Video Editing System

[Maj]

I'm not sure if this is the right board to be asking this but since I've gotten some good help before:

A few buddies of mine are going to be filming a documentary with digital videotape and a fairly sophisticated video camera. They'll want to upload their footage to a computer where they can both edit it with some pretty high-end software and back it up on DVD.

My Mac buddies laud their machine's prominence in the audio/video editing world (a boast I don't contend), but they own G4/5's, my Jr. Spielberg friends don't. They do, however, own PC's. Anyone know what PC specs are best suited for video editing?

 

[IceBlaZe]

You just need a fireware entrance (better if it comes with a video editing card), some decent software and plenty of hard drive space.
The rest of the stuff - the more the better. The faster your CPU and the more memory you have - the faster the rendering process will be. It will (probably) still take hours though.
I rendered DV Video for DVD using a moderate computer (1.33Ghz Athlon, 512MB Memory, 80GB 8MB 7200RPM HD) and one hour of video took 8 hours to render.
I assume that if you look at Video Editing websites, those will have their recommendations.
I'll try and search for some.

 

[Jeratain]

Yeah what he said.

Firewire is a must. RAM is a must. Processing power is a must. HD access isn't all that important, but it can help, so if your friends are very serious, then consider setting up a a SATA or RAID0 configuration.

 

[VimesUK]

Each to their own but I do not believe that SATA or RAID are important to video capture, editing or conversion for it to be a success.

I capture using Firewire and a ATA 100 drive (both a 7200 and a 5400) and there are ZERO frame drops - even my ATA 66 drive is fine.

Memory and CPU, along with a NT based OS so that the file size limitations of FAT32 can be overcome - without any workarounds, is pretty important and a large hard drive for space.

If you capture and edit in DV and then save it in that format then only the transitions and the titles or music etc added will take the time when converting to your latest epic.

I tend to find that all the above work is done by Pinnacle Studio 8 and if I want to convert it to another file format than DV then TMPGenc is my choice, although Canopus Decoder is the dogs danglies.

Pinnacle 8 is not expensive but is as good as others found in that price range avaialble today.


Morgan

 

[JonathanValjean]

I do quite a bit of video editing myself, using Pinnacle Studio 8, as well as some other tools. The main thing I would recommend after a relatively new processor (2 Ghz or more) is a sizable chunk of memory, at least 1 GB. This speeds things up dramatically, due to the substantial decrease in hard drive seeking. The more memory, the better.