Hey Guys,

Editing HDV at the moment and its a little laggy moving around the timeline, i have:

G5 1.8ghz (dual processor)
2.5GB Ram
64MB Graphics Card running dual monitors.

Motion pro doesn't run too well at all really

Would you reccommend possibly another 2GB ram? OR is it the graphics card? Or both?

Any suggestions, post them up

Thanks

Matt

What's the graphics card? What app are you using for editing?

Its a 64MB Geforce FX5200 (standard card)

Final Cut Pro Studio 5.1

Thanks

RAM for HDV.

Better GFX card for Motion.

Makes sence..

I can sort the ram out, but Recommendations for graphics card?

From what I understand powerful Mac compatible AGP video cards are pretty rare now.

I don't know the exact process, as I haven't quite gotten there yet, but I was told for my exercise, not to edit in HD for your above reasons, but in DV, as DV is less consuming/easier to work with. When the project was finished we are either going to digitise it back to HD (not the best option), or final cut is able to accrue all the logging info for each clip in the timeline, and would import the HDV back again from the original tapes to create the same finsihed product, attributes and all, in HD.
Something like that.

fast hard drives preferably sata raid.
as much ram as humanly possible
fast processor
and plently of vram on yr video card.

no reason that set up won't handle HDV easily. The bit rate of HDV is not that much higher than DV. So its well within your specs.
Graphics card won't really effect video but it will effect motion. You have plenty of RAM. So it could be a FCP update issue?
Other than that, without really knowing exactly what you feel as laggy, it could well be to do with HDV format. Its a pig of a format for post. There is alot of maths going on under the hood to edit natively in FCP.

Its because of its mpg2 compression and using interframe compression rather than intraframe.
That is any given frame in HDV is referencing a number of others. Its not a complete frame like intraframe compression like DV.

Eg: DVD is interframe compression.

What kind of disk array are you running your footage off? And have you captured your HD in .m2t or as Apple Intermediate Codec files? The Apple Intermediate Codec files will be bigger, but they are much more processor efficient. However, the larger your files are, the faster your disk array will need to be. I'd advise more RAM anyway, but if you don't have a RAID set up, I'd advise investigating. I was actually just looking at RAID boxes, so heres a link to what is on my other screen right now:

http://www.caldigit.com/S2VRDuo.asp


So - more details on your setup would help.

HDriveKilla is on the right track, although you have to be very familiar with HD/SD workflows to be able to work like that.

::reply to speedwayboy::
If you capture in Apple Intermediate Codec or use another 3rd party conversion tool, the video is converted to intraframe and each frame is stored individually. So, you may be correct. If the footage was captured as m2t then the issue may be simultaneous video streams and CPU speed. If the video was transcoded to AIC during capture, the data rate more than quadruples, and disk speed may well be the issue. I've found HDV to be relatively undemanding on my G4, but I am both yet to edit any long projects in it, and have an onboard RAID.

Probably the most available, fast graphics card would be the Radeon 9800s that pop up on eBay most weeks.

JB

Hi Guys,

Sorry I didn't see the replies to just now!

Yes, I captured it in HDV and Apple Intermediate Codec as recommended by a friend who did a Final Cut Course

I only have a 160GB HDD as the system hard disk, and at the moment only got the 320gb for capturing. Its just setup as standard.. I'm not too up to speed with Raid? Any advice appreciated though!

I will be purchasing a LACIE 500GB soon i hope (FW800).

Thanks - Matt