I do video editing, and have been working with it for around five
years.  Video Editing is the black hole of hardware performance.  I started
it out using a old Matrox G200 Marvel,  with a PII 450, and 256 megs of
RAM, and now use two high end workstations for my Video Work

My Media Box
P4 3.0 800 MHz FSB and HT on Intel 865PERL
2GB of DDR  with a 850 meg RAM Drive for temp files
Matrox G450 dual head
ATI TV Wonder PRO PCI ... which I am planning on changing to a HD ATI TV
Wonder card
Maxtor 300 MB 16mb Cache 7200 RPM SATA drive

My Workstation
Dual Xeon 3.06 533Mhz FSB and HT on ASUS PC DL Deluxe
2GB of DDR with a 850 meg RAM Drive for temp files
ATI All in Wonder 9600 PRO dual head
Two WD 10000 RPM 74GB Raptor Drives

You can not go too fast when doing video editing. I thought about going
SCSI, and I have used both software and hardware RAID-0, but it is not
necessary using a high end hard drive, a top end processor, and if you
wish, a big RAM Drive, which can really speed things along if you use it as
your temp drive. You will want the biggest fastest hard drive you can get.
Video files, particularly in raw format are huge. A typical 2 hour movie,
in DVD quality, can be anywhere between 4 to 8 GBs.

The dual processor can be great to have,  but isn't necessary. I mostly use
the P4 to edit and encode, because it is a dedicated Media box, and I can
do encoding over night.

However, with software that supports SMP, the difference can be dramatic,
when using dual processors. For example, this is a real world test I happen
to do today, in preparation for an article on TMPEnc editing tools.  I used
TMPEnc 3.0 Express encoder to  encode  a one hour TV Recording of Charlie
Rose, which was recorded at  DVD quality,  and then slightly edited, and
then encoded into a SVCD = mpeg-2 file.

Not only did I encode, but I specified under "Motion search precision
"Highest (with error correction)" rather then "Standard". I routinely do
this because it can solve a lot of sync and frame problems, but it can add
anywhere from two to ten times the encoding time of "Standard". Using this
level of motion search, can result in an encoding of  8 hours for 1 hour of
video, but I am not usually in a hurry when using my Media box.

My dual Xeon encoded this file in 31 minutes 43 seconds
My P4 encoded this file in 59 minutes and 7 seconds.

Big difference, but that is because the operating system = XP Pro, and the
encoder = TMPenc Express 3.0, both fully support Symmetric Multi Processor
and Hyperthreading. Very little software does. Tools that support SMP are
far and few between, but when you have one, and use it with
multiprocessors, or even just HT, it is a big deal.

So the answer to your question is to use the highest quality, stable, name
brand, fastest components, you can afford. Slower components will result in
more wait time on editing, and slower encoding times. Keep in mind that the
real challenge, when working with video, is finding software you are
comfortable with, and that still produces an excellent end result, as well
as overcoming the learning curve, which for me, was the most difficult part
of the "upgrades". The tools are getting easier to use, but it is still a
very dynamic field, which makes for a tough learning curve.

Rode
The NOSPIN Group
http://www.freepctech.com/rode/



>On 27 Jan 2005 at 4:51, Donna Salinas wrote:
> > I will be building a computer for my sons friend. He needs to do video
> > editing on it as they are professional wrestlers. Any help on processors,
> > motherboards, etc that would be good for this type of use? Any help
> would be
> > appreciated. Thank you,
> >
> > Donna Salinas
> > [log in to unmask]

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