What factors involve video editing performance?

[Athlon4all]

I am seeing several people building systems with plans to do video editing and I guess, I'm wondering what factors change performance(speaking as one who's never done any kind of video editing)? Memory Bandwidth? Hard Drive? RAM? Raw CPU power? Thanks for anyone who can be of assistance!!! The LORD loves you!!

 

[UsandThem]

1. CPU speed (and type of CPU if program is optimized for say SSE2)
2. Ram speed and amount (at least 512 mb of DDR)
3. Hard drive speed (7200 rpm) and best if run in RAID
4. Video editing card that has hardware encoding if you are going to really be into video editing, if you are just doing it on the side, then the first three are the most important.

Those four are the most important IMO

 

[coolVariable]

Lots of HD space ... at least in the 200-300 GB range ...

 

[oldfart]

CPU power is key. Lots of ram (512 is good). Ample HD space (80 gig+). DV capture is ~ 13 Gig per 1 hr of video at full DV quality. Analog capture can be twice that size. RAID is not needed. A good fast HD like the WD SE series is fine. My 1200JB has never had any issue keeping up.

As far as hardware encoding goes, that is an involved discussion. Hardware encoding can be limiting. For instance, hardware MPEG2 is typically CBR only. If you want HQ MPEG2 encoding for SVCD use, 2 pass VBR will produce much better results. You would use a program such as TMPGEnc to do this, which is a software encoder. Back again to the need for lots of CPU Power!