P.C. capable of video editing?

vertical_fool

Hi all.

A friend of mine is after a new PC which he wants to use for video editing. Now I expected a PC with a decent speed processor (ideally dual), 200Gig Hardrive, 1 gig DDR ram on a decent motherboard to do the job well enough at a decent price, drives and accessories although important I think all current ones are good enough. This will be substantially better that his current setup of 1 Gig P3 with SDR memory (this may even be 512 Mb).

However I noticed while looking at the TV`s in comet I think that they rated the PCs in areas including video editing. Of the ones that they had (very limited range as a small showroom) none of them were above average rating for video editing.

So this has led me to stop assuming I know what would be a good PC for this use in particular and post on here for peoples opinions especially of those that use their PC for video editing.

Also what good deals does anybody know of at the moment that will fit the bill (He also needs a new screen so this can be included or bought seperate). I`ve read on here somewhere that Dell are expected to be doing some good deals in August however I`m weary of Dells motherboards, although this can be overlooked if the price is good.

Ooops, nearly forgot to ask what graphics card would people suggest for video editing, probably won`t ever see a game?

Thanks

Vertical

crompton

youd probably be best getting a decent pc - 120gb+ hard drive, 1gb ram, decent graphics card, something like a radeon x1600 pro, dvd +/- rw and cd rw combo, dvd rom drive, plenty of usb ports and then get either an external tv card or an internal (depends if your tech friendly or not i myself have a usb (external) one its just so much easier) and you can link your cameras into the tv card or just download from the camera memory. Try a 19 inch moniter or maybe a 21 if youve got the money

movieman

What kind of video editing? Years ago I edited a feature-length video on a PII-350 with 256MB of RAM, and pretty much any modern PC is much faster than that.

Other than a fast CPU for realtime effects, the most important thing for reliable editing is a second (and large) hard disk for storing video files. Oh, and a Firewire port, if you're editing DV footage.

crompton

you will also want to invest in some decent video editing software, Ultra 2 is simply awesome it will do brand new vector keying (green screen swapping to me and you) and at £268 its a snatch - im gunna get it as soon as i get the money lol Ultra 2

15lsp

I use final cut pro on a mac, the more ram the better. Doesnt really matter about hard drive as you should save on dvd anyway. My home one has 2gb & my work mac has 4gb :-)

vertical_fool

The type of movies he edits tend to be of the adult type! So I think that requires alot of seperate cuts (Does this even make a difference).

I can`t remember what software he uses, I know he uses photoshop for at least his still images, maybe another adobe program for editing or maybe some of the software that comes with the cameras (As I write this I`m thinking if it comes free, maybe the quality of the software is slowing him down). Although he is impatient so that doesn`t help either.

Thanks

Vertical

phatty_2

I would use Windows Movie Maker it's free and easy to use.

movieman

If it's an Adobe program, it's probably Premiere, which is pretty good for amateur editing: the old versions I had used to crash a lot, but the newer ones are supposed to be quite reliable.