Tim - thanks for the insights. I had been using Studio DV from Pinnacle - it came with my Presario. I upgraded to a Matrox 2500 system. If you have not tried it, you will be "dazzled" - it does input and conversion to various formats including MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 in real time, and you can edit effects and see the results on a separate monitor, also in real time. That came with Adobe Premier, and a bunch of other tools for DV crazies.
I have a pair of Adaptec 2400 IDE RAID arrays, each running 4 80GB 7200 RPM drives in a stripe set, each on its own PCI bus, for a total of 640GB. Those babies can move some data. Each of the 8 drives has its own 100MB channel, and with striping and 128MB Cache on the controller I don't seem to have a lot of problems with disk bandwidth.
With 2 21 inch monitors running 1600 x 1200 and an S-video out to the TV Monitor, the single 1GHz processor sometimes gets bogged down, which is why I am going to a 2P system. I have a 2P ASUS MB but it doesn't have an AGP slot - it's a server board - so I'm looking at an Iwill board.
BTW I'm doing the same thing you are - getting 25 years of home video onto DVD. I suppose I could just blow it onto DVD but I want to have something people would actually want to look at. So I'm doing slices - Christmas over 25 years, Kid's birthdays, other kinds of significant events. To do that I'm breaking the video into bite sized chunks with a little indexing, so I can assemble stuff easily.
It's amazing how fast you can burn up storage with DV. But with the price of disk where it is, I will probably just add more and leave it all on line. I am just converting to a gigabit backplane so I could even move that big data around pretty easily. |
