Minimum specs for HD

[Galen Carter-Jeffrey]

I am buying a new mac with the intention of editing HD. Are there minimum specs I should keep in mind? The two most promising options are the 15" macbook pro or a macpro Tower.

 

15" macbook Pro $2,299

2.4 GHz intel core 2 GB ram

 

MacPro $2,568 (would also need to buy a monitor)

Two 2.66 GHz Dual Core

2GB ram

[Keith Mottram]

I am buying a new mac with the intention of editing HD. Are there minimum specs I should keep in mind? The two most promising options are the 15" macbook pro or a macpro Tower.

 

15" macbook Pro $2,299

2.4 GHz intel core 2 GB ram

 

MacPro $2,568 (would also need to buy a monitor)

Two 2.66 GHz Dual Core

2GB ram

 

I get asked this all the time. if you want to edit seriously then get a tower upgrade the graphics card to the ATI Radeon X1900 XT, get 4 gigs of ram, a couple of monitors and at a minimum fill your chasis with drives raid them and put your system on an external drive.

 

or if you are going to be doing a bit of 'offline' sufing the net and doing email/ word etc get a macbook.

 

the word 'intention' is the word you have to think most about.

[Daniel Smith]

Sorry for butting in here, but I have the same question, only for a PC.

 

Keith, I'm building a grands worth of PC later on this year with the following specs:

 

1x 2.66GHz Pentium Duo

2x 1GB 1066MHz RAM

1x 150GB 10,000RPM Primary Hard Drive (SATA) (For holding the software, i.e. premiere pro)

1x 500GB 7,2000RPM Hard Drive (SATA) (For holding the video)

Nvidia Geforce 8600

 

I'm not going to use this primarily for editing HD, just as a backup solution for 'at home'.

 

Are 7,200RPM SATA drives even capable of reading/writing uncompressed 1080x1440 footage? I remember on a recent shoot when recording via a HD-SDI output we had to use a special server to do it with a RAID system.

 

Is this no good or, could I get away with it? ~Thanks.

 

(And tnx Galen aswell)

Edited June 14, 2007 by Daniel Ashley-Smith

[Keith Mottram]

Sorry for butting in here, but I have the same question, only for a PC.

 

Keith, I'm building a grands worth of PC later on this year with the following specs:

 

1x 2.66GHz Pentium Duo

2x 1GB 1066MHz RAM

1x 150GB 10,000RPM Primary Hard Drive (SATA) (For holding the software, i.e. premiere pro)

1x 500GB 7,2000RPM Hard Drive (SATA) (For holding the video)

Nvidia Geforce 8600

 

I'm not going to use this primarily for editing HD, just as a backup solution for 'at home'.

 

Are 7,200RPM SATA drives even capable of reading/writing uncompressed 1080x1440 footage? I remember on a recent shoot when recording via a HD-SDI output we had to use a special server to do it with a RAID system.

 

Is this no good or, could I get away with it? ~Thanks.

 

(And tnx Galen aswell)

 

Sorry Daniel, only just noticed this, reading writing uncompressed footage is not possible without a raided drive system. Although I don't know your PC enclosure it may be possible for you to have a series of drives raided internally. If you can fit two drives internally then an old trick is to have your system disc on an external drive connected by firewire (though as a pc you may not have a firewire card, but a quick USB2 should surfice) and then you could raid two 150gb 10,000 rpm for online 4.2.2 8 bit at a push. I would need to have a bit more information about specifics regarding codecs and capture card to work out exactly what you need and as it's for a PC Phil Rhodes will be able to chime in then with some tried and tested choices. If you have got a budget as tight as this you should think about working compressed- but with good wavelet and then you'll get very acceptable results. HDV of course will be fine with your specs. Give more info and you'll get more!

 

 

keith