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CCWC Lusaka
Hewlett-Packard Helps CCMI Boost Performance

Randy Rike, a member of the CCMI Board of Trustees, was recently asked about the new HP xw8400 and 24” LCD monitors that have been added to the Avid department.

What is your involvement with Capital Christian Ministries International?
I’m a member of the Board of Trustees, USA Liaison Office. My official title is Director of Media & Technical, USA.

What all does that involve?
I research and procure anything technical, but my primary emphasis is providing assistance to the Media Ministries. I help them with video production and post-production.

We heard you have a new Avid Media Composer running on the HP xw8400. How’s that working?
The HP xw8400 has been an amazing addition to our department. Avid has a very short list of approved systems, and HP has been the premiere choice for many years. This is by far the fastest system I’ve ever worked on. It’s the same system that Avid uses for their top-of-line Symphony Nitris and DS Nitris HD editing systems. The cool thing is, if we upgrade our Avid, we can use the same computer.

Can you give us some examples of how that speed helps?
In video editing, there are several activities that traditionally waste a lot of time. The first is rendering. Avid provides a lot of Real Time effects, but a complex sequence still needs to be rendered, and the xw 8400 renders blindingly fast. It’s incredible to see the progress meter racing across the screen. We can literally finish a show sooner than on our other systems. This means we can spend more time on improving the look and quality of each episode.

Another painful part of video production is the encoding for DVD output. Again, the xw8400 churns out these files significantly faster that we’ve been used to. Since the system is tied up during encoding, the sooner we can get that done, the sooner we can get back to editing. The one resource we can’t buy more of is time … but the xw8400 has effectively done that!

From a technical standpoint, as an engineer, how do you like the system?
Expansion is always important to me. The xw8400 is the easiest system to service I’ve ever worked on. No tools, everything just snaps in. There’s room inside for several additional hard drives, and it takes about a minute to install one. As a bonus, the power supply can easily handle the additions. We also prefer to rack mount our systems, and HP offers a kit to do that. And, although we rarely require technical support, it’s comforting to know we have a 3-year warranty.