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Video Editing PC

D

d03boy

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 3, 2004
Messages
174
A friend wants to do some video editing.

They have an HP computer running WinXP Home.

Some of their specs:

Intel Celeron 1.2Ghz
128MB Ram
11mb onboard intel chipset video card
30GB hdd

no firewire, but it has USB.. they dont have a digital camcorder(dv output), but they do have an analog one (rca outputs). They want to be able to make home videos and crap basically. They want to be able to burn their movies to DVD. What upgrades do you recommend?

Obviously they need a DVD writer, and they already have one on layaway. I told them they probably need to upgrade their video card to a minimum of a 32mb GeForce or Radeon, but she will be looking for atleast a 64mb I think. I dont think they have an AGP slot, which is what sucks. How can I tell for sure without having to open up the case?

I told here to get atleast 256mb more RAM or more.

She wants the best buy deal on that 120gb hdd.

What should I do for video input? dazzle? I would need a firewire input though right? Could I buy a pci slot one?

thanks
 
Firewire cards are usually PCI, and yes, you would want one.

Because I would recommend getting a DV camera. Analog looks terrible. And it is a bit harder to edit. Analog looks ugly enough originally, but it only gets worse when you digitize it and then compress it. Backing up old analog tapes makes sense, but I wouldn't record new analog footage anymore.

As for the other things, I am not convinced that they need a new video card. More memory is key, but 256mb is really sufficient for home video editing. My family laptop has 256mb, and it works fine with video editing. But more is obviously better, and that computer probably has SDRAM, so a gigabyte would cost about $20 or so. SDRAM, and actually ram in general, is so cheap that there is no reason to have under 512mb.

The harddrive might actually be big enough, but that depends on how full it is now. DV takes up about a gigabyte per 5 minutes, and I figure most home videos are 25 minutes unedited, and about 10 edited, so you would be looking at around 7gigabytes harddrive use during the editing phase. Unless you are making feature length films, there really isn't any need to have massive harddrives or anything like that.
 
Yeah,more ram indeed.

DV will make importing video that much easier.
If they don't go that route, you have several options for analog import. But they will want to get USB 2.0 for decent performance.
 
I will second (or third, or fourth, whatever) that RAM recommendation. Video editing can be memory intensive, and I'd suggest upgrading to 512 at least. The CPU could use a little work (a bump to a P4 Northy would be a good choice for video editing, depending on how involved they'll get into it).

And yes, bigger hard drive needed.
 
Originally posted by ilkka
Firewire cards are usually PCI, and yes, you would want one.

Because I would recommend getting a DV camera. Analog looks terrible. And it is a bit harder to edit. Analog looks ugly enough originally, but it only gets worse when you digitize it and then compress it. Backing up old analog tapes makes sense, but I wouldn't record new analog footage anymore.

As for the other things, I am not convinced that they need a new video card. More memory is key, but 256mb is really sufficient for home video editing. My family laptop has 256mb, and it works fine with video editing. But more is obviously better, and that computer probably has SDRAM, so a gigabyte would cost about $20 or so. SDRAM, and actually ram in general, is so cheap that there is no reason to have under 512mb.

The harddrive might actually be big enough, but that depends on how full it is now. DV takes up about a gigabyte per 5 minutes, and I figure most home videos are 25 minutes unedited, and about 10 edited, so you would be looking at around 7gigabytes harddrive use during the editing phase. Unless you are making feature length films, there really isn't any need to have massive harddrives or anything like that.
Click to expand...
I agree, DV is definitely nicer.... but I think it can take up more than just a gigabyte per 5 minutes. I just finished a big project using Adobe Premiere, and I believe it sometimes got as high as 300mb a minutes, not just 200. This isn't a huge difference, but I think you'll definitely want a new hard drive. If they do a lot of editing, they'll have extra clippage outside the video on the drive... I used about 50-60gigs for a 50 minute video.
 
Originally posted by ST|FFY
^^^ indeed
im gonna say at least 512 mb total
Click to expand...


any good prog will fill 512 as soon as you click the icon. a gig is the way to go. plus a proc with some cache would be great. since its socket 370 its only really worth getting a completly new mobo and proc, since any proc upgrade for that board would be damn expensive.
 
Originally posted by Fisofo
I agree, DV is definitely nicer.... but I think it can take up more than just a gigabyte per 5 minutes. I just finished a big project using Adobe Premiere, and I believe it sometimes got as high as 300mb a minutes, not just 200. This isn't a huge difference, but I think you'll definitely want a new hard drive. If they do a lot of editing, they'll have extra clippage outside the video on the drive... I used about 50-60gigs for a 50 minute video.
Click to expand...
My videos take up about 217mb per minute. So it is a bit above the gigabyte per 5 minutes. But still, most people don't need all that much harddrive space, because they don't make 50 minute video. No vacation video should ever be over 10 minutes, and school videos (for French or English class) max out near the same. So if one used harddrive space at the same rate as you did, you would need about 10gigs for normal homeuse. So the thread starter might not need more harddrive space, but it of course depends on how much empty space he has.

But obviously a new harddrive wouldn't hurt.
 
I'm going to agree with everyone on this and say get at least 512MB of ram.
A bigger hdd.
And if possible get a new mb, cpu, and video card.
 
Originally posted by YoUnAn
video card.
Click to expand...
What exactly would a new video card do?

A new cpu is not necessary, if you plan on simply doing vacation movie editing, etc. A 10-minute film doesn't take terribly long to render, even with a 1ghz cpu.
 
Gee it sounds as if everyone is suggesting they have you build them a decent computer. Hah!

I think maxing the RAM on the system and getting more hard drive space are the logical moves. You should also consider a PCI card with Firewire and USB 2.0 ports.

If you can put another processor on there without spending a lot, then go for it, but it's probably not going to be worth the money and effort. This would be the least crucial of your upgrades I think.
 
ram, hard drive, and dvd burner.

>=512MB ram

>=120 Gig HD (look at WD SE drives at newegg)

Plextor DVD+-R/RW
 
How much is the budget for the upgrade?
DV video is 200megs/minute and 10megs/minute for the audio.
I am looking at a 10 minute file in my Matrox Machine and it's 2.1gigs for the video file and 110megs for the wav file.

What wll they be editing?
I've been doing long format videos for almost 10 years now, 60 minute to 120 minute videos.
The machine I have at the house is using a Matrox RT2000 editing card which has analog and Firewire inputs/outputs. This system does real time effects so there is almost never any rendering if you are going back out to video. Going to DVD, you will need to render the file into an Mpeg-2 compliant DVD file which can take several hours depending on the length of the video and the speed of the machine.

Just remember that the DVD you make, at best, will only look as good as the video tape it was sourced from. Having a low quality capture device will also degrade the picture too, so take that into consideration.

So, get some more memory and larger hard drive. 512 is enough, you can edit a feature length film with 512 megs, my friend did it and so can you..

Oh, and the only low cost capture device I have used was an old ATI All in Wonder card and that was used only to capture video to be used on the computer, not output back to video, so I have no idea how good those Dazzle capture devices are.
 
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