OK, so maybe this is not really an antique. It's actually a Dell Dimension 9150 that I bought about 4 years ago. At the time it was fine for my purposes, which included mostly text editing, but also a pretty healthy use of Adobe Photoshop. It did pretty well on Photoshop, but there were still times it slowed to a crawl in some operations. The processor is a Pentium D 2.8gb - not bad by its standards. Recently I've bumped the RAM to 4GB, added a second video card in order to support my current 3 monitors, and now have 4 SATA drives. But the problem has been that I've been editing video files, and for that task, this system sucks.

I've tried several changes and run a few tests, but the bottom line is that this system simply doesn't have the horsepower to process video edits. So, I visited the Dell outlet store and found a Studio XPS with an i7-920 (quad core) processor, 12GB RAM, and an nVidia GTX260 graphics card. According to the folks at Intel who recommended this particular processor, and Adobe who recommends 12GB of RAM for running Premiere Pro CS4, this configuration should be like stepping into the next century... which, come to think of it, is exactly what I'm doing.

I'm also trying out Sony Vegas Pro as an alternative to Premiere Pro. My very initial experience is that Vegas has a much lighter processor appetite, and it's fairly similar in operation to Premiere Pro. The only thing I've found about Vegas that I'm unhappy with it its encoder function. It doesn't (as far as I can tell) produce .FLV output, and the files it does produce are much (like 2x to 3x) larger than the files produced by Premiere Pro. I'll give it another shot once I get the Studio in place, and have some time to give a fair evaluation. Right now, I can barely keep up with my work because it takes so long to do the editing. 

But help is on the way!!

Comments

Add New Search RSS

Write comment
Name:
Email:	do not notifynotify
Title:

Powered by !JoomlaComment 3.26

3.26 Copyright (C) 2008 Compojoom.com / Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."