Reclaimer – A Halo 3 Comic

Some of you know that I recently acquired a new desktop computer that I’ve set aside to be my dedicated video capture and editing machine. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been working on rigging it out properly in order to get the most out of it. For those interested, here’s the basic technical specs:

Gateway LX6810-01
Intel® Core™2 Quad Processor10 Q8200 (2.33GHz, 1333MHz FSB, 4MB L2 cache)8
Genuine Microsoft® Windows Vista® Home Premium (64-bit) with SP11
8192MB 800MHz DDR2 Dual Channel Memory (4×2048MB Modules)9
Hard Drive 640GB 7200RPM SATA II hard drive with 16MB Cache4
8-Channel (7.1) High Definition Audio with Dolby Home Theater® Sound
Maximum 8GB
Systemboard with NVIDIA® nForce® 720i Chipset (MCP7A-D)
NVIDIA® GeForce® GT120 Graphics with 1GB DDR2 Total Video Memory9

In addition, I added a Blackmagic Design Intensity Pro video capture card and installed the Adobe Creative Suite 4 Production Premium bundle. All together, it’s one powerful machine.

My first capture tests started out well – the first four game videos I captured spooled off perfectly – but then the capture sequence started to lag, hang, and ultimately abort prematurely. A little research revealed that my hard drive wasn’t fast enough to keep up with the HD video being captured to it. Fortunately, this computer has built-in expansion slots for a RAID array, so my next task was to select and acquire two hard drives for that purpose. A little more research, and I chose two 300GB Western Digital Velociraptor disks, which clock in at 10,000 RPMs, 16MB cache, and 3Gb/s data transfer. A quick hot-swap, a RAID 0 config (128K stripe), and I suddenly have a VERY fast hard drive.

As I write, I’ve got Adobe Premiere capturing video footage, and so far there’s been no hesitation or problems. If all goes well, my computer will continue to function at a high rate, and I can really start to think about what I need to do to start work on a Reclaimer machinima.