I got a problem - I bought a Samsung HMX-H100P 1920x1080i / 720p full HD camcorder and a copy of Vegas Pro 9, both of which I've wanted for ages, but could only afford when they were nearly half price. The camcorder is great and puts out a really good h.264 compressed image. Now I got a problem. I thought my Medion PC with an Intel 3Ghz P4 hyperthreading thingummy with 3.25Gb RAM visible to WinXP would be fine, even though it's 5 years old. Wrong! It will JUST play the 1080x720p, forget about 1920, and when editing, each frame takes several seconds to render in Vegas! Normal avi edits fine. I'm not prepared to encode everything to avi first, and I'm not exactly swimming around in cash. I've been looking at PCs for days and they're all specced for gaming and stuff. I don't do that. From what I've read on the Vegas forums, it doesn't use the graphics card to do the rendering work, which was my first idea so I don't need terabytes of memory that gaming cards have either. What I could really do with is to find a system/chipset/whatever that could handle h.264 with ease. I don't even need on with an OS as people are getting good results with Windows 7 so that'll do me for the next 9 months at least. I don't mind if it's a prebuild, but it's been 6 years since I built anything myself as it usually seems to work out better to get someone to do it. My budget is £500 or less. I suppose the question would be: AMD or Intel? Dual or Quad Core? etc - just anything to get the h.264 playing properly! Thanks
I'm not entirely sure which CPU Vegas favours, but something like a quad core would be recommended. Apart from being four times the processor of the P4, they're also twice as fast per-core, beause they're newer. http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Inte...S775-283-GHz-1333MHz-12MB-L2-Cache-85x-Retail http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Giga...-20-(x16)-DDR2-1600-1200-1066-800-SATA-II-ATX http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/4GB-...-240-Pins-Non-ECC-Unbuffered-CAS-5-5-5-18-DHX http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/512M...z-GDDR3-GPU-600MHz-80-Cores-DVI-D-Sub-S-Video http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Antec-Three-Hundred-Black-Midi-Tower-Case-w-o-PSU http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/500-...aviar-Blue-SATA-300-7200-rpm-16MB-Cache-89-ms http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/LG-GH22NS30-22x-DVDR-16xDVDDL-DVDplusRW-x8-RWx6-12xRAM-SATA-Black-OEM http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/400W-Corsair-Power-Series-PSU-ATX-PS-2-UK-Version-3-year-warranty This lot is about £460, and is an admirable video encoding PC, with reasonable HD video playback support.
Thank you very much, Sam. The case and motherboard are out of stock, but found them elsewhere Is there still the big thing in favour of Intel that some people say these days, or is it pretty much a level field these days? Anyway, thanks again for the help - and underbudget too. I think a graphics tablet might be affordable now! I'll let you know how I get on..
It's a lot more even now than it was, but Intels are the more energy efficient chips with less confusion over what is good and what is not.
