Some advice needed with regards to HD footage editing/processing

KonFusion

Greetings all,

Comp Science student here, working on a multimedia project at the moment, and was wondering if I could get a bit of advice.

Have filmed several .MOV files, on average they're each about 2-4 mins long, all filmed in HD on a DSLR. Now it comes to editing, and I've a slight problem.

When playing back on the camera, there's no problem. When playing on my PC or laptop, they're pretty damn laggy (tested in QuickTime, VLC and RealPlayer) and the audio is wayyy out of sync.

I came to the conclusion that it was due to the fact my PC's weren't powerful enough to handle/process the HD footage. (both PC specs are around 2.4GHz core 2 duo with 4 gigs of ram, running XP and Vista 32bit, with pretty decent GPU's.)

Is this the case, or is there another variable I haven't thought of?

Many thanks in advance!

(First time posting in this forum so feel free to shout at me if this is covered elsewhere.)

stunt_penguin

Yea, you're killing your processor ang dpu with those files, theyre' 40mbps; a suggested good spec for actually editing those files is a PC with at least a 2.4ghz quad core processor and a good 4-8gb of RAM, and even at that you need to be using Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 as previous editions of premiere are slower and lag significantly when editing that DSLR footage.

All that said, to edit those files smoothly you can create proxies using Adobe Media Encoder- make them DVD res. MPEG 2 files, edit your project using those files as proxies, then swap in the real clips. This is the way I worked with DLSR files for a while while waiting for CS5 to come out...

Any questions PM me

Chris

reece

You would need a 64bit os for cs5. Cs5 is great though

enazamov

Hiya,

I am editing HD files on a Mac with 2.2Ghz dual core, 4GB RAM and I have no problems. I am shooting them with my Canon 5D MarkII so they are full HD!
Rendering times sometimes can be long, but once they are rendered you can work pretty fast with them. I am using HDV1080p25 compressor on my timeline.

Although the specs are similar to your PC, I think the 64 Bit operating system on the Mac and using Final Cut Pro probably make the difference and generally Macs are better optimised for Multimedia.

You can try the following, not 100% sure if it'll work, but on FCP you can export Edit Decision List (EDL). If you do your edit on a low res video and export EDL from it, then you can apply that file to your original HD footage. I am not sure if the software you are using supports that option?

Hope this helps!

Erol
facebook.com/videography.ie

KonFusion

Thanks for all the suggestions guys.

Re-filmed on another camera and got some decent software and everything worked grand.