MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
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I bought a GoPro 960 recently for an upcoming holiday, and have been messing about with it recently. One of the reasons I didn't go for the 1080 version is that I was concerned about my computers ability to edit the video.
My laptop is an Intel Core2 Duo 2GHz, 2GB Ram running Vista 32bit, I wasn't expecting much from this but with plenty of patience I did manage to edit a short video from three clips. But once I start editing a longer video it starts to fall over with choppy playback and plenty of waiting around whilst it thinks. I've been using Movie Maker 6 and Live Movie Maker, with some 3rd party codecs to enable Mpeg-4 video to work.
My PC is several years old, Pentium 4 3GHz, 1GB Ram, Nvidia GeForce FX5200 graphics card, Win XP SP.3. At first the only way I could watch Mpeg-4 video was via iTunes, managed to find a Codec bundle that included Media Player Classic and the playback with this becomes choppy after 15 - 30 seconds. This PC has MovieMaker 2.1 and it just doesn't want anything to do with mpeg-4, and I can't find a newer version that will work with XP.
So it appears the Laptop is coping better although I haven't been able to compare playback with the same software.
So, I've spent a bundle on the camera and have now got to watch the pennies due to upcoming wedding/honeymoon and splurging on the bikes ready for the trip.
Can anyone identify any simple problems/cheap upgrades that will give me half a chance of editing 10 hours of video from a recent riding weekend? I suppose I'm hoping that someone will just say get some more memory for the PC and upgrade to Windows 7 to get an mpeg-4 compatible version of MovieMaker, but I don't want to waste my money if I still have the same issues.
Or the other possibility, will different editing software make a difference?
I didnt think MM could open the mp4 files. To use it, was a faff of converting to another format and then importing. I managed to get hold of Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 10 via the internet..ahem. It opens them straight off and then edit. It does however require some newish hardware. Dual core might just do, its the CPU that gets hammered, so dont wory about graphics card. Your PC prob wont be upto scratch, and as you have found out, wont be able to play them anyway. My lappy is a similar spec to yours and can play ok (not got editing s/w on that).
I upgraded my PC due to the same thing unfortunately. Hey, its probably 6-7 years old anyway.
Thanks.
Difficult decision on what to do as the laptop is slowly dieing (its had a new adaptor, now needs a new battery and palmrest/touchpad) and if I turn off the PC at the mains, I then have to unplug the power to the motherboard before the power supply will allow the computer to start.
Laptop is used 99% of the time and silly to spend money on a PC just for a couple of hours use a week, so if I get a decent laptop and plug it into my screen and keyboard for desk use that would sort out both issues.
From the price the 'spares or repair' laptops are going for on ebay, I could probably get £200 for my £400 three year old lappy!
So what spec should I look for in a laptop?
I think as a stopgap I'd throw another two gig in the lapdog, assuming it supports it.
Using Vegas here and it works a dream with the files etc - make it super easy.
In terms of PC power, I recently upgraded (for about £200 which probably doesn't help you) and I'm now running a quad core AMD chip at 3.3mhz on XP and it is sweet. I've got a super fast HDD (6Gb/s) which may be helping speed things up.
From your perspective on the desktop - maybe upgrading memory to 2GB might help but then your CPU might be too slow or your HDD too. I ran HD tach on my PC and it showed how slow the disk is. If you're running IDE drives and can get some SATA action in there - do it, even if its just a 3GB/s drive
On the laptop - I'd download the trial version of Vegas and see how it runs.
Thanks, just tried Vegas but even with the preview pane in draft/quarter it was unwatchable 🙁
I'm pretty sure my laptop HD is a SATA, the drive in my PC has ATA written on it which is essentially SATA isn't it?
Sounds like you need to upgrade. I was in a similar position and did - now can render a 1 min HD vid in under 5 mins
No ATA is IDE, old and slow nowadays.
I prefer to do video work on my desktop, so I'd say upgrade that and leave the lappy for a few more years yet (you prob cant get any more mem in anyway).
My desktop went from AMD x64 3200 2GB - AMD Phenom x4 955 (3.2GHz) 4GB. I'm still disappointed with the Vegas preview though (It is slow). Upgrade M/B, MEm, CPU+Fan, PowerSup, cost £323
AMD-P2955 AMD PHENOM II QUAD CORE 955 AM3 1 £102.16
ASU-M4ATDV ASUS M4A785TD-V EVO AMD 785G (SO 1 £62.11
CSR-4GXMS3 CORSAIR XMS3 TWINX 4GB (2X2GB) D 1 £72.33
TT-TR250S THERMALTAKE TR2 500W W0093 1 £38.28
That was Aug last year though.
Superfli - got very similar spec but with a on board graphics card and it flies, what transfer speed Hdds you got?
I'm using the onboard GC too. 754 chipset.
Using a mix of HDD, 2 SATA and 1 IDE (for backups). Cant remember what makes.. Samsung, Maxtor and WD I think
Getting more RAM is pretty cheap and will help, but HD video is one of the few things that will really test a computer's performance.
I'm not super hot on codecs or PCs but converting the footage could help perhaps?
My canon puts out h.264 and it's a total dog in Final Cut Pro on a fairly well loaded Macbook Pro - premiere pro is just unworkable. But convert to Apple ProRes and it's super fast.
Not a direct solution but might be something to research
I think as a stopgap I'd throw another two gig in the lapdog, assuming it supports it.
+1 if you're skint. It's also possible the laptop hdd could be upgraded to SSD or even just 7200rpm SATA with a big cache... but your mileage would vary according to the model, and it wouldn't be as dramatic as more ram.
Thanks, plenty of stuff to think about.
Just did a factory reset/format on the laptop, partly to check it wasn't junk slowing down the performance (its not) and partly to check that the dodgy touchpad wasn't a software issue (its not either). Happily I just bought a new palmrest/touchpad on ebay for £12.50, so if I don't break the laptop whilst disassembling it then at least I know I can sell it for around £150 to offset the cost of a new one.
Time to do the sums, I could upgrade the PC but it would be easier to buy a barebones unit as either the power supply or motherboard is buggered (the power cut issue mentioned earlier) and the fascia is falling off the case, so that'll mean everything needs to be replaced apart from the DVD drive/graphics card, plus I would need to upgrade from XP for mp4 compatibility which is £85 for Windows 7, hopefully I get this bundled with a barebones unit.
Or just stump up for a performance laptop with a huge hard drive, the advantage of this is I'm down to one computer and could use my hopelessly slow network hard drive (2.5mb/s) purely for backup, rather than its current use as a My Documents drive. Obviously when working on a video I copy it onto the laptop, but it takes around an hour per 10GB to copy.
I'm a bit out of touch with the current processors etc, anything here jump out as suited towards my needs?
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/barebones.html?gclid=CPfR2req06gCFdFX4QodVzH4gg
As Gary said, the single best thing you can do to get better performance whilst editing is to convert your footage into something more appropriate. H264 is not good as it requires a huge amount of processor power to decompress and play as you edit. On a Mac I use ProRes but I'm not sure what would be best on your PC. DVCPro HD maybe?
Its time consuming to do, especially if you shoot loads of stuff, and the converted footage will take up loads more room, but its free at least. Faster hard drives etc will also help of course, but the first step should always be to get away from H264.
working on HD footage straight out of the camera is not usually possible unless you have a superfast fiber-channel raid system and loads of ram (16-32gb)
you can work on a proxy and then render the edit in the background or afterward. (this is how most editing programs work)
i use mpegstremclip to convert 5DII footage to 720 so it will playback without issues on my macbookpro. (this is not to edit just clip viewing)
Obviously when working on a video I copy it onto the laptop, but it takes around an hour per 10GB to copy.
Wild speculation here, but are you doing that over a wireless LAN?
Whenever I've got to move considerable amounts of data between PCs (and assuming I'm not doing it via sneakernet), I'll plug both machines into a wired Ethernet connection temporarily. It's exponentially faster than WiFi.
Not sure what the above means, but I'm taking the files direct from my gopro, editing them and then rendering video really easily. Not sure what the H264 is.
It's a fancy way of saying MPEG4, iirc.
( <-- no expert)
I'm currently waiting for MP4Cam2AVi to convert some of my files to AVI...though I suspect that is still H264 based?
I am transferring files via wireless but wired is only maybe 20% faster, I'm using a MyBookWorld but I discovered after buying it that it only has a 200Mhz (ish) processor so despite a normal network supporting up to 10mb/s, the bottleneck is the drive itself, which tops out at 2.9mb/s, though I seem to get 2.5mb/s. They market it as Gigabit compatible, but all that means is it won't slow the other network traffic down. Even a direct ethernet to the PC (avoiding the Router) doesn't help speed things up.
Well its looking good, converted to AVI the playback in Live Movie Maker is looking smooth with 6GB/1:20mins of video in the preview 🙂
So, now I've formatted the laptop, should I re-install the Vegas demo with a view to shelling out £30 for the full version? Is it £30 better than MovieMaker?
Finally, am I likely to have lost much quality coverting from MP4 to AVI? Converted file sizes are pretty much the same.