Upgrade or Buy New

[Brian Rose]

Hello all,

I'm a grad student entering my final year at film school. For the last four years, I've used a Gateway desktop PC to edit with. It has a 2.4 gig P4 processor, and 1.5 gig of ram, as well as a new, 150 gig hard drive (in addition to a 250 gig external). I edit with Premiere pro CS3. Up to now, it was worked wonderfully for my needs. However, I am currently beginning production on a documentary which will serve as my thesis project. At the current rate I'm shooting, I plan on having anywhere from 50 to 60 hours of raw footage to log and capture, for an anticipated 90 minute film. The closest I've come to this before was a film that wound up being 55 minutes, and my system creaked a bit, but I managed. Not wanting to repeat that, or take any risks with this major project, I am faced with what to do next.

 

Normally, I'd lean toward buying a new computer, but I'm looking to save money for post grad, and since I'm primarily a DP, I don't feel as much impetus to invest in some kind of high powered post-production system. Of course, once I'm able to generate some income after I graduate, I will get something new. Until then, do you think I could make it through another nine months, by getting another external drive to complement the 250 gig external I've already got, and pumping up the RAM to 4 gig? Any info/advice would be much appreciated!

 

Best,

Brian R.

[Matthew W. Phillips]

If your system is tweaked just the way you like it, I wouldn't buy new. At least unless you are going to build it yourself. I used to build systems for a living and I was a computer programmer and I can say that I never liked "out of box" systems as well as the ones I built and tweaked to my specs. Even an older system can be better than new if it uses higher quality parts and is tailored lean with very few TSR's (terminate and stay resident programs.) My vote would be to upgrade the RAM and maybe even the CPU if your board socket isnt maxed out already.

[Steve McBride]

Just buy some more RAM and externals. You also would want to look into a new processor, get at least a Core 2 Duo, it'll help a lot.

 

60 hours x 13 gb/hr = 780 gigs

 

If you're going to be using that much footage, you definitely need to look into something like a server if you're going to be accessing footage at the same time. Lots of drives working independantly is a LOT slower than a lot of drives working as one ;) .