Building a Video Editing PC For Super 8 - Help Needed

[RichardB]

Now that I've started shooting film, and since my Dad's got hundreds of hours of Super 8 film and Video8 footage, we've decided to go ahead soon and look into getting a Workprinter XP and I'm upgrading my PC. Do you guys have any advice on adding extra hardware or open source software to the PC I'm building? I've just put an order in for parts to build this:

AMD X2 6000+ dual core processor
2GB dual channel DDR2 RAM (is 2GB more worth it?)
2 x 500GB SATAII hard drives for a RAID configuration
256MB ATI Radeon HD2400 Pro graphics card
22" widescreen DVI monitor

The PC will be mostly for Uni work, watching videos and films and a little bit of gaming since I'm building it for me, but I've tried to make it comfy with capture and editing. It's not too late to amend the order if need be as its not shipped out yet. I know the Moviestuff site advises against SATA, but PATA is on it's way out and I can easily get large PATA drives from my other PCs if necessary. Plus, we won't be giving the effective 1TB RAID drive hard continual usage, as it'll be an addition to the main system 300GB drive, and any cine capture will be personal usage, not commercial.

2 of my housemates have Vista and seeing their PC's handling it, there's no way I'm getting that any time soon, I was thinking about a dual boot XP SP2 / Linux Ubuntu setup - but will Ubuntu be compatible with Cinecap? If it is, then I might actually be able to do away with Windows altogether, as there's nothing else I'd need Windows for. I'm really keen to support open source, but I'm not aware of what there is in terms of video applications - and one thing I'd like to dabble in is constructing 5.1 audio to give our home movies surround sound, if there's anything in OS that does that, I'd be well chuffed.

[MovieStuff]

.....we've decided to go ahead soon and look into getting a Workprinter XP and I'm upgrading my PC......I know the Moviestuff site advises against SATA, but PATA is on it's way out and I can easily get large PATA drives from my other PCs if necessary. Plus, we won't be giving the effective 1TB RAID drive hard continual usage, as it'll be an addition to the main system 300GB drive, and any cine capture will be personal usage, not commercial.

Hi, Richard!

Actually, the new 300 speed SATA drives with 16 megs of cache seem to work just fine in a Raid with the WorkPrinters. It was the older 150 speed SATA drives that were sometimes problematic. Most people just build a cheap PC to capture to that is streamlined for working with the WorkPrinter or Sniper units. Then when they render their speed changes, they just designate a cheap external USB or firewire drive to render to. Then that drive can be brought over to whatever whiz-bang edit suite you want to work on for editing and color correction.

The basic config for the WorkPrinter is:

Windows XP Home or Pro

512 megs of RAM minimum

Pentium 4 processor or better

3 drives:

one drive will be your system drive (it can be ATA, Ultra-ATA or SATA)

Two drives will be your Raid-0 array (ATA or Ultra-ATA or the new 300 speed SATA only)

Firewire card

That's pretty much it. As you note, parallel drives are on their way out but they are also practically free and always work for this application.

Feel free to contact me offlist if you need any technical support.

Roger

[RichardB]

Thanks Roger, that sounds great. Both of the new 500GB hard drives are SATAII w/ 16mb cache, and the two 300GB drives I have in my current PC are SATAII / 16mb cache too so I guess I could use all four! 8O

Hopefully we'll be contacting you soon about obtaining a workprinter, I really can't wait to get started with this.

[RichardB]

Just picked up a few of these:

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/63157

The reviews look really good, dirt cheap, and hopefully this will reduce the chance of errors when stressing the hard drives with intensive video capture.

[aj]

It is an old topic but it is a complete mystery why there is still need for Raid-0 on these modern sytems with drives which have such high data-troughputs. In the 90-ies (or even earlier) there used to be special approved harddiskdrives which were suitable for video applications running on computers. Modern drives dwarf these video approved specs and still they are not good enough for these what is actually low-demand workprinters.

Makes you wonder what they have for requirements in studio video equipment or how they get these machines to work at all.

[MovieStuff]

It is an old topic but it is a complete mystery why there is still need for Raid-0 on these modern sytems with drives which have such high data-troughputs.....Modern drives dwarf these video approved specs and still they are not good enough for these what is actually low-demand workprinters.

Because data throughput isn't the whole issue and this is far from being "low demand" on the system. If you are recording just streaming video then, yes, a single drive will work reliably. But with the workprinter units, streaming video is not being used to capture with. Yes, there is a constant stream of video entering the computer via firewire but you are only capturing one frame out of that stream using "on demand" capture as initiated by mouse command. You aren't personally clicking the mouse like a mad telegraph operator because the workprinter takes over the mouse and does that for you but the computer doesn't know the difference. So while streaming video capture of even an hour long clip has only two mouse commands associated with it ("start" and "stop"), rapid stop motion using "on demand" capture has different dynamics. After all, a 50 foot roll of film has about 3600 frames so that's 3600 individual mouse commands stampeding through your PC or Mac at about 8.5 mouse commands per second. That's a whole lotta mouse commands and you need a nimble system to keep up with it reliably.

But to be clear, you can capture using a WorkPrinter with a single, non-raid drive but you will be on the very edge of acceptable system and drive performance and there is a chance that it will let you down (and always when you're on a deadline, of course). If that happens, you will not "drop" any frames but should your mouse command be executed late, relative to the pulldown of the film, then there is a chance you will capture the film while in motion and not stationary in dwell time. That will result in frames with vertical blur. If you have a proper Raid with your timing set correctly and your camera on the correct settings, that will never happen.

But your question is a reasonable one, AJ. Believe me, I have had many gear-head computer and Mac geeks buy the WorkPrinter and initially tell me that they have no problems without a raid only to call about 6 months later going, "Gee, everything was working okay and now I'm getting this weird vertical streaking in my picture. What's up with that?" They're just sure that something is now wrong with the WorkPrinter when, in reality, their system/drive performance dropped enough to throw them out of synch with the capture process. They then install a Raid and never have the problem again.

So, since I have to support these WorkPrinter units after the sale and since 99% of them are sold to transfer businesses where money is on the line and since Raid-0 arrays are practically free, then it only makes sense to use a drive configuration that history shows works reliably with our product. But, again, you can do it and some people have used single drives for years with no problems. However, if someone calls me with a synch issue and they don't have a raid, there is little I can do to help them because I would not know if they are having synch issues due to a lack of a raid array or because of some other issue. Using a cheap Raid eliminates system/drive performance from the problem solving equation.

The higher speed Snipers do not require a Raid but they capture differently and are now PC based only, using special Velocity software that allows frame by frame captures up to about 20fps. The WorkPrinters are PC or Mac based. If we were to drop Mac support then we could offer a version of the Velocity software for the WorkPrinter, as well. But our WorkPrinter client base remains about 30% Mac, so we still use the simple "capture on demand" interface, which is limited to about 8.5fps.

Anyway, hope this helps explain why I suggest using a Raid with the WorkPrinters. You can do it without a Raid but I don't recommend it if you want consistant results.

Roger

[freddiesykes]

Be careful with RAID-0. I lost over 300 gigs of data due to one of the drives crashing (Western Digital SATA 300 drive). Just a word of caution especially with such sensitive data (although I suppose you could just re-transfer losing time).

[MovieStuff]

Be careful with RAID-0. I lost over 300 gigs of data due to one of the drives crashing (Western Digital SATA 300 drive). Just a word of caution especially with such sensitive data (although I suppose you could just re-transfer losing time).

I guess I've been lucky. I have 6 systems, one of which is over 5 years old, and they all have Raid-0 arrays and none of the raids have ever crashed but I understand what you mean. The possibility is always there. But then, again, whether you have one drive or two, the crash of a single drive is going to mean data loss either way. The only advantage of a single drive is if you can somehow fish out the disk and install it in another hard drive module but I rarely see that effectively work. The Raid-0 does give you increased performance and increased volume so the risk is minimal considering the gains, IMHO, but you're right that there is a risk.

Roger