Advice with new system and camera
Shane P Feb 17, 2012 6:11 AMHello Friends,
I finally made the transition from standard DV to HD and my current workstation is gagging on the HD (I know it's sadly under specced for HD editing) and I am going to be upgrading my workstation and camera shortly and am looking for some advice/opinions on the best way to go. I'm not sure if this is the appropriate forum for this topic but I figured since I am editing on PP 5.5 it would be. If it is not my apologies.
I was in a pinch for a scheduled shoot last weekend and wanted to shoot it in HD.Because I’m not as familiar with HD formats as I have not actually worked with HD up until this point I went out to the Blue Box store and picked up a consumer grade Sony CX130 which I knew ultimately would not be staying with me.
I shoot primarily for web video (not YouTube) and with the scene well lit it was "OK". I shot in 1080p 60fps. When compressed down to 720 it looked decent but when viewing at 1080 you can see some artifacting and the overall “grain” of a low quality sensor. I brought it back and am looking to go prosumer grade.Up until just recently I was shooting on the SD on the Sony VX 2100 which I bought in 2004 from BH. I want to upgrade to a similar quality HD “prosumer” grade camera. I am undecided as whether to go with a Canon 5D or 7D and use it for video (plus the benefits of interchangeable lenses and having a real still camera) or going with a dedicated HD Camcorder.
I have been editing for years and am not foreign to the science of video editing/production, just never had the opportunity to work in HD.
So I guess the question is in your opinion(s) will I get better HD video quality out of a DSLR or a dedicated HD Camcorder? I have a budget of up to $3000. The end product will be 720 web video and I want to have the source material be pristine as I want to have blurays replicated for distribution.
One of the guys at the Blue Box said the Canon D5 (or it might have been the D7) can’t shoot video too long without overheating. Any truth to this or can I just throw in a card and shoot until full?
Workstation question:
My current system:
Vista 64, Intel Core Duo, 8GB. (Yes quite sad)
I am not going to “upgrade” my workstation as my current motherboard only supports up to 16 GB. I am going to build a new one from the mother board up. As I stated above I am editing in PP 5.5 and am finally moving into HD.
I watched a lot of videos online (a few of Karl’s) and they were quire informative. I know I am going to go with Win 7 Pro and beyond that I am deliberating the cost of hardware versus overall performance and building a “balanced” system. In one of the videos Karl did he was mentioning something to the effect of balancing cpu cores with “X” amount of ram and at what point do you install too much ram to notice a difference between “X” amount of ram. I don’t know if I explained that correctly or not.
But I was thinking of about 32GB ram, Intel xeon(s) single or dual processors? And definitely a certified Nvidia card. Again not sure which grade of card I would need to the type of HD I am editing, etc.
Any advice/opinions would be appreciated.
Thank you in advance,
Shane



