I’ve had another thread running for a few weeks “DISTORTED AUDIO IN TIMELINE – NOT FROM CLIPS” but we haven’t found a solution except that I need to replace my current PC. This was built especially for Studio 7 years ago and was set up with XP Professional but it appears it has become corrupted in some way. That, together with the demise of XP support, has meant that it’s time to upgrade again. I’ve already received some valuable advice from the experts in that thread but I’ve been advised to cast my net wider for more input before I take the plunge.

 

I’ve used PCSpecialist to specify the replacement and I’ll be ordering from them. Although my computer specialist neighbour will help me I’m not a techie and we’ve both agreed that it’ll be the best way to go. He’ll help with the setting up and transfer of programmes etc. My current probable spec for hardware is:-

Case: Corsair Carbide Series 300R Compact Gaming Case

Processor: i7 Quad core 4770 (3.4GHz) 8MB Cache

Motherboard:  ASUS H81M-E: Micro-ATX, LG1150, USB3.0, SATA 6GBs  (- N.B I’m waiting for more information from PCSpecialist but it seems that this does not have a PCI slot for a FireWire card, only the top of the range one does at an extra £70 – also see below)

Memory: 8GB KINGSTON DUAL-DDR3 1600MHz (1x8GB)

Graphics Card: 1GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 650 - DVI, mHDMI, VGA - 3D Vision Ready

Hard Disk: 1TB WD CAVIAR BLACK WD 1003FZEX, SATA 6Gb/s, 64MB CACHE (7200rpm)

Power Supply: CORSAIR 450W VS SERIES

Sound Card: ONBOARD 8 CHANNEL (5.1) HIGH DEF (AS STANDARD)

Software: SEE BELOW

PRICE (without software) £666 incl Silver Warranty, VAT & Delivery

RE FIREWIRE etc - I'm currently looking for a second hand Pinnacle Movie Box which I understand will replace the need for my DC10+ card (for downloading my old analogue Hi-8 tapes) and also allow me to download my current digital tape videos from my current Sony camera, but a FireWire card would allow me to continue downloading video until I can get one, as well as acting as a connection for my external WD hard drive which operates better that way than via USB although I can use that if necessary. Later I may upgrade my video camera to an HD one so I’ll need to take that into account too.

SOFTWARE

W7 - according to Microsoft, W7 Professional has much greater compatibility with many programmes designed for XP which I currently have. £109 i/o £79 for Home Premium – some have advised that Home Premium is satisfactory but PCS have stated that I should go for W7 Professional - does anyone else have any experience/knowledge of XP programmes on W7?

OFFICE - I currently use Office XP Professional. This includes Outlook which I use all the time. I have a very big library of retained e-mails including ones with important information including user codes etc for software products and other useful information as well as a useful calendar where I store all my activities so I will need to keep it. I’ve been told that to do that I would need to buy Office Home & Business 2013 at £159 i/o £85 for Home & Student; a big difference but I don’t see any way around that.

Any more advice would be appreciated before I take the plunge!

(edited to remove formatting codes - if you paste from some text editors or WPs these can be quite disruptive but can be removed by switching to the HTML tab)

The motherboard has two PCIe slots (https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/H81ME/#specifications) and PCIe firewire cards are available for considerably less than £80

Hi, nice to see you over here too!

According to the latest e-mail from PCSpecialist the graphics card covers the PCI slot on that motherboard so it won't take their FireWire card (although I'm getting mixed messages from them because an earlier e-mail seemed to indicate that you could - I'm waiting for more info). Their own FireWire card costs about £10 but when I submitted the draft spec for checking it stated that a FireWire card couldn't be used with that motherboard. Re-checking with their other motherboards showed that only the top end one could accept a FireWire card and that cost an extra £70. That's where the £80 came from, £70 extra for a bigger motherboard and £10 for the card. At the moment I can't see any way around that, even with a different FW card but I'm not happy to pay that much.

The board appears to have three slots 1 x PCIe x16 (for the graphics card) and 2 x PCIe 2.0 x1. The graphics card is double width and therefore masks one of the slots, but I'm surprised it masks both slots. But they should know :-) - it's possible they fit another card for something else?

So, you could go for a cheaper/smaller graphics card that doesn't require so much room, or even none at all. The slot is there if you decided to upgrade and the onboard HD 4000 series graphics will be usable for video editing. Unless you are a secret Call of Duty player....

However, as I said in the other thread, you won't detect any difference whether your external HDD is connected by firewire or USB 2.0 when editing (despite what some people say) and when you get your USB moviebox, that will cover the capture issue. If you aren't willing to accept that the firewire HDD connection isn't significantly better than USB 2.0, then the other thing to think about is a new USB 3.0 connected external HDD - which will outperform any firewire by a considerable margin. I just bought a 2Tbyte usb 3.0 portable drive of £90 - only £10 more than you are thinking about paying to add a firewire card. How big is your old external drive?

 

Oh - it looks like the fan of the graphics card might be the issue - seems like overkill to me.

Not being a techie, I went for that graphics card after seeing what others seemed to be using on both this and the PCS Forum. I don't do gaming so maybe I could consider another one.

Just to clarify, I have a 1TB WD My Book Studio Edition external hard drive and the reason I prefer connecting it to the PC via a FireWire card is more for convenience than speed. When I had to connect it via a USB2 recently it behaved differently. Instead of shutting down and starting up automatically with the computer it had to be switched on and off manually. It's not located in the most convenient location and when I didn't switch it on quickly enough my Kaspersky Internet Security thought it was a new addition and started a scan. So far it's only 1/2 full with all my back-ups and over 280GB of downloaded digital video so I don't want to change it or add to it yet.

I followed your suggestion in the other thread and set up a search for a Pinnacle Studio Movie Box to replace my DC10+ card and my existing FireWire card for downloading video from both my analogue and digital camera tapes but so far only items in the US have come up and the postage etc seems exorbitant, so that is why at £9 I decided to add a FireWire card to my new PC spec so that I could at least continue my DV downloads for the time being as well as connecting the WD My Book. P.S. will a Movie Box handle HD video if I upgrade my camera in future?

I've just done a another search of motherboard and graphics card combinations on PC Specialist's website and it seems that even if I go for the lowest spec NVIDIA card you cannot fit a FireWire card unless you specify the most expensive motherboard! They don't seem to offer any option, but as I've said before, I'm loathe to pay that much extra. As you say, I could add another large external drive for that.

P.S. will a Movie Box handle HD video if I upgrade my camera in future?

Unless you buy an HDV camera, no. But any other type of HD camera will be file based and you can simply transfer the video via USB, much faster than real time.

Is there any reason why you need the Micro ATX motherboard apart from the size of the box. A standard ATX board might have more room to fit the firewire card.

There is no particular need for a micro ATX motherboard. I simply chose it because it seemed to meet all my other specification needs. PC Specialist offers 4 motherboards for the i7 CPU. When I checked the other 3 boards only the most expensive at +£70 had any PCI slots available with any of the NVIDIA graphic cards fitted. My anticipated cost has already reached £943 with software so I wanted to avoid an extra £70 just to get a PCI slot for a FireWire card. 

as has been said before, you need not get a video card initially -- Ivy Bridge Intel MB graphics are likely sufficient for your current (and foreseeable) needs.

Adding one later is not difficult should you choose.

ALso -- MANY folks have had major trouble getting FIrewire importing to work properly on Win 7, 8 systems (me included).

In my case rather than mess with this issue, I simply reverted to using my Vista PC for the odd HDV import.

 

For safety sake, am I right in assuming therefore that the motherboard has it's own in-built graphics card and that it would be suitable for my needs? That hasn't been cleat to me before and every PC spec I've looked at has an NVIDIA graphics card specified so I thought I had to do so too.

My video downloads are from a camera using digital tapes and not HDV, also I don't have another PC to use. Do you think a FireWire with W7 would be able to import those tapes?

If I were you, I would initially forego getting a discreet video card. (just be sure your MB has an available x16 PCIe slot).

Some folks get their firewire imports to work by reverting to a legacy Firewire driver.  That didn't work for me.  

And since I needed the slot for something else and had a alternate import path --  I yanked the card and moved on.

 

Right - here is the problem - yes you can specify a computer from PCSpecialists that doesn't have a graphics card, but even if you do, it won't let you add a firewire card - and that's because they are specifying a PCI firewire card, not a PCI-e card. Note the "e". The cheaper motherboards don't have the older (non-"e") slots, and it looks like they don't stock PCI-e firewire cards. These cards DO exist.

So, contact them directly and ask them if they could fit a PCI-e firewire card. With an "e"

I said earlier in this thread "So, you could go for a cheaper/smaller graphics card that doesn't require so much room, or even none at all. The slot is there if you decided to upgrade and the onboard HD 4000 series graphics will be usable for video editing. Unless you are a secret Call of Duty player...." I'll go one step further and say that until you move up the AVCHD video, with the latest intel HD onboard/onchip graphics you really don't need a graphics card. and even when you do, it's not actually essential.

Installing firewire on W7 can be problematic, as BARYE says. You might need to get the builders to check out the drivers for you. But they offer it as an option and most people seem have got them to work eventually.

jjn:

Right - here is the problem - yes you can specify a computer from Specialists that doesn't have a graphics card, but even if you do, it won't let you add a firewire card - and that's because they are specifying a PCI firewire card, not a PCI-e card. Note the "e". The cheaper motherboards don't have the older (non-"e") slots, and it looks like they don't stock PCI-e firewire cards. These cards DO exist.

So, contact them directly and ask them if they could fit a PCI-e firewire card. With an "e"

I said earlier in this thread "So, you could go for a cheaper/smaller graphics card that doesn't require so much room, or even none at all. The slot is there if you decided to upgrade and the onboard HD 4000 series graphics will be usable for video editing. Unless you are a secret Call of Duty player...." I'll go one step further and say that until you move up the AVCHD video, with the latest intel HD onboard/onchip graphics you really don't need a graphics card. and even when you do, it's not actually essential.

Installing firewire on W7 can be problematic, as BARYE says. You might need to get the builders to check out the drivers for you. But they offer it as an option and most people seem have got them to work eventually.

(_!_)ing-in

Mike's PC Spec has Haswell CPU Intel HD 5000 Integrated Graphics:

Up to 20% performance increase over the integrated HD4000 GPU

(_!_)ing-out 

I mistakenly mentioned the 4000 graphics because that's what my machines have. Obviously the 5000 series are even better, but I don't have direct experience of using them. (in both cases the GPU is integrated into the CPU, not the motherboard)

I'm still waiting for a reply from PCS but as you say, their FireWire card doesn't appear to be suitable even if I don't specify a graphics card. I've had another look at the Amazon site you suggested earlier and this one looks like a good choice. Your confirmation would be appreciated - 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Firewire-PCI-E-IEEE1394-PCI-Express-Card/dp/B006VVWS3E/ref=sr_1_3?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1387807922&sr=1-3&keywords=firewire+pci+express+card

For future reference, I presume PCIe means PCI Express?

yup -- PCIe means PCI Express.

And that card looks ok.

Getting a FW card to work properly in Win 7 can be tricky. Device manager might tell you that all drivers are working properly, but you won't be able to import...

 

That unit was very highly rated by 7 users who all said it was easy to install with plug & play on W7/8 computers and worked well downloading video from Sony camcorders (which I have). As there were only a few left I've ordered one. Thanks for your advice.

As I haven't yet been able to find a UK based e-Bay Movie Box I've been trying to experiment with my old DC10+ card in the hope that I could download all my old Hi-8 tapes before I get my new PC but I've not used it or the camera for years and I've run into more problems. So I've checked e-Bay again and although there are still only US based products available I saw this one and wondered if it might be suitable. Even with postage and duty it only comes to about £45 and it's new so it looks reasonable, but there seem to be many different models. Does anyone know this particular version and/or have any knowledge of buying from the US? Would it even work on a UK spec PC? I'd need it to download my old Hi-8 tapes as well as my current digital video tapes from my Sony cameras and perhaps later from a more modern digital video camera (although I understand some can now be downloaded more directly).

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/NEW-Pinnacle-Studio-MovieBox-HD-8230-10067-71-USB-2-0-Interface-SHIP-NEXT-DAY-/251412149455?pt=US_Video_Capture_TV_Tuner_Cards&hash=item3a8954f4cf

Yes, that's fine. It's also less than I paid for one in the UK - and they retailed at about £90.

What is the make and model number of your old XP Computer.

You said that your XP computer became corrupted. Have you tried reformatting your XP computer again to see if it may work again. If your Hard Drive is giving up on your XP computer you can just buy a new Hard Drive and install all programs in it. I still use XP for my video editings and  I know I have a few months for support to end, but if XP still works and my programs runs ok, there is no problem for me to use (I don't use the internet too often on XP at this time). I also have purchased the W7 disc for my computer, but since this Holiday times I have not had the time to install it in my computer yet. 

Right, I received my FireWire PCIe card from Amazon today and I've just ordered the MovieBox at £44 including post and duty etc., so I'm getting there, only the main PC spec to finalise and then I can order it. If anyone has anything to add to my earlier spec I'd be grateful to hear it.

2 more people who are knowledgeable in computers but not in Studio 12 have advised that I'd be better off with Win8 rather than 7 (mostly because of its longer life) but as far as I have been able to tell from this Forum, 7 will be better for Studio and those XP programmes I want to keep. Any more thoughts on that out there?

Regarding my current XP computer it doesn't have a make or model number as I had it built especially for me to do Studio editing 7 years ago. Someone who specialised then in building computer editing PC's did it for me but I no longer have contact with them. How far the computer is corrupted is difficult to say but  do have lots of little problems here and there although I can still use it for every day jobs and the internet etc. I personally have no knowledge of computer innards or software so there's no way I would attempt to modify it. Also, I think everyone on this Forum has agreed that it (and XP) is past it's sell by date and it's time I bit the bullet and bought a new one. PC Specialist seem a really good source to build one to my specification following all the valuable advice I'm getting here and I'd rather then get my knowledgeable neighbour to transfer those programmes etc I want to keep. I'd be very frightened that anything I do by fiddling with it might end up with me actually losing lots of things I want to keep. And I want to limit the amount of time I request from the neighbour because i know he won't accept any payment for his valuable time.

VideoMike123:

Right, I received my FireWire PCIe card from Amazon today and I've just ordered the MovieBox at £44 including post and duty etc., so I'm getting there, only the main PC spec to finalise and then I can order it. If anyone has anything to add to my earlier spec I'd be grateful to hear it.

2 more people who are knowledgeable in computers but not in Studio 12 have advised that I'd be better off with Win8 rather than 7 (mostly because of its longer life) but as far as I have been able to tell from this Forum, 7 will be better for Studio and those XP programmes I want to keep. Any more thoughts on that out there?

Regarding my current XP computer it doesn't have a make or model number as I had it built especially for me to do Studio editing 7 years ago. Someone who specialised then in building computer editing PC's did it for me but I no longer have contact with them. How far the computer is corrupted is difficult to say but  do have lots of little problems here and there although I can still use it for every day jobs and the internet etc. I personally have no knowledge of computer innards or software so there's no way I would attempt to modify it. Also, I think everyone on this Forum has agreed that it (and XP) is past it's sell by date and it's time I bit the bullet and bought a new one. PC Specialist seem a really good source to build one to my specification following all the valuable advice I'm getting here and I'd rather then get my knowledgeable neighbour to transfer those programmes etc I want to keep. I'd be very frightened that anything I do by fiddling with it might end up with me actually losing lots of things I want to keep. And I want to limit the amount of time I request from the neighbour because i know he won't accept any payment for his valuable time.

 get my knowledgeable neighbour to transfer those programmes etc I want to keep

It's early days for doing that, Mike. However you need to make a note to leave S12 Installation until last, having got the correct procedure from the Forum, because|:

1) Your S12 is an Upgrade from S10.

2) One of your previous Posts states that you had problems Installing S12 without having S10 Installed, via the Insert S10 Program Disk Shift Key method. & Installed S10 instead.

3) S10 won't Install on W7 without applying S10 Vista (Same as W7) Installer first. That "may" not still be available for Download from Pinnacle/Corel.

4) You don't want S10 Installed if you can help it. If you do, you need to do a Custom Install & choose not Install InstantDVD Recorder & MediaManager/Server ("Two" of the causes of your original problems).

5) S12 Program Disk gives the option of NOT Installing IDVDR, without having to do a Custom Install. MediaManager/Server was scrapped with either S11 or S12.

6) If you purchased any "Premium" Content other than that supplied with S10/S12, you need to Copy S12 Pixie Folder & Save it for Pasting into the new S12 Installation on your new PC.

7) If you did purchase Premium Content, you need to Keep S10 "Bonus" Content DVD, using that for Transferring Content to S12, via S12 Content Transfer Wizard.

You can see from the above that there are a number of things to consider before & during S12 Installation., So leave it to us.

I'll keep an eye on your progress & walk you through the Installation when the time comes.

You're a star! I'd already started wondering how I'd install S12 knowing the problems I'd had with the last reinstall when I'd had to install S10 first. I have a very bad memory so I've copoied al your comments above and I'll definitely ask for more instructions when the time comes. Hope your presentation is going well.