Need just a basic video editing system?

People often start out looking for a "basic" video editing PC because they only want to "edit the odd home video". We don't understand that reasoning. If you use your car only for the odd trip to the supermarket why buy a whole car? Why not buy just a steering wheel? :-)

Whether you are looking to make video editing a full time job, or are looking to edit the occasionally home movie of the kids you still do need to have all the right gear. A professional video editor may pay a bit more for faster processor or a heavier duty video editing card but otherwise the requirements are roughly the same. Video is the most demanding of all applications and even more demanding than the latest games. If you don't have the right PC even the once in a blue-moon editing can be very tiresome, very restrictive, and not something that you'll enjoy at all. You could end up applying a command and having to wait 30 minutes to see what the results look like. It will be cumbersome and annoying.

Some of the things a "basic" video editing PC probably won't offer you are listed below.

• no speed. Even the latest and greatest of fast, cutting-edge PCs will fall to it's knees when handling video. It may play the best of games, simply fly through any other programs you normally run, or play fast action DVDs with aplomb, but when you want to see it begging for mercy put your average home video clip on it, apply a few transitions and ask it to render the clip. Now watch it crawl like a inebriated slug. It's because video editing pushes PCs so hard that video editing applications are used by PC magazines to test and benchmark PCs

• no analogue plugs/sockets to connect equipment like microphones, music sources, radio, TVs, VCRs and older camcorders to your PC ...so you can't input from or output to those devices. This is a nuisance as VCRs are very convenient as backup devices to transfer all that footage from your hard disk that you haven't had time to edit.  And music systems are handy sources for audio clips you want to incorporate into your film. Then there are those DV camcorders that don't have DV inputs, you'll need analogue output to transfer clips to those camcorders. There are various other good reasons to have a full range of analogue inputs and outputs on your PC. Don't compromise on this or you'll kick yourself later for not heeding our advice

• no conversion of NTSC to PAL or vice versa

• no conversion of formats (video comes in a variety of formats from AVI to WMV to MPG and you often have to convert from one to the other)

• no being able to record over the audio track of a video clip (you've got a lovely clip of the birthday boy blowing his candles out but some kid was screaming blue murder right next to your camcorder microphone and you want to replace the crying track with someone singing "Happy Birthday".  You may not be able to split the audio and video tracks and replace the audio track with your song)

• no ability to "shrink" the size of your video clip to send it by email or put it on a website

• no encoding of your clips to MPEG format

• no DVD authoring and DVD creation facility to store your clip in DVD format

• no ability to apply a title or transition and immediately see how it would look across the clip (without having to go away for three hours for each simple effect to "render")

• no ability to remove hiss and crackle on your audio (wind hiss on outdoor footage can be particularly annoying)

• no correction of the colour or lighting, for example the clip looked OK in the viewfinder but when played on the PC it appears too dark and you can hardly make out the people in it so you want to make the clip brighter by adjusting/enhancing the lighting (gamma correction). It's either that or scrap the clip

• no separation of your video clips, they'll be on the same hard disk as your operating system. Even on a fast PC this could cause the frustration of dropped frames, freezing and crashing. It's annoying losing the last several hours worth of work

• no easy archiving/backup of your video
  ... and tons more

But the most important of all is that if you have a basic video editing system you don't really have a video editing system at all. You have a general purpose PC that you will always struggle to edit video on. You'll have things that don't work properly, incompatibilities, problems, and the constant worry that someone may do something simple - like installing a game on your PC - and cause all your video editing software and hardware to go wonky on you.

It's not just the professionals who need to add special effects to their video. Adding a title, replacing the audio, adjusting the lighting/colour may seem simple tasks but they do require the same amount of power as some complex sounding effects. Even something as simple as a title has to be applied to all the frames in a clip so if you want a one word title to appear over a one minute clip the PC has to "write" that title to 1440 individual frames (60 seconds at 24 frames per second). That takes a lot more power than most people appreciate. 

While applying a title affects one small area of the frame adjusting lighting or colour is a different matter. If you want to adjust the lighting on your clip the PC has to apply a change to every pixel in the frame. Based on 24 frames per second - brace yourself - the PC has to apply the effect to 10,000,000 pixels per second of video clip!

But do I really need a professional video editing software suite? They are too complex.

Well, then don't use it. But DO buy it. Expensive video editing software comes free with good video editing cards. Don't use it if you don't need to but DO keep it around. A day will come when you will feel constricted by what your existing software offers, or have need to do a one off job that requires something meatier, and you'll appreciate having something like Adobe Premiere around.

If you are new to editing anyway then - for goodness sakes - start on something like Final cut Pro or Premiere. Don't be under the illusion that it's a steep learning curve. It's NOT! It's a steep learning curve only if you want to become an expert in the program. If all you are looking to do is capture clips, cut and paste, and export your finished product it'll take you roughly the same time to learn to do it in Premiere as it would take you to learn in some Product X  Cheap-Free-Studio-Bundled-Newbie-Restricted software suite.  And - if you make yourself familiar with the basics in Premiere/Edition/Final Cut then when you do need to learn new tricks you won't need to start from scratch with a new program. You'll have neither the expense of buying the software nor the stress of scrapping all you know about editing to start afresh with a non-familiar package. You can instead just explore other features of the program you are already comfortable with.

So how does an entry level video editing PC differ from a professional one?

A professional system will likely have some or all of the following additional features

• More storage + RAID configured hard disks

• SCSI hard disks

• A clear archiving system, perhaps DAT/ IDE caddy/ other removable storage in addition to a DVD writer

• A far more expensive video editing card. Some of them cost several thousand pounds on their own

• Additional special effects software, titling, sound editing and other specialist programs and plug-ins for their main video editing suite

• A server grade PC, perhaps with two or more processors, ECC memory, and/or other server type features

• other video outputs in addition to DV, SVGA, S-video, composite and DV-I

• other hardware tools like switches, toggles and bars

• Dual or triple head video card

• Two or more monitors/screens

• and others