Barry knows - He's just spent loads on his.

Cheers
Adrian Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated. (see below)
Confucius
AMD Phenom IIX6 1055T, win10, 5 internal drives, 7 usb drives, struggling power supply.

Thanks for the plug Holy Father (of the Church of extra words).
Anyway...
I have a DV7t-3000 from HP. 8 i7 processors 1.73g.
I do superb with my machine until I start adding too many fixes such as lighting, color, too many pips.
With straight 720 and 1080, hardly a stutter. I don't bother with shadow files.
Rather than just a name-brand, look for certain features.
i7 with Turbo-boost
At least 4 gigs of memory
A decent Nvidea or ATI card
The connections you desire, on the side you desire.
OS
screen size ( my 17" display is juuuuust right)

Then go to CNET.COM or similar site and look up reviews.

Anyone else?

HP Envy Phoenix/4thGen i7-4770(4@3.4GHz~turbo>3.9)
Nvidia GTX 960(4GB)/16GB DDR3/
Canon Vixia HV30/HF-M40/HF-M41/HF-G20/Olympus E-PL5.
Tape capture using 6 VCR, TBC-1000, Elite BVP4+, Sony D8 camcorder with TBC.
https://www.facebook.com/BarryAFTT

Barry:
I have a Win 7 i7 920, 6gig memory, a nvidia geForce4800 with 512mb. My preview in really really not that great, lots of sutddering, but you say your is very smooth.

Does PD depend on the graphics card alot, is mine to low of performance?
I am coming from Adobe and at least CS3 did care about graphics card preformance that much, low end gave same preview as high end.

I have use CUDA technology turned on, but it does really seem to matter if its on or off.

Any things I might try to get a better preview?


Also, others have seen this as well, PD will be working then just die for 15-30sec. I have found that this is due to PD heavily accessing the disk. Does anyone know what its doing when this happens? Its like it has to refresh all the avchd files for some reason. The odd thing is I have very fast disk access rate, sata drives with ACH enabled, so I cant figure out why the disk access takes so long. Just For Fun
i7 Core@3.8ghz 6gig mem 3 HDD geForce8400
Canon HF S20

My card is a Nvidea 230m, 1 gig.
Disk 7,200 rpm.
I defrag frequently.
CUDA does not affect the preview.
Are you on a laptop or desktop?
Let me say again, my preview is fine in straight unaltered files, but as I throw more fx at it, I need to change preview quality to keep up.
Tony has a good site link to video card ratings.
TONY, WHERE ARE YOU? Busy making music?
HP Envy Phoenix/4thGen i7-4770(4@3.4GHz~turbo>3.9)
Nvidia GTX 960(4GB)/16GB DDR3/
Canon Vixia HV30/HF-M40/HF-M41/HF-G20/Olympus E-PL5.
Tape capture using 6 VCR, TBC-1000, Elite BVP4+, Sony D8 camcorder with TBC.
https://www.facebook.com/BarryAFTT

It is amazing how fast things become obsolete or not good enough (moore's law). My machine is only about 4 years old and was the business then...

Anyway, I have been following up some of the info here, and found that my Nov 2009 graphics board is not so hot after all... mtrapp look here http://tinyurl.com/7qw7hn

I have just spec'd up a machine at http://tinyurl.com/y996m3p where one starts with £409, and my spec comes out at £2105. Now I must see if I can scrape something off that price - bearing in mind that it will be too slow in 2014/5 My spec uses the i7-980x Extreme, see http://tinyurl.com/ya32sm9

I am a bit worried by mtrapp having stuttering with almost the same sort of processor.... i7 980x; W7 Pro; 12GB; Nvidia GTX 285; 2x300G Velociraptors in Raid 0; 2x1.5TB Barracuda in Raid 1; 2TB WD Studio Ed.II (eSATA); NEC SpectraView Reference 2690 + MultiSync EA232

I bought mine through HP, $1,700 with the tax, and PSE8.
TV tuner, a few other little goodies.
Try that or Tigerdirect, lots of places.
And I'm sure others will chime in. HP Envy Phoenix/4thGen i7-4770(4@3.4GHz~turbo>3.9)
Nvidia GTX 960(4GB)/16GB DDR3/
Canon Vixia HV30/HF-M40/HF-M41/HF-G20/Olympus E-PL5.
Tape capture using 6 VCR, TBC-1000, Elite BVP4+, Sony D8 camcorder with TBC.
https://www.facebook.com/BarryAFTT

Post Scriptum:

Finding that the professionals (eg. those who made Avatar) use NVIDIA Quattro FX boards, I looked to compare prices. YOu can pick up a discounted Fx4800 for about £1000, or a top-level NVIDIA GeForce gtx 295 for about £350.

Big question is: How does one compare these boards other than price? The specs are only meaningful to a pro in the area (maybe), and I am sure it would also depend on whether the software (in this case PDR8 ) can handle the extra twiddles available.

Maybe someone here is expert enough to tell? i7 980x; W7 Pro; 12GB; Nvidia GTX 285; 2x300G Velociraptors in Raid 0; 2x1.5TB Barracuda in Raid 1; 2TB WD Studio Ed.II (eSATA); NEC SpectraView Reference 2690 + MultiSync EA232

OK then, my 6mos old graphics card is not even on the list.

So I can start thinking about it, a good grphics card like the ones here http://tinyurl.com/7qw7hn will help in preview.

I get studdering even with no effects.

I am on a desktop Just For Fun
i7 Core@3.8ghz 6gig mem 3 HDD geForce8400
Canon HF S20

I'm no expert about GPUs, but these guys are...

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-gaming-graphics-card,2544-7.html
and
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/video_lookup.php?cpu=GeForce+8400

mrtapp - you'll find the GeForce 8400 on both those charts. I agree that it would be a good starting point for upgrading. It will make a difference to your preview quality & speed of processing (depending on your choice).

Denbigh - the benchmark charts give a good comparative guide - they'll get you started anyway.

Cheers - Tony
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Hi Tony,

Really useful information, and I can highly recommend my GPU the ATi Radeon 5770. I'm more of a fan of the ATi because it accelerates encoding of AVCHD and MPEG2 - both of which I use, but as I keep saying it's each to their own!

Preview works well under the conditions I use but I don't tend to over enhance my projects because it's mostly family stuff.

Cheers,

Andrew Alienware Aurora ALX R4 - Intel i7-4820 4.2 GHz - 32GB DDR3 RAM - Crucial 512GB SSD - 1TB Seagate HDD - 3TB WD Green HDD - 4TB WD Green HDD - MSI NVIDIA GTX 1070 8GB

Sony HDR-PJ810 and HDR-PJ530

Hi All,

My story is similar to Barry's...I edit with 1920x1080 HD footage and Power Director 8 runs great until you throw several PIP tracks with lots of transitions, titles, etc etc., then it stutters a bit when it meets a tricky transition. But all in all, the editing experience has improved tremendously with an upgraded system.

What I REALLY noticed as an improvement was the significantly reduced rendering time when producing a video. Having the TWO ATI Radeon 5770 in Crossfire was a significant improvement over my old Graphic card. It blew me away when I had the "Preview" visible during rendering...Simply amazing! Depending on the Hardware(ATI Radeon or Nvidia) in your system and the type of file you produce, you can take advantage of the Graphic card assisting the rendering process.

That's my two cents on the subject!

Kevin
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Makes cents to me. HP Envy Phoenix/4thGen i7-4770(4@3.4GHz~turbo>3.9)
Nvidia GTX 960(4GB)/16GB DDR3/
Canon Vixia HV30/HF-M40/HF-M41/HF-G20/Olympus E-PL5.
Tape capture using 6 VCR, TBC-1000, Elite BVP4+, Sony D8 camcorder with TBC.
https://www.facebook.com/BarryAFTT

So this got me motivated to upgrade the card. Bought a Nvidia gforce 9800 GT, 1 gig memory. A big improvment.

The preview window does not studder, with hardware encoding on the rendering sails and I can overclock the GPU with the EVGA utility for even better performance.

Question:To get produce to use the graphics card
enable hardware decoding in the preferences and the produce window needs to be set, correct?

When its set in the produce window, svrt is turned off right?

So one needs to make a trade between SVRT rendering and hardware encoding, seems would be best to run both.


Just For Fun
i7 Core@3.8ghz 6gig mem 3 HDD geForce8400
Canon HF S20

I think SVRT works only when your output specs match the input specs on certain file types.
And if you add a bunch of new items in the timeline, they need to be rendered and SVRT does not apply.
Did I get that right folks? HP Envy Phoenix/4thGen i7-4770(4@3.4GHz~turbo>3.9)
Nvidia GTX 960(4GB)/16GB DDR3/
Canon Vixia HV30/HF-M40/HF-M41/HF-G20/Olympus E-PL5.
Tape capture using 6 VCR, TBC-1000, Elite BVP4+, Sony D8 camcorder with TBC.
https://www.facebook.com/BarryAFTT