Video-Editing

E

Eihli

Gawd
Joined
Nov 20, 2003
Messages
610
Friend wants me to help him purchase a video-editing PC. I was seriously considering going w/ an XPS 600 or Alienware, as he really doesn't want to mess around with building his own.

He plans on being a professional video-editor, so I'm curious how intensive vid-edit programs are.

Right now I'm curious as to what type of ___ he needs.

CPU?
I was thinking a 2.8 Pentium D or comparable AMD would do the trick.

Video Card?
Would he definately need a 256 mb GPU, and if so would a 6800 suffice or should he go with a 7900 gtx? What about a 128 megabyte video card.

Ram?
1gig?

That's pretty much it, just wondering how much performance he needs.
-Thanks
 
I think P4's may be better for video editing, but im sure any CPU better than say a P4 3.2GHz will be good for some serious editing. Dont quote me on that though.

He will need at least 1 gig of ram, 2 would be optimal

If he is just editing and not gaming, a videocard isnt that big a deal I dont think. You could even go 6600GT or an ATI 9800 pro, shit just about any dedicated card will be fine. Just something with good IQ. Thats not where he needs his power. Put that $$ into a CPU, memory, and a nice monitor.

And if he is REALLY serious about editing video, he needs to get a G5.
 
Why specifically a Mac? Window's based PC's are much better for various reasons, unless there are more video-editing programs which are compatible for a Mac, I don't understand why he should take that route.
 
Because Final Cut Pro runs on the mac, and pretty much all pc-based editing programs are barbaric in comparison. If he is truly serious, he needs the mac.

 
uzor said:
Because Final Cut Pro runs on the mac, and pretty much all pc-based editing programs are barbaric in comparison. If he is truly serious, he needs the mac.

Click to expand...

This guy speaks the truth. I know some people in the movie/video editing buisness, and if you dont use a mac they basically laugh at you. Mac's are really good at video editing and if he truely is serious in learning how to, he should start with a Mac so the Mac computer is like a second laugage to him!!
 
final cut pro is the shit for editing. I'd use a Mac, but I don't want to be part of a small group again. I started out with an Amiga 3000 with a Video Toaster4000 card and switched to the PC when the app I was using, Lightwave 3D became available and have been using PC's since.

If he is set on using a PC for video editing, his best move would be to get a dedicated video editing card, either the Matrox RTX.100 or the Canopus DV-Storm2. Both cards are around $1000 and come with the Adobe suites, or at least Adobe Premiere.

At our studio, we have 2 Matrox RTX.100 suites, and they do the job just great, both machines are P4's, one is a 1.8ghz and the other is a 2.0ghz with 512megs each and 3 drives each, one for OS, one for capture, and one for realtime MPEG-2 encoding.
We do long format, 2 hour videos, and the machines are fine. I do recommend more ram though as I was doing some Adobe After Effects Pro stuff and the 512megs of Ram was limiting the machine, making preview renders take longer and only allowing a few seconds of realtime renders. Ram is cheap so might as well go with 2 gigs, drives are cheap as well, so go large with those too.
 
Get a mac definetly. They're just cool.. I was amazed at how easy it was when I tried it at my friends.
 
Get a PC or Mac based on the software package you use. If Final Cut or Shake ran on the PC, editors would go for PCs. Video editing needs a nice beefy CPU and RAM, and fast HDDs if that same box will be used for capturing video as well. Back in the olden days, RAID was needed, but nowadays, even a vanilla 7200 IDE drive is fast enough to capture from say, a DV camcorder.
 
movax said:
Video editing needs a nice beefy CPU and RAM, and fast HDDs if that same box will be used for capturing video as well. Back in the olden days, RAID was needed, but nowadays, even a vanilla 7200 IDE drive is fast enough to capture from say, a DV camcorder.
Click to expand...

you first statement isn't entirely true. Only time you need processor is for rendering and encoding, using a realtime card like the Matrox, there is no rendering unless you end up using more layers than the card can support, and then rendering isnt that slow, even on our 2ghz machine.

your second statement is very true, as we needed raid to be able to capture DV with our first Matrox RT2000 we had back in 2000. Pretty much any drive today will support the 3-5mb/sec capture rate of DV video.
 
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