Video Editing System

[DrCool]

Does anyone have experience with Video editing on the PC, and/or can reccomend a good hardware combination: CPU/Mobo/Capture Device.... looking in the 1,500 - 2,000 level for the entire system

thanks

 

[junthin]

Good video editing PC would be a dual PIII or Dual AMD with U2W or U160 SCSI hard drives.

If that's too expensive, then stick to a fast AMD chip (1.4Ghz).

What kind of video editing will you be doing? Short clips or insanely long movie stuff?

 

[The Stigenator]

actually the biggest bottle necks in video editing is the video card, amount of RAM and disk speeds.. your processor doesnt do much, unless your rendering stuff.. in that case its good to have a speedy processor.. even so it doesnt take long to render.

I work for a production company so I know this stuff. But we built a video editing system for home with a single AMD 1ghz (it was a while back that we built it) with a 45GB IBM as our video capture drive. It was an all IDE array and did very well.

Just make sure you got enough ram, we put in 512MB and its just about enough. We are using a ATI Radeon VIVO 64MB for a video card.

So for about 2K you can build a decent IDE subsystem based video editing box. Just make sure you got the DMA and all conflicts taken care off. With the Radeon and VIA there are lots of conflicts.. prefer you go the intel method.. would be more stable .. especially under W2K.

 

[jmcoreymv]

I think Id generally go with an Intel based system for video editing because of all the conflicts (video capture cards arent exactly the most forgiving devices). Anyways with that said I have an AMD 1.33 ghz 256 DDR system using an MSI K7 Master and Win2000. The capture card is an Asus v7700 deluxe (its capture quality blows chunks but oh well), the system has no trouble capturing at 720x480x30fps, 0 dropped frames even though the quality is crappy simply because the capture device is cheap. Also its capturing to a single IBM 60GXP 60 GB drive.

 

[codehack2]

If your serious about editing stay away from the "All in Wonder" cards.. get a dedicated capture/editing card. For a decent card bundled with Adobe Premiere 6.0 your looking at anywhere from $500-$1200. Tom's hardware has some awesome articles up about NLE systems and reccomendations for systems. See this Link. The VideoGuys.com also have some great pointers up on thier site too.

Good Luck,
CH2

 

[edmicman]

how are the sony vaio machines? aren't they designed somewhat with the digital editing, etc. in mind?

 

[ChipNOW]

edmicman - the Vaio's have Sony i.Link (aka Firewire IEEE-1394) inbuilt... that's their only claim to video editing.

Dude - you're going to need three main things - hard disk speed, lotsa RAM , and a pretty decent graphics card.

I'd go a couple of the 15,000rpm X.15's in a RAID 0 stripe if you can strech to that - HDD should be your main priority IMO

With RAM at it's current prices you'd be daft to go for less than 512MB; ideally a gig.

As for GC - get any DDR GF2/3 and mod it to Quadro spec (can someone link to the site for him plz) - this should give you very good video editing etc. speed at a decent price.

Oh... and go for a 1.4GHz Athlon or a 1.2GHz MP (for future expandability) with any of the decent DDR boards - take your pick of brand, as long as they make an AMD760 or KT266 board - don't use the ALi chipset

Hope this helps,
Chris

 

[codehack2]

<< As for GC - get any DDR GF2/3 and mod it to Quadro spec (can someone link to the site for him plz) - this should give you very good video editing etc. speed at a decent price. >>



I don't think that modding your GF2/3 to a quadro is going to help you in speeding up video editing.. The quadro mod will speed up perfromance in 3d apps like Maya/3d Studio Max. Nearly all add in video editng systems use overlay functionality when displaying video on the monitor, so as long as your primary video card supports overlay then you should be fine. Personally, if I were strictly using my system for video editing, I would go with a card with clear, crisp 2d.. i.e. Matrox/ATI.

Now, if you really want to speed up editing, go with a &quot;Real Time&quot; editing card. These cards provide real time support for most transitions and overlay effects, meaning that everytime you add a transition, you don't have to rerender the timeline. A couple of cards that provide &quot;Real Time&quot; support are the Pinnacle dv500+ and Matrox RT2000/2500.

CH2

 

[ChipNOW]

Nice and cheap too those too [sarcasm]

 

[majewski9]

Look at the AIW radeon for an affordable solution for vid capture! A firewire card and Premiere 6 are an awesome combo for digital capture!

 

[codehack2]

<< Nice and cheap too those too [sarcasm] >>



Yes, but if planned right, he can still build a top quality system for the 2k budget.

CH2

 

[WhiteKnight]

I'm only 20 now, but I've been editing for about 5 years now (anyone ever hear of Star Wars: Macbeth?) and I've had varied luck with a number of different systems. Right now I am running a single AMD 1.4, 512 MB Crucial, 2x 60GB 60GXP RAID-0 Array, Pinnacle DV500+ capture card, and I don't have any complaints. The first machine I edited on was a PI 166 or something... with a VE500 capture card that produced pretty awful compression quality. I don't really remember the other system specs. Between those two, I had a PIII 500, 256 RAM, 2x 30.0 GB HDs (non-raided), Pinnacle DC30 Pro. I've used Ulead MediaStudio (back in the day), Premiere 5.0, Premiere 6.0, and Final Cut Pro to edit. I really have been happy with the Pinnacle cards, but I've heard that a lot of people like Matrox cards too, particularly the RT2000. I do professional work on my machine, and while it may fall a little bit short of broadcast quality, it's more than good enough for normal professional work.
If you don't care too much about the rest of your system, your should be able to put together something decent based on a Pinnacle cap card for under $2000. The DV500+ runs around $600? I think. The DV500 includes sound capture, so you don't need to worry about a really expensive sound card. With regard to dual processors... dual processors are not as important in video editing as they are in somthing like image rendering. Video editing tends to put more of the workload on the capture card/compressor, rather than on the processor. I could be a little bit off on that, but I'm pretty certain. I'd agree codehack above, avoid the AIW cards. The quality just isn't anywhere near as good. Then again, it depends on what level of work you are going to be doing on this machine.

 

[dbwillis]

Ive got a few editing cards for sale:
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=45&amp;threadid=496407&amp;highlight_key=y