Hi

I seem unable to play HDV clip in Xpress Pro - starting playing slowing and then jumps between stills. Has anyone any ideas what trhe problem might be? 

It my first project in HDV and is a new system so wondering whether:

- if my computer isnt fast enough, what is the minium spec? for editing HDV?

- is my computer not working properly (its a self build)?

- or is it a setting in avid i've got wrong?

The project was shot in DVCPRO HDV (1080i/50i) has been imported to harddrive from P2 card.

Thanks,

Thom

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2.66Ghz Intel Core2Duo, 2Gb DDR2, Nvidia Quadro FX1500, Samsung SpinPoint SATAII HDD

Window XP pro service pack 2

1.  You need every bit of that 2GB RAM to run HDV.  If you can afford a bit more RAM, you might want to make that upgrade. 

2.  Make sure you go through the readme file that comes with the program and configure your video card correctly.  You could have the resolution set too high for the system to perform well. 

3.  Make sure that you have turned off any background processes.  You might want to turn off anti-virus to see if that is causing you problems.  Videoguys.com also has a sheet of tweaks to get the most out of your operating system.  If your system is not one of the approved systems (which I gather it isn't), you should also look at the documentation of your motherboard to determine if you are sharing resources between PCI slots that could be causing slow downs.

4.  Make sure your project type is the same as the media (i.e an HDV project type)  If you are not using an HDV project type, you should transcode your media to a DNxHD codec for better performance.

Good Luck!

DVCPro HD isn't HDV... HDV only requires a fraction of the bit rate that the Panasonic system uses.  Your drives  may not be fast enough... Start there and keep working on it.

Thom, your drive(s) should be fast enough for a single stream of DVCpro HD at 100 Mb/s.  However your SATA interface may not be.

Although SATA II should have a throughput of 300 Mb/s, depending on the hardware, the practical speed measured may be well under 100 Mb/s.  Major offenders here can be the onboard chipsets, which rely on raw CPU power.  For that reason I use an Adaptec PCIe card which has its own processor.

You may also like to check the jumper settings on your drive as a first step.  A lot of hard drives come jumpered for 150 Mb/s operation and need to be set to 300 Mb/s by the user.

 I would argue differently. First of all we need to determine if this is DVCPRO HD or HDV. HDV uses GOP (group of pictures) which requires a tremendous amount of processing to unpack. A slower machine that might be able to run DVCPRO HD quite nicely could get hung up on the GOP issue.

Guywithcat:

A slower machine that might be able to run DVCPRO HD quite nicely could get hung up on the GOP issue.

Yes, that's true, but in this case:

thom_allen:

The project was shot in DVCPRO HDV (1080i/50i) has been imported to harddrive from P2 card.

If the media was imported from a P2 card it was shot on a Panasonic camera.  It's therefore likely that it isn't "DVCPRO HDV" (there's no such thing anyway) but actually DVCpro HD.  In that case the drive system throughput requirements are higher than for DV or HDV.