Play/Edit uncompressed 1080p video

What are the hardware requirements (or minimal requirements) to play/edit 1080p video? What hardware parts are affected the most during this task?

I am planning to do this soon but I am worried since streaming Hulu and zshare videos (not high def) in fullscreen makes my computer lag....

My computer is a Gateway p-7801u (essentially the same as a p-7805u/p7811fx but with a WUXGA screen).

 

To simply play, not so high - some netbooks can now do this.

To edit uncompressed 1080p video? lol...

You need a high end Quad Core or better, i7/i9 with RAID0 SSD based storage system and the proper software along with a pro or ultimate Win 7 x64 version. Along with at least 8GB or more of fast RAM.

If you want to edit in 'real time'.

So in order of importance:

O/S: Win 7 x64 Pro or greater.
MEM: 8GB RAM or greater.
CPU: i7/i9 Quad Core CPU.
STORAGE: RAID0 arrays (multiple) RAID1 arrays SSD's preferred, SCSI second choice, VRaptors last choice for O/S and Scratch Disk/Temp File use. For Data storage; at least 4 Terabyte HD's in two RAID1 arrays.

We were talking about a desktop, right?

On a notebook, something like an M6500 with RAM maxed out (16GB) and two or three (can't remember if they'll do three) SSD's on the highest end i7 they offer. Don't really know if this system will do uncompressed 1080p video editing in real time though...

Good luck.

 

Very few desktops will edit uncompressed HD. Most editing tools I've seen edit the compressed streams any more.

 

like 99% of HD content on the internet is compressed.

 

Play uncompressed 1080p video: All you need is a very big hard drive... Playing uncompressed 1080p video is computationally easier than playing a low quality Youtube video since no decoding is required. Of course, as surfasb said, you'll never find an uncompressed video.

Editing uncompressed 1080p video: What tilleroftheearth said.

 

SATAII interface isn't fast enough to play 1080P uncompressed videos. So even if you have 100 SSDs in RAID 0 on SATAII interface connected to your laptop, you will not be able to play or edit uncompressed 1080p video.

 

You are quite wrong there. Each drive has a SataII connection. Add them up (RAID0 is parallel, not serial) and you'll easily get to where you need.

Trust me.

How do you think HD content gets made anyway? lol...

What I want to see is a notebook with 100 SATA2 connections... I was talking about a desktop, of course, for the RAID0 setup.

Cheers!

 

Thanks for the detailed response. That's a lot of money right there. So my laptop would be crushed by this huh...

On your list, you had OS as the most important piece of hardware, but would it really make a big difference going from x64 Vista to Win7?

Oh, and why didn't you mention GPU in the hardware?

 

Any laptop would be crushed by this. Unless if you work in Hollywood, I don't see why this even matters.

 

Each drive is a sataII connnection and is parallel, but there's a limit to how fast all of those SATAII connection combined can work. There's a predefined limit of data transfer speed on the link between southbridge and northbridge and the cpu. Thus if you have 100SATAII in RAID0, the speed will be capped significantly.

HD content is always compressed. Even in the industry, professional camera shoots in compressed format. 1080P video at 60P is about 1GB/s. A full length uncompressed movie at 120minutes would take 7000GB of space the store it.

 

You are still wrong. They may not scale perfectly linear, but they do scale well - with appropriate RAID cards.

Also, who needs a stinking North bridge with i7/i9's?

I don't know which professional camera you are referring to: I'm referencing a RED.

Cheers!

 

check this benchmark:

http://ppbm5.com/Benchmark5.html

its from a group of professional and enthusiast users of premiere pro cs5.
they use dual hexacores, dual quads, and hexacores mostly. they use 12gig on average and at the very, very least use 2 fast hdds (i dont think you can raid ssds other than raid 0, could be wrong tho), but most use multi disk arrays. a lot of them also use the new nvidia gtx-480 to help in realtime rendering via mercury engine gpu acceleration.
these are production level workstations, but you get the idea.

 

what kind of software are you planning to use for your editing work?

 

for your laptop i suggest you use power director of sony vegas pro. uses so much less than adobe products

 

I have worked with uncompressed 1080p (raw FRAPS recordings with compression off) my G73 can handle it and play it fine.

Not sure why somebody said some netbooks could play it... thats not true lol (not without hardware rendering assistance via gpu & codec)

Generally I would encode the stream to a virtually lossless state (high quality x264 settings) and then edit it. When sending the video from the editor I send it out with a lossless format like HuffYUV or Lagareth and then encode to x264 again because the video editors cant do nearly as good a job encoding as the stand alone tools can.

 

We recently upgraded to Media Composer 5 at my office. I haven't played around with it much yet, but my understanding is that it handles native RED raw files in a way that lets you work with 2k, 3k and 4k RED files natively, but downscales the playback to 1080p frame size while you are working. Basically for us it just means we don't have to go through the step of preparing the files with Metafuze, etc.