Posted by JT on 12/03/05 15:58

Another two cents, from the perspective of a guy who shoots
multi-camera stage-lit events ranging from half an hour to about two
hours:

From a computer-resources standpoint, video post-production has two
distinct steps: editing and rendering/exporting.

Your editing environment will be optimized by having enough video
display real estate to conveniently see everything you'd like to see
at once, and when you have something in the display scheme that shows
you video you can trust to be representative of the final product. An
ideal edit station will have at least two 20" CRT computer displays,
and possibly a calibrated video monitor. (But my personal experience
using a Panasonic monitor didn't leave me convinced of its value,
since keeping it calibrated was a nuisance.)

Not much about editing benefits from exotic computer hardware. At
first you may want to do a lot of immediate rendering to see how your
effects and transitions look, but after you gain experience you'll
have more and more confidence in what you're doing and save that
time-consuming process for unusual circumstances.

Rendering/exporting otoh takes lots of CPU cycles. The voices I trust
say Premier Pro 1.5 supports hyperthreading, but rendering is NOT
distributed across multiple processors (or cores) thus the contributor
who got 8x performance improvement perhaps benefited from other
elements of his spiffy new system. In my world a 2.8 GHz hyperthreaded
P4 renders about twice as fast as an older 2.4 GHz P4 without
hyperthreading.

So for now the only useful way to increase rendering/encoding
performance is to distribute it across multiple computers by cutting
it into pieces, or to use dedicated hardware like the Canopus boards.

Thus my personal "ideal/affordable" edit station is something like two
or three cheap Dell 2.8GHz SC430 "server" computers linked by their
included 1Gb network, with dual-headed video in one of them.

Hard drives:

1. remember that Premiere Pro is basically a data-base manager with a
library of spiffy effects and transitions that it applies when you
render/export (and for previews). While your work is in progress, the
only thing you stand to lose when your hard drive tanks is contained
in the relatively small project file - Premiere does not alter the
source material in any way. Raid'ing drives for redundancy reduces
performance, so forget that idea and just replicate the project file
to a networked computer at an interval you can feel comfortable with.

Of course should your drive die you'll need to restore the video from
its original source(s), but that's perhaps no more time consuming than
recreating the broken drive of a raid pair. And I'm ignoring conformed
audio files, preview files, and any exported/rendered work that you
have further plans for.The audio files are quick to recreate, the
preview files are usually throw-aways. I copy important rendered files
onto another computer when I get nervous.

2. Consider keeping your work on a collection of external drives. At
25 cents a GB for good-performing Seagate PATA drives, the storage is
cheaper than Sony Excellence tape, so you may choose to archive a
project with the potential of a future revisit that way. For the
moment USB 2 is faster than the fastest commonly available drives, and
$10 buys you a caseless interface that lets you pick up a drive and
plug it in with no fuss.

3. StorageReview.com has lists of actual drive performance. You'll see
that data density is the most important factor in throughput, and will
find drives in the 160-250GB range to be great performers, moving data
at around 50MB/sec on outer tracks.

Memory

Rumors to the contrary notwithstanding I've never looked at my
performance monitor and seen Premiere having used more than 375 MB.
The computer is dedicated to that one job, of course.

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