Thinking About Shooting High Definition Movies…? Add in the Cost of a New Computer with that New Camcorder
November 12th, 2009
As I have progressed in my business of making video classes I have decided to upgrade my camcorder to a high definition version. It’s one of the fancy ones with an internal 120GB hard drive and surround sound microphone. The camera shoots like a dream. The videos it captures are crystal clear, and the sound quality from the internal microphone simply sings. The 1920 x 1080 resolution videos will stand the test of time with a clarity that is expected from modern consumers of video.
I was ecstatic to shoot my first video class using the camera. Everything worked well, and I practically skipped home to plug the camera into my computer to begin editing the footage. And then… everything went to hell.
My computer chokes, sputters and damn near dies when it tries to process high def video. I have a decent Core 2 processor and 4 GB of RAM. It’s not the latest and greatest computer, but I thought at least I could do basic high def video editing. Apparently I was wrong…
Please keep this in mind if you are thinking about going out and buying a new high definition camcorder. I never had a single problem with my standard definition camcorder, but like I say the high def footage brings my system to a painful halt.
So when you go out to buy your new camera make sure to factor in the price of a new computer with the package. I’m not being melodramatic… my wonderful little system that runs Adobe CS3 products and video editing software easily cannot even begin to cope with high def video editing.
2 Responses to “Thinking About Shooting High Definition Movies…? Add in the Cost of a New Computer with that New Camcorder”
Leave a Reply
This is so true, and the reason I didn’t buy the Flip Ultra HD and opted for the standard def – my computer wouldn’t have been able to edit the dern video! It’s fine when you don’t do any editing, but who wants to do that???
If you’re getting AVCHD footage it’s super important you have a really fast codec installedr; “CoreAVC” is probably the best at the moment.
However! If you have a recent-ish NVidia graphics card that supports “CUDA” (i.e. using the graphics card processor to decode the video) you’re in a whole different ballgame; with “CoreAVC” using my graphics card GPU I can play fullscreen 1080i with barely any CPU load; makes a huge difference.
Generally recommended is “Cyberlink Power Director” which also uses CUDA acceleration if you have it and is very usable for editing AVCHD, if a bit basic on the features.