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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-- .
BETTER
Now it's
time to paddle upstream to the next level -- systems that are well-suited
for corporate training and presentations. You'll be spending a bit more
money here for one reason: if you'd like your production to end up on
VHS tape or DVD, you'll need to produce video at full-screen, 640x480
resolution at 30 frames per second. This brings in factors that raise
the price, like the need for faster throughput and more space on your
hard disks. A popular configuration to handle the throughput problem is
an ultra-wide, 10,000 RPM SCSI-2 hard disk like the Seagate Cheetah coupled
with an PCI SCSI adapter. Raid-0 is still a great way to guarantee speed
on your hard disk, where two drives are working hand-in-hand to simultaneously
read data at nearly twice the speed of just one. Better yet, just introduced
are FireWire (IEEE 1394) drives that offer even faster throughput. Not
as new as FireWire drives and arrays but still at the top of the heap
are drives that use fiber optics to send data from to drives and back,
called Fibre Channel.
Why all this extra paraphernalia? Speed, that's why. Never mind how fast
your capture card spits out video -- if your hard disk can't swallow that
data fast enough, you'll suffer from that nemesis of every digi-vid jockey:
dropped frames. For corporate work, the most important thing at this price
point is to produce video that's free of dropped frames and whose quality
matches that of VHS tape. Sure, you could add lots of spectacular effects
and filters, but if you're really doing corporate training and communications,
oftentimes such shenanigans are distracting to your message. The majority
of corporate video producers have little use for more special effects
than a dissolve and a few titles.
That said, let's stay within our $10K budget and put together a 600 MHz
Pentium III computer with 512MB of RAM with four Seagate Cheetah 18GB
SCSI hard disks with an Adaptec AHA 2942 Ultra Wide SCSI PCI card. That'll
give us the bandwidth we'll need for the amount of video sent to them
by a FASTAV Master, DPS Perception or Pinnacle miroDC30 Pro or DC50 capture
card, all of which are about equal in performance and have high data rates
that equate to at least S-VHS quality.
A good software choice here would be Ulead's Media Studio Pro, an easy-to-use
application that can not only put together cut-and-paste presentations
for you, but is capable of lots of artistic special effects should the
need actually arise.
Lead
on to Best
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