Unless you are using
REALLY OLD drives..

What single drive pulls 100Mb/s alone?


"nappy" <n@n.n> wrote in message
news:nUX2j.65928$RX.13278@newssvr11.news.prodigy.n et...

On Tue, 27 Nov 2007 12:34:21 -0500, "Jim" <nearly_normal_jimmy AT
hotmail.com> wrote:

That's 12.5MB/s, which is no sweat for a modern drive.

-m-
--
Official website "Jonah's Quid" http://www.jonahsquids.co.uk

Huh? What? Where or what does 12.5MegaBYTES have to do with anything?

As stated in my first reply.......
4 DV clips @ 25Mb(notB)/s playing at one time is 100Mb(notB)/s throughput.
Again I ask. What drive on it's own pulls that speed?

An average 7200rpm ide drive is around 30-35 Mb/s a SATA 3G is around
50Mb/s, NEITHER of which are fast enough to
push 4 DV clips (100 Mb/s) thru at the same time without a Raid.

I think in everyone's rush to correct people here they are not fully
reading what is written.

Jim

"Martin Heffels" <goofie@flikken.net> wrote in message
news:12mok35to99llb2qsjfgg6874adur0h2kn@4ax.com...

"Jim" <nearly_normal_jimmy AT hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:474c5c13$0$19580$4c368faf@roadrunner.com...
100Mb / 8



Any drive ! 100 megabits?

Jim.. read what you just wrote!



Jim.. your numbers are way off.. ANY drive can handle 12 mB a second.

"Jim" <nearly_normal_jimmy AT hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:4749e3a8$0$19633$4c368faf@roadrunner.com...
delicate and powerful.. lol!

That's the way it is everywhere. Unless you build em yourself. It's a no
brainer anymore to put together a decent NLE.

true.

WHEW!! REDICULOUSLY overpriced as most system integrators are.. but his
prices are stratoshperic.
Not even near worth it.

On Tue, 27 Nov 2007 13:04:10 -0500, "Jim" <nearly_normal_jimmy AT
hotmail.com> wrote:

Everything! (as nappy also mentioned) 100Mb/s divided by 8 = 12.5 MB/s

Almost any modern drive

You might read the article:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/the-sp...view-2265.html

The slowest drive read/writes at 48 MB/s average. Want to do the maths
yourself how many streams you can play? I'm not to sure where you got your
numbers from, or if you're mixing-up the Mb and the MB.

Uhm, "hear hear"? :-)

-m-
--
Official website "Jonah's Quid" http://www.jonahsquids.co.uk

On Mon, 26 Nov 2007 20:19:01 -0800, "Richard Crowley" <rcrowley@xp7rt.net> wrote:

If they disagree, then they do not understand how raids work. It is quite simple.

That is correct. When I was in charge of backups (for the largest internet consulting firm in the
world), we used RAID 1 and 5. We needed redundancy. When it comes to video editing, I am not about
to sacrifice speed and performance with backups. As soon as I finish my edits, I back everything up
to a $100 external firewire 500GB drive. Nice and simple.

I am not concerned with rendering. I am concerned with REAL TIME all the way through my edits. Not
that BS that AE has you go through to see a preview. I use Speed Edit and it is realtime 100% of the
time because I stripe my disks. I was able to edit capturing 22MB/s back in 1999 using my Video
Toaster. That was uncompressed, not DV. I was able to do a few layers. At this point, I am doing
7-10 layers in real time as I edit. I dont live in a world that involves rendering. If you do, that
is your choice. I like instant results. Not standing around or going to eat dinner while I wait for
my timeline to render. There's nothing like waiting 30 minutes for a 5 minute clip to render only to
find out you have to change one little tiny section. Then you have to wait another 30 minutes to see
that edit. That is idiotic.

I am a computer consultant (specializing in building video and audio editing workstations). I have
seen drives crash in my day but I see that more in general pcs with people running aol and going on
the web. I have my own repair shop for over 5 years now. I would never build a system that would
sacrifice performance by using a raid 1-5). As I said, backup at the end of a session to another
drive. Plain and simple.

I have never had a RAID O go bad on me. I have a 4 scsi cheetah raid 0 (stripe) running flawlessly
since Jan 2005. I have put them through the ringer but doing edits that take me 300-400 hours for a
1 hour show. When all is backed up, I wipe the drives and start again. Never had a video drive crash
on me in over 7 years of doing this. I dont think I am lucky. Maybe you do nice, simple edits. I
dont. I push it to the limit. There could be 15 layers (video, stills, audio, sound fx, titles etc)
going on at any one time. No Raid 5 is gonna be able to do that. So, if you do simple stuff, go with
a raid 1 or 5. If you do more interesting, cutting edge stuff that edits really are made of, then
you go for performance. There's no sense in backing up stuff that I am compromising on because I
dont have the speed to do what I wish in the first place.

If you were in a sprint race, do you run as fast as you can and wear as little clothing as you can
or do you carry a first aid bag and extra clothes in case it gets cold? I capture and edit quickly.
I also backup all along the way to an extra drive. That's all I need to do. If I cant make it to the
backup, then I didnt get enough accomplished to back up in the first place.

Tony