Video editing-what PC setup?

JackieChan

Guys,
I'm looking to get in to video editing seriously.
The spec for the machine that I'm looking to put together would
1)P4 3Ghz 1Mb cache
2)1Gb of PC3200 memory
3)250/300Gb Sata drive
4)not sure of the graphics card that would be best, any advice?
5)I think the on-board sound would be sufficent

Any advice/comments on this setup?

I'm looking to buy Adobe premiere 1.5. Is there any other video-editing package that would be comparable/better than this?

thanks
JC

Lump

Of course there are better... but with quality comes money. I would Advise getting Pinnacle Edition Pro 6.1 (I think is the current version) It's about £400 but is the daddy. You get the cards you need with it and a breakout box. Also Avid have just bought pinnacle, so it's bound to get better, apparently.

John

angelofdeath

i can recommend vegas as an alternative, but premier is just as good, the gfx card won't be as important so you can skimp on that and maybe get larger drive(s)

the setup is fine, maybe a 9800, you can pick one up pretty cheap these days or if you have the money to spend id recommend a 6800LE (250yoyos), which can be unlocked to gt speeds rediculously easily

reece

Depends on the amount of money you've got to spend. I'm getting into it seriously aswell. I'm going for a machine with 2 hard disks, 4 gigs of ram,
and dual p4 3.2ghz processors . If you can bump up the ram, i'd definitely recommend doing that and go for 2 hard disks - One for your installed software and one for your data (captured footage etc....).

Lump

4 gigs of ram... What a waste. A 1 - 1.5 gigs is enough. TBH it depends on what editing software you get. Pinnacle uses the graphics card to render etc etc.

John

Lump

Also the drives you have will get ample DV footage (Compressed at about 5.7:1) on them. I have a 200 gig drive and I had plenty of space to edit an hour film. Digitised about 13 hours footage.

John

JackieChan

Thanks guys.
On another post, it is recommended to have seperate disks for source and destination of video. Do you think there is much merit in this?
So would one disk for installed apps and source video and one disk for destination to best way to go. I suppose if money is no object then there must be a performance benedfit by not having read/writes happening on the same disk when you could have exclusive reads on one and exclusive writes on another when creating output.
Can anybody compare the two disk setup to the one disk situation?
Ta
JC

Furp

Over the weekend I just installed a second HDD on my Pc, I'm using Pinnacle Studio 9.

Its made a huge difference, editing is a lot quicker and creating DVD images also has a performance increase.

The way I'd set it up is that the Software and OS etc are alll installed on the first Drive C: and then the second drive is used exclusivley for the captured footage and creating the new DV, mpeg avi files.

Also your editing software could be set up to use the second drive for its temporary files.

reece

Lump wrote:

4 gigs of ram... What a waste. A 1 - 1.5 gigs is enough. TBH it depends on what editing software you get. Pinnacle uses the graphics card to render etc etc.
John

anyone worth their socks will tell ya - bump up the ram - 1.5 gig - enough ? not really (especially when running XP) - I currently have 1.256 gig and crash all the time on large projects.

2 hard disks reason not based on space requirements but performance -
when rendering

Lump

Well, I work in the BBC, and having edited an hour film from Dv and a 1.25 hour film from dv, each with at least 13 hours of rushes, I can tell you that pinnacle Pro Edition handles them fine. Also I'm running Avid Express Pro, and It's running fine. on a 3 Ghz 1 Gig of ram... and as I said Pinnacle edition uses the GPU (Grahpics Processing Unit " Graphics Card" as its rending source"

Also the Avid Media Composers only have 512 Megs of ram and all of the stuff you watch on the BBC is edited on them.

John

JackieChan

angelofdeath,
You say that a 9800 would be enough. Is this the 9800SE,9800 or 9800Pro.
JC

angelofdeath

id go for the pro or xt