User Story: Jumping Into DV Editing

 

 

 

 

(Continued from Page 2)

 
I could buy a Dell, Micron, or Gateway, but again, I'd be locked into a limited set of choices for components, plus I'd be paying for some software I already owned, and service I could perform myself.  So I decided not to go with buying a PC from Mail order. 

5) Buy a base PC or build one from scratch?  I could buy a Dell, Micron, or Gateway, but again, I'd be locked into a limited set of choices for components, plus I'd be paying for some software I already owned, and service I could perform myself.  So I decided not to go with buying a PC from Mail order.  In the Los Angeles area, there are a lot of mom and pop computer stores, AND there are quite a few "computer shows" where you can go and buy all the pieces yourself, or find a vendor to custom build a machine.  That's what I did, found a vendor I trusted and picked all the pieces that went into my base machine.  I could have built it myself, but I let them do it while I went out for lunch.  So on Saturday, I went to the show and bought the following:
 
 

I chose the PII-350 because it was the most economical that would allow me to upgrade easily.  (a little later, I heard a lot of success by overclocking a Celeron 300A ... this was a good cost saving option back then, but now it probably isn't worth the hassle especially since the prices of CPUs have come down so much).  I really wanted to get the PII-450, but since I wasn't planning on making money with the system, the 350 had the best "bang for the buck".  I saw many NLE systems working with the Asus P2B board, so I went with that 'cuz it seemed pretty successful (wish they would have had 5 PCI slots instead of 4).  Promise had just came out with the FT440BX motherboard board but the price was kind of high, around $200.  But the Promise board is a lot cheaper now.  ABIT recently came out with the BX6 Rev 2.0 Motherboard.  This is another excellent alternative because it has 5 PCI slots, and you can easily configure the motherboard through soft menus for different processors which makes upgrades extremely easy (no jumpers).  I think the Asus and ABIT boards will support PIII-500s, not sure about the Promise.  What are some reasons to spend extra money and buy a faster CPU?  If you need to do a LOT of rendering ... say you apply a lot of filters and effects to your video, or you want to export a lot of movies ... say compress them into smaller AVIs or MJPEG or QuickTime ... and your time is money, then getting the fastest CPU may be worth it.  (At the moment I use mostly cuts, a few dissolves, not many fancy effects, so rendering isn't a big deal to me.  I have compressed a couple of videos, which I normally do overnight so it isn't that big a deal either ... on my PII-350, compressing a 13 minute video, Premiere estimated compression (AVI, Cinepak, 24fps, 50% quality, 320x240) to be about 9 hours! Don't know how long it actually took)

I wanted  the All-In-Wonder because it had video in and out which would come in handy for various things.  The video in could be used  for video conferencing or more importantly to preview the DV video out on my monitor.  The video out would allow me to tape the computer screen when I'm putting together "How to" type videos.  It also had a TV tuner which was nice, but not important.  I got a full tower case in the event I add a lot more hard disks.  I got a PCI sound card to hopefully make it easier for the computer to manage IRQs.  While I was at the show, I called my wife and she told me that the monitor and MotoDV had arrived!  I was excited.

In addition to the base computer, I purchased:

The hard drive was to hold the video data.  I went with UDMA because it was much cheaper then a SCSI solution and both PC and Mac people have had success with these drives.  The motherboard had room for one more hard drive and I can always add the Fast Trak later if I want even more space.  Part of me wanted to buy a 2nd 16.8G drive now, but common sense prevailed ... if I wait 'till later, the price of the drive will most likely be less.  Partition Magic (also included Boot Magic) by Powerquest,  allowed me to resize partitions on the fly as well as create and easily select from multiple boot partitions.  I set up 3 partitions, one for general use, another for video editing, and another for experimental software.  Powerquest also makes Drive Image which sounds like it could be useful if I reinstall Win98 a lot on my experimental partition (haven't tried it yet).  By setting up separate partitions, I don't have to have a separate machine for video editing and another for general use.  Originally, I was thinking of getting a removable carriage and swapping system drives ... but this solution made a lot more sense.

6) I set it all up.  Everything worked right out of the box!  Win98 was installed with no special options along with the video card and sound card.  I installed the extra hard drive.  No problem! I installed Partiton Magic.  The hardest part was learning about partitions, but the documentation and on-line reading was easy to understand.  I created my partitions.  I followed the directions for the Radius MotoDV card (installed it in slot 1 in case that made a difference) and it worked without any problems.  I ran through a few exercises creating a short video, and exporting it back to tape ... beautiful!  I order the MotoDV Studio 2.0 upgrade.  In the meantime, I had an old Adaptec 2940U card lying around which I installed and connected a Recordable CD-ROM.  Everything still runs fine.  Gotta add my HP 4P scanner next.

Continued on Page 4