System Requirements

Most products ship with two sets of requirements, minimum and recommended. Here are Studio 10's minimum and recommended requirements:

• Intel Pentium or AMD Athlon 1.4 MHz or higher (2.4 GHz or higher recommended).

• 512MB RAM (1 GB recommended. 1 GB required for HD).

• Windows XP.

• DirectX 9 or higher compatible graphics card with 32 MB (ATI Radeon or Nvidia Geforce 3 or higher with 128 MB recommended for SD. 128 MB required for 720p HD. 256 MB required for 1080i HD).

• DirectX 9 or higher compatible sound card (Creative Audigy or M-Audio recommended).

• 500 MB of disk space to install software + 3 GB to install bonus content.

• DVD-ROM drive for installation.

• CD-R(W) burner for creating Video CDs or Super Video CDs.

• DVD-/+R(W) burner drive for creating DVDs.

• Sound card with surround sound output required for preview of surround sound mixes.

• 16:9 compatible camcorder for capture of 16:9 video.

• 4.5 GB of hard disk space for every 20 minutes of video captured at best quality.

• Hard disk capable of sustained throughput of at least 4 MB per second. All SCSI and most ultra direct memory access (UDMA) drives are fast enough; dedicated hard drive recommended. (Studio will automatically test your hard drive for sufficient speed for real-time video capture when you first enter Capture mode.)

Note that if you're going to edit HDV with Studio, you'll need a bear of a system, including a mind boggling 256 MB of video memory in your graphics card.

Disk requirements

A faster processor and more RAM are certainly better when it comes to video production, but the most significant area of potential trouble relates to disk requirements. Here's a quick example that illustrates how to estimate how much disk space you'll need for your projects.

Assume that you've shot 60 minutes of video that you want to edit down to a 30-minute production. You plan on including both a narration and background audio track, and will burn the result to DVD.

Table i.1, which presents a worst-case estimate of required disk space, assumes that you'll be applying edits to every single frame in the production footage. If you edit more sparingly, you'll need less space.

Table i.1. Calculating Disk Requirements

ITEM	DURATION	MB/MINUTE	TOTAL
Capture footage	60 minutes	216	12.96 GB
Production footage	30 minutes	216	6.48 GB
Narration track	30 minutes	10.5	315 MB
Background audio	30 minutes	10.5	315 MB
DVD files	30 minutes	60	1.8 GB
Total disk space required:			21.87 GB

In 1994, the required 22 GB would have cost close to $30,000, and your electrical bill would jump significantly. Today, you can buy an 80 GB drive for well under $100, a great investment if you plan on pursuing multiple editing projects.

Some Final Notes

All things in life involve some compromise; balanced against an exhaustive survey of new features like HDV and DVD camcorder compatibility was an onerous deadline and other things like two little girls who like seeing their Daddy every once in awhile. I think we hit the high points, but I wish we could have done more.

But I do have in my possession a brand new Sony HDR-FX1 camcorder, so HDV testing will come, and I plan to bum a DVD camcorder from Sony for the next round of PC Magazine and EventDV testing. Hey, I know there's a lot of you out there using these devices, and I want to be responsive.

So I plan to write a few how to's regarding new formats and some of the newer programs that will be showing up in the Studio family like Jasc Paint Shop Pro and Steinberg's WavLab audio editor. Please check www.doceo.com for these updates as time goes by in 2005 and beyond. Until then, thanks again for buying this book, and may all your movies have happy endings.