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Today in DCC Workstation
Building
a Digital Video Editing System --Good, Fast and Cheap: Pick Two.
The PC Hardware You Need for Good, Better and
Best Digital Video Editing
by Charlie
White
--INTRO--;
--GOOD, BETTER, BEST DEFINED-- ; --GOOD--
; --BETTER-- ; --BEST--
; --CONCLUSION-- ; --TABLE
1: Video Storage Requirements-- ; --TABLE
2: Sample Configurations-- ; --TABLE 3: For
further information-- .
INTRO
For a long
time, "Good, Fast and Cheap: Pick Two" has been the hard and fast axiom
of getting (or not getting) what you want when you're buying digital video
editing equipment. Think about it: If it's good and fast, it's not cheap;
if it's good and cheap, it's not fast, and if it's fast and cheap, it's
not good. But that's not necessarily true any more. Plummeting prices,
along with technology that gets faster, better and cheaper with each passing
day brings all these eggs into the same basket, making your task of choosing
the right components for the job progressively easier. Let's dip into
this rushing river of change, scooping up a sample of system requirements
for the various uses of digital video. While we'll still keep an eye on
that "good, fast, and cheap" equation, you'll get an idea of what the
good, better and best systems can do in the midst of this gushing torrent
of technological innovation.
It's important to note at the outset that the highest-end systems are
capable of doing any of the tasks assigned to the lower categories in
this report. For example, an Intergraph workstation with a Matrox DigiSuite
LE capture card and 10,000 RPM SCSI hard drives could crunch through a
capture session destined for the Web without even breathing hard. Conversely,
lower-end equipment can perform many of the more sophisticated tasks like
layering, filtering and wild transitions that are the domain of the high
end. The key question is, though, how long will it take you to render
these effects? And at what quality? For example, you might be able to
render a one-second dissolve on a low-end system, but it would take a
minute or so each time at full resolution, as opposed to no rendering
with a real-time broadcast system.
The upbeat part of this equation, though, is that the price of doing fantastic
things with digital video continues to drop like a rock. "There has
a been a price collapse," said Sujata Ramnarayan, a multimedia
industry analyst at Dataquest. "But I don't think there's been a feature
collapse," added Ramnarayan. "The high end systems offer features
that aren't needed for corporate training. Corporate videos generally
don't need that many effects or transitions." So what do you get when
you spend thousands more for a higher-end system? "For example, you
can work with more layers at the same time, with speed definitely a factor
-- and any time you have more powerful features you need more speed,"
explained Ramnarayan.
No matter which level of equipment you choose, when dealing with digital
video it's always important to carefully select the hard disk you'll be
using. If the disk isn't fast enough to write all the data sent to it,
your video will have gaps in it, known as dropped frames. When checking
specs for hard disks, pay close attention to throughput rates, and look
for the term "sustained throughput," an all-important capability when
it comes to capturing frames of video. To ensure smooth playback, this
data must be written on the hard disk without any pauses. Avoid dropped
frames by selecting a drive that's been A/V rated. Because of drastic
improvements in hard disk speed in the past year, however, nearly any
stock disk drive will be fast enough to handle the throughput of compressed
video. Uncompressed video is another story, however.
Lead
on to Good, Better and Best: Defined
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