General Hardware Advice

[yprbest]

Great, my second thread and once more I'm asking for advice - I feel like such a leech >_<

Apologies for being so needy, I promise to try and return the favour in future if and when I can!

Anyway, my question is a (relatively) simple one: what's most important to consider when buying a new PC with regards to AMV creation - RAM, CPU or Video Card? I assumed the CPU and RAM would be the major ones, but I've been told it's actually the Video Card and RAM, which has left me somewhat confused. On top of this, I've been considering a Mac Mini (or similarly priced Mac hardware), wondering whether the reliabilty and efficiency of the machine would offset the relatively poor processor and graphics card?

So, which should I go for, processor power, reliability or graphics card oomph? Also, what's an optimal amount of RAM to use - will 512MB be enough, or is a gig advisable (if somewhat expensive, particularly if opting for Mac Mini)

[Zero1]

CPU, RAM and Hard Drive speed are the key issues.

As for what will matter to you all depends on the type of AMVs you intend on making.

CPU
If you plan on making an AMV with some nice rendered effects, Definately go for a fast CPU, an Intel Pentium 4 or equivalent if possible (look at the AMD die hard recommending Intel lol).

Pentiums are generally faster at media orientated tasks such as encoding audio and video, and if you plan on doing it regularly or extensively, then it's important to make the right choice.


RAM
As for RAM, there are a few ways to look at this. Firstly consider the software and Operating System you will be using, that will be the first point of concern, are you going to be using a relatively light OS and Non linear editor, or are you using one of the memory hungry fancy apps (something like Premiere Pro or After Effects). Then think about the complexity of the AMV you want to produce, do you want to have 1 or 2 video layers, or are you going to have multiple video layers with Image masks effects, fades and so on. Also keep in mind the size of the source files. Larger files (such as Huffyuv video) will occupy more RAM than say an MPEG2 video (which if you are using AVIsynth, depends on the filters and operations involved).


Harddrive
This is also a key component and depending on the size and speed of the drive, it will affect your editing ability considerably.

First off with harddrive size. As with RAM it depends on how many source videos you want to use, the duration, bitrate etc. You can do as many people here do and simply rip the VOBs from the DVD, and frameserve them with AVIsynth, the drawback to that is what you gain in harddrive space, you lose in CPU power (since you will be processing, IVTC'ing etc. videos in realtime in order to save space).

DVDs are usually 4 - 8 GB in size (a rough estimate!) The DVDs seem to be split into 1GB chunks that are approx 25mins each.

A standard harddrive will play back DVD material fine before you have to worry about harddrive speeds, but if you skimp on RAM, the OS will resort to dumping RAM on the harddrive in order to free up real RAM, and this dumping (disk swapping or page filing as it's also known) can be pretty slow stuff and will affect the rate at which you can read video (or anything else for that matter) thus hindering your real time previews.


If on the other hand you want to keep things simple and relatively fast you can do as I and others do and dump the videos to Huffyuv files. Instead of using the AVIsynth script to edit from, you just import it into virtualdub and save it as AVI using the Huffyuv codec. The advantage of this is that what you see is what you get, as in it's already processed and IVTC'ed and so no other processing other than playback of the file is needed (which can vary depending on the strength of the compression you use, again it's the diskspace/cpu time tradeoff)

That's great, but Huffyuv is huge lol. I've got the Ah My Goddess Movie on one of my harddrives and it's 62GB. As you can see you lose a hell of a lot of space, it's questionable really. Another thing to remember that Huffyuv is lossless and on old noisy source the files it can produce will be massive. It will eat your harddrive if you forget to remove the interlacing also.

The average datarate of the encode is 10.4MB/s (83061kbps), I hate to think what it peaks at, but if you have 3 or 4 of these as video layers while using a standard hard drive, you may start to struggle.


There are a few alternatives, I'm using a RAID array, which if you didn't know if basically combining multiple drives to form one big one, which results in increased speed and storage, you can check pretty much all you need to know about RAID through the links at the bottom of the post.

Again with how big/fast harddrive you need is down to how much RAM you have (read up) and how many video layers you will use. If you want to be a serious editor, want to do complex things or simply want an awesomly fast computer, I'd really reccomend RAID.


Graphics Card
You'd be forgiven for thinking that the graphics card is a key component in AMV making, I mean hey, it's all to do with video isn't it?

I was thinking about this the other day and concluded that as long as you have a graphics card capable of playing back the required resolution video you want to produce without bottlenecking the rest of the system, that it should be sufficient.

The only time I could see a nice graphics card being required is with any kind of 3D work, be it games, 3D modelling or something like CAD. Of course the more expensive graphics cards will have better hardware acceleration which in turn will relieve CPU stress and possibly lighten the load on the RAM a bit. You will also have access to higher refresh rates and resolutions. You can also expect general better quality, but the quality of the graphics card won't affect your final output, so that's worth bearing in mind.

That said, with a nice graphics card and monitor (preferably CRT to avoid dead pixels and shadows) you may have the quality available to you to fine tune your AMV, or see defects in your editing which you might not have seen on cheaper cards.

The Radeon 9800 card also used to have DivX acceleration, which I assume will work for XviD, unless it was a case of the software being optimised to make better use of the Radeon's features rather than it really being hardware tweaked for DivX


Links
RAID options explained
Harddrive speeds and what you should look for when buying a harddrive
The advantages of having RAID and it's real world results
Recommended RAID card manufacturers

[yprbest]

Cheers for that, that's been really helpful! (Plus I'm glad to know I was pretty much right about it being CPU and RAM - rather than Graphics Card and RAM - that'd matter, though doh for not thinking that HDD speed (as well as size) might be important!

Now, just need to save up a little more money so I can afford something truly decent; looks like I'll need a new job, then... (why can't they pay me for being librarian of the anime club, eh? ^_^)

[Scintilla]

Pentiums are generally faster at media orientated tasks such as encoding audio and video, and if you plan on doing it regularly or extensively, then it's important to make the right choice.

Um.

"Oriented".

"Orientate" and "orientated" are not words.

</grammar police>

...but if you skimp on RAM, the OS will resort to dumping RAM on the harddrive in order to free up real RAM, and this dumping (disk swapping or page filing as it's also known) can be pretty slow stuff and will affect the rate at which you can read video (or anything else for that matter) thus hindering your real time previews.

Pardon me, but won't the OS go to virtual memory even if you <i>do</i> have enough RAM? It seems like almost every major process running on my computer at any given time is using more VM than RAM, no matter how much RAM is free at the time.

[Knowname]

Uh, yeah, if you don't have enough Hard Drive space your kinda' screwed...

And don't worry about the leaching thing... we're all little bastards at some point <dadum dum, he's on a ROLE!!>

but what I want to know (it's a leaching thread, I might as well ask the nooby question ) is, what is all this I hear about upgrading to Serial from a U100 8mb cache HDD gets you a much quicker loading windows? True or just a myth??

[dwchang]

One thing since I'm overly biased and work at AMD.

The misconception that Pentium 4's are better at media has been rebutted in recent benchmarks (OK I give, it was in january so things could've changed). Assuming things didn't change in a month and I don't know of any new processors from either of us, we have the performance crown and *dominate* in everything except multimedia encoding. And IIRC we still won it by a slight margin.

Honestly if you go Intel though, just wait for them to migrate their Pentium-M series to A) 64-bit and B) desktops. They consume significantly less power, won't require as much cooling (P4's are notorious for this) and the architecture in general is much better. Coincidence it's similar to the PIII and Athlon?

Anyway, as for your question, as others have pointed out, the CPU and RAM are the most important. The video card isn't that important at all unless you're doing capturing. If not, I have no idea why someone would tell you this. Assuming you have a decent one (ie. not like 5 years old), you should be fine.

[TaranT]

"Orientate" and "orientated" are not words.

</grammar police>

Actually, it is a valid word, but rarely used: http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=orientate

</grammar police, IAD>

[trythil]

Pardon me, but won't the OS go to virtual memory even if you <i>do</i> have enough RAM?

Not always. I've been able to fit 800M of data into a 1GB space on my Gentoo laptop, with zero swap utilization.

It really depends on the VM subsystem, though. I know that Linux v2.4, by default, used to start swapping when half of physical RAM was utilized: these days, in kernel 2.6, you won't see swap until it's really necessary. (I'm not sure if kernel 2.4 counted program working sets only, working sets +cache + buffers, or what.)

Windows will start swapping out least recently used pages when "memory becomes scarce", to use William Stallings' words. I'm not sure what that means, but I'd guess it's in a Microsoft white paper somewhere. I get the feeling that the default setting is pretty conservative (liberal?), though -- my Windows XP system, which has access to 1GB of physical memory, has 619MB available, and the pagefile usage is at 359MB.

[trythil]

Honestly if you go Intel though, just wait for them to migrate their Pentium-M series to A) 64-bit and B) desktops. They consume significantly less power, won't require as much cooling (P4's are notorious for this) and the architecture in general is much better.

That, and the Pentium-M isn't a dead end, upgrade-wise. :P

[Zero1]

Pentiums are generally faster at media orientated tasks such as encoding audio and video, and if you plan on doing it regularly or extensively, then it's important to make the right choice.

Um.

"Oriented".

"Orientate" and "orientated" are not words.

</grammar police>

Bah, seeing as I took the time to write all that and share my experience, I'd have thought you would have let that pass, if indeed you have a point.


Besides I typed that on the fly without proofing it since it's a forum and not a spelling and grammar test, so there are bound to be errors

Actually, it is a valid word, but rarely used: http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=orientate

</grammar police, IAD>

Thanks for the support, when I say orientated I mean "geared towards" or "specialising in", which may or may not be accurate use of the word, but I hope it isn't too misleading. For instance I make AMVs Anime Wallpapers but I am more orientated towards the encoding of video rather than the creation of it.

...but if you skimp on RAM, the OS will resort to dumping RAM on the harddrive in order to free up real RAM, and this dumping (disk swapping or page filing as it's also known) can be pretty slow stuff and will affect the rate at which you can read video (or anything else for that matter) thus hindering your real time previews.

Pardon me, but won't the OS go to virtual memory even if you <i>do</i> have enough RAM? It seems like almost every major process running on my computer at any given time is using more VM than RAM, no matter how much RAM is free at the time.

Yes, the OS and some, (if not all) applications tend to go to to virtual memory regardless of how much RAM you have. The difference being that when that application is called upon it can read from the VM and load it straight into RAM as opposed to not having enough RAM which creates the situation of dumping some of the RAM to virtual memory (in addition to what's already there) to free up some RAM before loading a new application from the drive/drive cache/virtual memory etc.

This is what we term as disk swapping since you are dumping RAM to the virtual memory before it can load something else stored in the virtual memory into the RAM again. It's the cycle of read/write/read/write which is so slow.

There are other factors too, you can turn the virtual memory off altogether (which isn't usually recommended, and some apps like photoshop complain if there isn't a page file), and run everything strictly from RAM. This will result in no disk swapping regardless of how much RAM you do or don't have, you will simply get out of memory errors.

The other factor is also the memory usage, in Windows XP you can set it to use the RAM as a disk cache, or just regular use. I assume, though am not sure that providing you have enough RAM that using it as a disk cache will also result in decreased disk swapping.

Basically when I said:

...but if you skimp on RAM, the OS will resort to dumping RAM on the harddrive in order to free up real RAM

What I meant was is does it more so than usual ie. the actual disk swapping itself when RAM is low rather than sending dormant programs to the virtual memory.



Well I can't accuse you of flaming, but picking me up on my grammar was a bit petty , though I have to thank you for pulling me up on the disk swapping comment, I knew what I mean, and I'm sure the other hardware orientated (there it is again ) people knew what I meant, but I failed to be specific, and it could have been misleading to some people who don't really know about hardware.

But having said all that, I'm no tech support, and I'm not obliged to try and help people, and nor do I guarantee the accuracy of the information I provide, though I try to stick to things I know the facts about, and when in doubt I make sure to tell people that I'm unsure, or I don't remember fully.

So go easy on the nitpicking, it puts people off offering help, it makes you think, "What's the point, people will only try and find fault with me".




As for what dwchang said, I can't and won't argue with:
a) Someone that obviously knows the facts
b) Another AMD die hard ( Got a couple of Opterons going spare?)

Well joking aside, I can vouch that the Athlon 64 is an awesome beast. I was fortunate enough to catch a 3400+ Clawhammer (754 pins, 1MB cache), before they changed to the Newcastle core which if I am correct is clocked 200MHz higher than the Clawhammer counterparts with 512KB cache.

Just wondering, but why did they stop producing the Atlhon 64 3400+ Clawhammer, was it simply not cost effective to have such a large cache on what was inteded to be a mid range processor? (if you consider the semprons to be budget and FX's to be enthusiast)