I have recently been learning about video editing myself. I'm no expert,
and I am as interested in replies to this thread as you are. What I have
learned is that the most important single component is the CPU speed.
A dual processor setup is nice because it allows you to do multiple things
without overtaxing one processor, and a single errant thread will never
bring your computer to a stop. But when you are encoding, you can only go
as fast as a single processor will let you go.... so the single processor
speed is very important. For example, how fast will a Dual PIII 1.2 Ghz
system run? It can't run a single program any faster then 1.2 Ghz. Overall,
running many programs, it will deliver the performance of around 1.7 to 1.8
Ghz.
At the moment, the fastest dual processor setup would be a AMD Athlon MP
2000, or an expensive Intel Xeon2.2GHz. The Xenon is really optimized for
Servers and file transfer, and I doubt they would be all that great for
high end workstation use. Unfortunately,there is no P4 dual processor
support and the fastest dual PIII would be a PIII 1.2.
Ram should be 500 megs or more, but when I am editing I haven't used much
RAM. It's not like loading a huge 300 meg graphic image in Photoshop. In
fact, most of the time I have 350 plus megs of the 500 megs of physical Ram
available.
Hard drive speed can be important. You can go all out and build a 15000 RPM
SCSI system, but I am not so sure this will help much. A fast Ultra 66 7200
RPM drive should do the trick....but I wouldn't go below that. What is
important is size. You can not have too much hard drive space. A minimum of
20 GB just for working with video and a lot more for storage. I would
suggest one of those new Western Digital 120 GB drives with the 8 meg
cache. Great performance, lots of breathing room, and really cheap compared
to a 36 GB Seagate 15000 RPM SCSI Cheetah. You could get two or three of
the WDs and setup a Windows 2000 or XP Pro software RAID, which would be
very quick, and very big. Sound nuts ? Wait until you start saving your
video file's! They use up your hard drive space like a black hole!
Depending on your needs, you might want a DVD RAM recorder. Hold off on
this if you can, because prices are coming down and technology is getting
better and better.
For a Video editing card, you will have a hard time finding better then
Matrox. Check out one of the older G450 Marvels with TV, or look into the
brand new and awesome Matrox Parheila 512s, which were announced last
month, and will be coming to market this month.
A 1.1 GHz is what I am using for video editing. I have a IBM Ultra 100
Deskstar at 7200 RPM, 500 megs of Crucial ECC RAM, and a Matrox Marvel G200
with 16 megs of RAM with an add on Matrox hardware DVD decoder module (
very nice). Sound is a ISA AWE64 Value
It works fine for what I am doing.... which isn't all that fancy. Mostly I
am recording, cutting and splicing. No real special effects....yet. When it
comes time to encode, I could always use a faster processor. This is the
only limitation that I notice. I can take one hours worth of Matrox
recorded avi video = 3.2 GB, that was recorded with my G200 from a TV
broadcast in a Matrox hardware codec, at very good quality, and then encode
it to MPEG-1, using TMPGEnc or Adobe Premier 6.1, and it will take about
90 minutes. The same thing will take around 8 hours on my old PII 450. The
difference seems disproportionate to the performance gain of the processor.
It would be great if I could do it in 15 or 30 minutes with a P4 2.5 Ghz.
If I was going to build a dedicated Video editing box from scratch, and I
was not going to try and save money, then I would be building either a Dual
AMD MP2000 or a single Intel P4 2.5 Ghz ( or what ever was the fastest
available). But I would want to find out if applications like Adobe
Premier, which are SMP compatible, take full advantage of both processors
in a AMD system. You would have to ask Adobe this to be sure, as well as
other software manufacturers. The problem with AMD is that VIA systems
always are a bit problematic, and dual processors are new to AMD ... not
to mention software manufacturers.
I ideally I would want a P4 Dual 2.5 GHz system .... it doesn't have the
problematic behavior of a VIA system.. but we are still waiting on dual P4.
Rode
The NOSPIN Group
>Thanks to people who have contibuted to this group and helped me to
>improve my PC understanding.
>I would like some advice on a good hardware specification (mobo, cpu,
>graphics, ram) for a machine that will be used mainly for editing from
>analogue and digital video recordings.
>Best wishes
>Graham Peak.
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