Got P Pro 1.5: what else am I going to need?

[rhinotwo]

I have used Premiere 6 intermittently for a few years, but recently decided to fire it up again. Since I'd forgotten what little I once knew I went browsing through the tutorials. Foolishly I peeked in the Pro section, big mistake, left me sorely disatisfied. So, in a fit of jealousy, I bought an OEM copy of Pro1.5 on e-Bay. It's legit enough I've checked with Adobe, but now having been doing more reading I'm wondering what else I'm going to need.

I have a 5 year old system, Asus A7V-133, 1.4GHz Athalon, 1Gb RAM and plenty of hard drive space, 230Gb free at the moment. The display adapter is Matrox Milleniun G450, and I also have an ADS Pyro capture card. The m/b, CPU and RAM I'll be updating, but what about the 450G and Pyro board, do they have to be replaced too?

I've read about the Matrox RT X10, is this a "must have" or "nice to have" item? One other thing...I saw somewhere that the CPU had to conform to some extra instruction set, ECC(?) Something like that, sorry to be a bit vague, can't find the reference now. Would the newer Athalon 64 X2 chips do?

 

[Akribie]

Have you tried installing yet? You may find that your slowish Athlon lacks the SSE2 instruction set which will cause the install program to abort, since PPro requires SSE2 instructions in the CPU. I think (check!) that current AMD processors mostly now support SSE2.

A good 3-D GPU on the graphics card with a reasonable amount of graphics memory is helpful for Premiere to use in RT rendering certain effects.

PPro natively captures and replays video through a FireWire port, but less well if that port is shared with a FireWire disk drive. Best to specify separate ports if you pan to use external FireWire drives with your system.

If you do not need to capture analogue, then IMO a capture card is a luxury unless you are doing complex things to tight commercial deadlines and can justify the expense. An alternative for analogue in/out is to use a camera or deck as a bridge, if you have one that supports this facility, rather than buying dedicated bridge hardware.

You would have to check with the manufacturer to see if the Pyro board has a PPro driver, since older drivers are unlikely to be compatible. The manufacturer's forum (if there is one) would be a good place to ask about this.

1Gb RAM is OK, but 2Gb is better if you plan to run more than one program (eg AE or PhotoShop) at the same time.

 

[rhinotwo]

Many thanks for your input. I already know that the old Athalon doesn't support SSE2, some other software that I tried to install a while ago aborted with a message to that effect. I believe that the newer 64 X2 chips do, the Videoguys did a face off between AMD & Intel (

http://www.videoguys.com/DIY4.html)

Will get on to Matrox about the G450. I have been struggling to get ananswer from ADS about the Pyro card, what pain their support site is, and sloooooow too.

Thanks again,

David