Choppy Video - need new cheap card.

Howdy all.

I am having a little trouble editing HD video on my current computer and I am assuming it is due to my video card.

I have a Canon M30 camcorder that records 1080P - footage looks great on the camera and when played on my PS3 directly from the SD card.

However, when I import it to either my desktop or laptop, the video is incledible choppy, with whatever player I use (VLC, WMP or Adobe Premiere).

Current PC -
Phenom II 720 BE @ 3.3GHz (200x16.5)
ASUS M4A78-E
8gb G.Skill PC8500 5-5-5-15
7950GT (650/1600)

I also have an onboard ATI Radeon HD 3300 - I took the 7950 out and used that, same results...

I really do not play a lot of games nowadays so I don't really care too much about gaming performance. I mean, my 7950GT sufices my gaming needs so anything better then that is gravy.


I am looking for a good VIDEO EDITING card that can handle 24 Mbps 1080P 60i videos well, gaming being secondary.

I am trying to stick to a $150 budget since my 3rd kid arrives in a month, all extra cash is going that way =).

PS - Blu-Ray movies play perfect from drive, even the ones I made from the camcorder footage!

Would something like this work? GTS 250
Thanks a lot in advance!

I can tell you right now, you absolutely do not need a new video card.

I think you have a misunderstanding of how the video card plays into the whole process. There really isn't any such thing as a "video editing" card... the encoding is done entirely by the main CPU. Playback can be done by the video card, if you use a video card that supports the hardware acceleration (your IGP does, the 7950 doesn't) and a player that is capable of using it (none of the players you listed).

But I'm still not quite clear what exactly the problem is... movies are choppy when played from a file on your hard drive, but they play smoothly if you burn them and play them from your BluRay drive? What player are you using to play them from the BluRay drive?

Thanks for the quick reply - you are correct, I am unfamiliar when it comes to how the video card interacts with editing movies.

To answer your question, when I burn a BR disk and play it back on the PC, I used PowerDVD. Playback of either store bought BR films of the ones I burned are perfect.

What I am trying to do is edit the videos, add transitions, menus, effects, etc. When I open the files (.mts), using either Adobe Premiere, VLC or WMP, the playback is basically unwatchable, fells very choppy and looks like it skips frames.

This happens when I play it from any of my 3 hard drives or directly form the SDHC card itself. If its not the video card, what could it be?

I was under the impression that a tri-core cpu and 8GB or ram would be sufficient to play/encode HD video, no?

OH!! And video from my Canon 7D in HD as well plays fine but the camera is too freaking complicated to use as a dedicated video camera. Awesome pictures though.

bump? any ideas?

Honestly, I have no clue... you're right that your CPU should have no troubles encoding/playing back the video, even if hardware acceleration isn't used. Choppiness in VLC I can understand, since VLC sucks at h.264 in general, but I would think Premiere would be a bit more efficient at it, at the very least.

The only thing I can think of is that maybe that camera uses a troublesome or slightly out-of-spec encoding profile, which gets fixed when the video is re-encoded to a BluRay compliant form.