Working With Compressed HD In The Comfort Of Your Own Home

DMN By Kevin McAuliffe

With the inception of Pro Res and DNX, you don't need to spend excessively to use a facility to edit HD content

Much like vinyl, VHS and paper (movie, plane, concert, etc.) tickets, large post production houses are the way of the past. With the inception of Pro Res (Apple) and DNX (Avid), I (or my clients for that matter) don't need to spend excessive amounts of money to use a facility to edit HD content. I can do it in the comfort of my own home. In this article I'm going to break down the three main things you need to edit compressed HD from the comfort of your own home.

CPU
Assuming you are just starting out, and don't have any equipment yet, here's a simple and straight forward configuration I would suggest:

• Mac Pro with two 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeons
• 4GB RAM (4x1GB)
• 500GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s (main launch drive)
• 3x1TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s (expanded capture drives)
• ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 256MB
• One 16x SuperDrive
• Apple Cinema Display (20" flat panel)
• Apple Mighty Mouse
• Apple Keyboard + User's Guide

For the computer itself, you are looking at about $5300 with an additional $1300 for Final Cut Studio 2. There are other bells and whistles you can add like fibre channel and RAID cards, but remember, we're talking about compressed HD, so you don't need to break the bank. read more...