AV News 192 - May 2013
Laptops and Dual Graphics Cards
Mike Owens
A non member here. I was reading my wife Ann's edition of February AV
News with particular regard to the laptop dilemmas and dual graphic cards
being experienced by members. Bear with me on the following as it's
relevance or otherwise may become apparent later.
I work now exclusively in Video AVCHD and have a customised PC using
windows7 with dual hard drives, quad core processor and a fast Nvidia
GeForce graphics card and 8Gb RAM. I originally had a DV Panasonic
Camcorder using a micro cassette, the output of which I successfully edited
on Adobe Premiere Elements 8 with a conventional PC running Windows
XP. With an extensive holiday in America planned last year, I decided to
upgrade to a HD Panasonic Camcorder using avchd files recording on sdhc
cards to record the events. Hard drives in a camcorder are not to be
recommended!!
When I came to edit the footage using 1920 x 1080 setting in Adobe 8,
the PC could not deal with it. The Panasonic shop salespeople did not have
a clue! Neither in fact did Panasonic themselves when asked! They simply
suggested using their primitive software supplied with the camera which
was probably suitable for the needs of average consumers. So on the
customised PC I installed the latest Premiere Elements ver10. That too
wouldn't cope very well, with jerky replay in edit mode. In my opinion Hi Def
had seemed to catch Adobe out and they had released it far too early
without sufficient testing. Version 11 came out a few months later and that
seems to work thus far, proving I think my previous contention.
However, whilst editing, the playback will be jerky if the edited footage
isn't regularly rendered! I don't have to tell you that video files are massive.
The edited files continue to hold the discarded footage until rendered I am
informed. Also of note is that you have to give the PC/laptop time to load all
the files before attempting to play/edit. This can take about 5 minutes or
more on a long edit. If you don't, jerky playback ensues as the PC's trying
to do two massive operations at once. This I can see might be a problem
with your competitions replays and viewing the DVD's. I can only suggest
you have two laptops working in tandem!
Also of note i ́ѡ