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Video Editing Hardware Requirements..

T

Taejin

Moderator<br>Love & Relationships
I have a friend who would like to build a computer for video editing - for example, he would like to record video on his camcorder and be able to edit it (simple editing cut/paste)

I am not really aware of what is needed for this. I would like to elucidate the fact that he is not doing heavy-duty video encoding or anything of the sort. He would simply like to be able to take videos from his camcorder and save the parts he would like as .mpeg/.avi type files.

What are the bare minimum to middle-class hardware for this kind of operation? Thanks for any advice -

UPDATE:
My friend's limit is tentatively $1000.

All he wants to be able to do is use it part of the time as a HTPC (ie hook it up to a TV and watch movies and such) and be able to do simple editing of videos.

We were just wondering exactly what is needed in order to do this - should he just get an ATi AIW? And does the video card affect video editing/encoding?

No gaming either.

Thanks for any further help - you guys are a wellspring of knowledge.


Taejin
 
Frankly, if he has any reasonably new computer, he probably just needs a way to get the video in there, editing software, and authoring software and a DVD burner (if you want to burn things to DVD).

If it's a DV camera, get a Firewire (IEEE1394) card. Otherwise, you'll need a video capture card (search for tons of threads about them). Having a faster CPU will just speed up encoding operations.

You will need a LOT of hard drive space. Video files are huge (somewhere from 3-10GB/hour, depending on the quality and type of video).
 
Lots of HDD space. DV takes about 13GB/hour, then you need to about double that when editing (non destructive) and encoding, so figure at least 30GB to work with an hour of video without major IO slow downs.

Also as said above, just about any fairly modern CPU will handle it, just that older slower CPUs will be, well slower. If you've got time or can let it render/encode overnight then no problem. But if you want to apply an effect to a large clip and then preview it before doing something else then speed could matter.

Get the fastest processor you can afford, at least 1GB of ram and as much HDD space as you can afford, unless you only plan to work with about 1 hour of DV at at time.

Good luck
 
Like kini's system!!!!!


I am fine for the little actually DV stuff I do. I do like my rator drive for OS and application (70-80% free)...then another large drive for storage...I need to upgrade my 80gb to something like 160-250 range....
 
My friend's limit is tentatively $1000.

All he wants to be able to do is use it part of the time as a HTPC (ie hook it up to a TV and watch movies and such) and be able to do simple editing of videos.

We were just wondering exactly what is needed in order to do this - should he just get an ATi AIW? And does the video card affect video editing/encoding?

Thanks for any further help - you guys are a wellspring of knowledge.
 
What you need in addition to the hardware above is a software editing package - such as the Pinnacle Studio 9 or Adobe Premiere Pro 7. These products and a few others, including stuff from Cyberlink & Sony will allow editing of DV video, prepare menus and burn DVDs.

If you dont want to spend the money buying software, then Microdoft offers a free software, Movie Maker 2, which along with products such as Nero Vision Express (Part of the Nero suite) offer basic editing functionality.
 
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