Home Video Editing - Setup

[TAZ]

"Would simply getting a nice sound card and an expensive set of head phones cure the problem of having poor pc speakers for editing?"

well, yes and no. a good set of headphones is certainly better than a poor set of speakers but there are a few catches.

headphone are very good with mid-high frequency response and very bad with low frequency despite numerous psuedo enchancements so you will never get real world sound although you will certainly get a good idea of the s/n ratio.

the other thing is that headphones generally target just one ear (L&R) whereas in the real world there is some "cross correlation"(can't think of the actual proper term for this at the mo) between the two because speakers do not target the ears specifically but rather the entire room. there have been attempts made (some very good ones too i might add) to simulate this in headphones but they still just haven't hit the mark and i personally don't think they ever will..

so to answer the question, headphones are far better than cheap speakers but still won't match up to a good 2.1 setup.

________________________________________________________
know your limits, and never stop trying to exceed them!

 

[TAZ]

cost is definetly always a big issue, it's not always pratical to have the best of everything, so long as you have something to fall back on and your data is backed up somehow you're safe, everything after that really just makes things move along faster and makes the whole editing experience more fluid and more fun.

having said that, i would definetly recommend having one drive for the actual footage and another for rendering onto, even if the second is your system drive. trying to render back onto the video disk will close to double the time it takes to finish the project.

on the whole raid thing:
my main problem with raid0 is the lack of redundancy but this stems from the fact that i do 97% of my work for other people so my studio time is important and i need to safeguard against loosing data as much as possible nomatter what the circumstance. to that end i don't mind sacrificing a bit of speed for the security of my data, and at any rate, as my workflow doesn't involve much file tranfer beyond capture (which is realtime anyway), i don't really need raid0.

however, for someone who is just starting or only doing hobby stuff with loose (or no) deadlines, then you don't need to worry about it so much and maybe then raid0 is the way to go. call me a worrier, but my mirrored setup is like a safety blanket and really helps me avoid getting stressed.

for the record, the 9HD's thing was just me taking the piss, i don't even know if that sort of setup is possible on a stock mobo. you could prob do it but you'd need to add in extra RAID controller cards. it's not something i was proposing as a serious consideration, more just as a bit of light humour cus i felt bad about contradicting pat on so many points. usually i wouldn't, he seems to know his stuff and i really don't want to go making anyone feel put down, we're all learners here and it doesn't do to make a twat of yourself by blatently contradicting people, especially those who know way more about other area's than you do.

________________________________________________________
know your limits, and never stop trying to exceed them!

 

[pat]

For general home movie editing, like I do, simple system is adequate. I would love to have a real editing machine with all parts dedicated to editing. But it is not reasonnable, as I don't do that for a living.

I mostly receive the home movie either directly from the camera, which always been an analog one, or on a VHS tape.. usually degraded with time. I capture the whole thing in my system, and let the program do scene detection by itself. To date, it always find the scramble parts between 2 different shot on analog. Then I scrool thru te bad part to at least keep the best one, and then reassemble the whole thing, add transition, title, music,... and do the final render. See, if something crash, I always have the original on tape. And from the time I work with RAID0 without zero problem, I'm confident at it. Seagate drive has a 5 years warranty... should be good..

But I know that to do that professionnaly, I would need more than what I have. But it is sufficient for most home user and wont scare them because of unnecessary complexity.

Your points are very valide thou.. but it is a matter of situation.. Maybe he should tell us what kind of editing and capture device he is using...

<font color=red>Sig space for rent. make your offer.</font color=red>

 

[TAZ]

oh that's true of course, you do always have the tape as a last resort. unfortunatly, what i do not have is the 3hours average required to recapture the whole thing and then start editing again from scratch --> i love redundancy.

both systems have their pro's and con's, at the very least it's a template for how the system should be set up depending on how serious you want to get.

________________________________________________________
know your limits, and never stop trying to exceed them!