Video Editing Build/Buy advice

[xchecker]

My son enjoys creating and editing videos but the older PCs we have built (one WinXP and the other Ubuntu) at home with dual core processors and 2GBs of RAM struggle with the loads.

Where do we need to put our focus when upgrading, building or buying a PC primarily for video editing use? Is it the processor, RAM or something else? What minimums would you suggest, especially for today's large HD videos?

And if you have a favored editing software suggestion I'll take that too!

Thanks.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

IO, IO, IO.

If you can get a dual something, get a dual. If you can get a quad something, get a quad. If you can get a RAID of something, get a RAID. It doesn't even have to be as fast as humanely possible, provided you have a lot of them.

Minimum? 6 or 8 GB of ram (depending on whether it's dual or triple channel) Striped raid for scratch/editing disk. (Most will recommend SSD boot, but for this I don't think it's as important.)

The price premium for an i7 may be worth it, but just make sure you're getting a quad core, not a dualie. I'd go Intel unless you really need to save money.

The good new is that the GPU doesn't matter as much. Some editing suites will use the GPU to render realtime effects when previewing, and that's nice, but the exports will still be using the CPU.

If you find yourself spending a lot of time converting to different formats, there are GPU-accelerated video converters, too. But that sort of thing I usually just cue up and go to bed anyway.

 

[Ken g6]

I suggest...that you answer [thread=80121]these questions[/thread].

I personally have liked using AviSynth; but, then, I'm a computer programmer.

 

[xchecker]

At this point I'm really just looking for advice as to which components in general are most important to a successful video editing build. Once I understand that I may repost with a traditional query about a specific build and components.

AviSynth looks interesting BTW, thanks!

 

[Charlie98]

Correct me if I'm wrong... but wouldn't an i3 (2125) or i5 (650) with HT be the way to go? It's not like this is a commercial application... Maybe a 128GB or 256SSD and 16GB RAM...?

 

[mfenn]

At this point I'm really just looking for advice as to which components in general are most important to a successful video editing build. Once I understand that I may repost with a traditional query about a specific build and components.

AviSynth looks interesting BTW, thanks!

Dave the nerd is pretty much right on in his analysis. First, you want to have enough RAM to fit the working set of your project into memory (i.e. no swapping to disk). How much this is depends of what you're doing, but 8GB is a good starting point. Next, you want to have as fast of a disk array as you can reasonably afford. Finally, you want to get as fast of a CPU as you can with the remaining budget.

 

[xchecker]

Your replies will help me get started. I'll come back with a new thread once I narrow down the specific budget and potential components.

Appreciate the advice here as always!