Will a celeron 566 be good enough for novice video editing?

[Fattom]

I have recently got a celeron 566 system from my brother and wonder if this system would be good enough to try out video editing. The spec of the machine is as follows:

Celeron II 566
384MB RAM (I believe it's PC100)
TNT video card
SB Live! Value
CDRW & CD-ROM
20GB HD (I have a spare 40GB that can be added to this computer)

My question is whether this system will be good enough for video editing.

Note: I have a camcoder and a firewire card (well, never tired it before, so i hope it's not that difficult to get it work).

Thanks.

 

[Oreo]

It'll work but it won't be too fast.

 

[FrustratedUser]

Yes. Don't spend $$$ unless you know what you want to do. Your rig might be just right for you.
I see no problems cutting/merging with my 500MHz Celeron.

 

[richleader]

Video editing will be fine, heck, I did it on a Pentium Pro 200, but you might have a problem importing from your camcorder without dropping frames.

 

[Fattom]

Thanks for your inputs.

Richleader, why would I drop frames when I import video from the camcorder? I am new to all these video stuff... have a lot more to learn I guess .

 

[oldfart]

C566's are good overclockers. What kind of motherboard do you have?

 

[mrzed]

What motherboard do you have in that system? Most Celeron 566 will make it to 850 if you are OK with trying an overclock.

It would give you essentially free performance. A celeron at 850 would be not too bad for light video editing.

 

[vss1980]

"Richleader, why would I drop frames when I import video from the camcorder? I am new to all these video stuff... have a lot more to learn I guess."

Example:

When you are editing a video that has already been captured and is stored on CD/DVD/HD, it doesn't matter if your computer is able to process it in real-time or not, because there is no need to. As it is already captured and you are just performing simple cut/conversion on it there is no demand to have it done in real-time, ie. you could let your computer spend a day processing maybe just 1 hours worth of video and it wouldn't matter. None of the information will be lost.

Now, lets say your computer is actually capturing video that you want to edit (ie. it is not stored on a CD/DVD/HD yet), it has to be able to digitise the video frame before the next one is being sent to the capture card. In most cases, you will want to have some sort of low-scale compression being used on the frames otherwise you will need lots of storage space and fast CPU/hard-drive systems to cope with the data transfer. If the computer isn't able to complete compression of the frame before the next one has been sent to the capture card/device, the computer will just drop it.

In most cases, home-made videos captured to computer will have a few frames missing (except for those with very good computers and capture systems), so dropping the odd couple of frames in every thousand captured is no big deal, but if you drop too many, you will see jumps in your captured video which will ultimately p!ss you off.

For a celeron 566, I would say that you probably shouldn't try to capture video higher than normal Video CD resolutions (ie. 352x288 PAL, or 352x240 NTSC), as I dont think it will be able to cope with much more without significant frame loss.

 

[Mingon]

Another thing to consider when using 'slower' cpu's is the frustration factor, when something goes wrong in something that you have spent an hour encoding it is a bit annoying.