What makes for a good video editing system?

Hardware: 

This covers PCs for enthusiasts and semi-professional work. We have other pages that cover professional video editing workstations and Macs. There is only once company we recommend as specialists in Non-linear digital video editing computers: Poweroid.com. Visit them now.

With Matrox promoting it's "Power of X", Canopus promoting it's "Scalable Media Technology" and Pinnacle dropping out of video cards altogether and concentrating on video editing software because today's general PC hardware is so powerful, it is clear that everyone is emphasizing the power of the PC itself.

These are the main factor's contributing to the PC's power:

1. Processor: Normally known as the heart of the PC, it's important to go for a fast processor but unless it's backed up by other high performance parts it's unlikely to prove it's worth. Video editors tend to prefer Intel but there's there's very little to choose from between the two main CPU (Central Processing Unit) manufacturers i.e. AMD and Intel. Some video editing cards and software may prefer Intel over AMD.

2. Motherboard: Often overlooked as one of the main if not the main component in the PC. Many PC manufacturers find this a good place to cut corners as buyers often don't have time to do the research into the often changing motherboard market. This brief page on the latest Intel motherboards and this one on AMD will lead you to useful locations within specialist technical websites like Tom's Hardware and Anandtech for more information.

3. Hard Disk: If you've been in the video editing business for a while you'll remember that you had to have expensive SCSI hard disks in any video editing PC. When you made the transition to the more standard IDE disks it was often a matter of having to check disk access times, data throughput speeds etc as many of them were just too slow for video editing. That's all changed. Modern IDE hard disks are very, very fast. When looking at the various technical specifications of hard disks you can ignore technical specs on DMA (eg DMA100 or UDMA 133) as these are largely irrelevant. Check the spindle speed often quoted in rpm. 10K rpm is obviously better than 7200 rpm which is obviously faster than the 5400 rpm. (See our articles on choosing hard disks and using RAID). Laptops tend to have hard disks that lag far behind desktop PCs in speed. A lot also depends on how the hard disk is optimised and you can find some tips here.

4. Graphics Card: This market changes even faster than the motherboard market and it will take you weeks to get up to date on what's the latest in graphics cards and how all the top cards compare in performance and value. Our advice would be not to get too bogged down in this. The main manufacturers of "chipsets" for graphics cards are ATI, nVidia (yes, that's how they spell it!) and Matrox. Matrox cards tend to be targeted more towards the video editing market and they were the first to introduce a card with three heads i.e. allowing you to connect two monitors and a TV to one graphics card. The other chipset manufacturers are both reputable and well respected in the gaming, 3D, graphics workstation and other markets. 

5. Memory: Of course a vital element, but please do take note that it's not just a matter of how much, but also what type, what speed etc. Do you go for SDRAM, DDRSDRAM, RDRAM, 32 bit RDRAM....? The motherboard you choose will impose a restriction as it mayaccept only one type of RAM but do check the maximum RAM speed it supports and here's some more information on tweaking your RAM for the best performance.

Others: Whether you need an LCD or CRT monitor, DVD writer or just a plain CD Writer, desktop case or tower case, are largely personal preferences as is the size of your hard disk, the software you want to use and the supplier you want to buy all of it from.

At the budget end of the market you will of course make do with a firewire (IEEE 1394) card or a firewire socket built into the motherboard. This is sufficient for input and output of Digital Video. If you have Windows XP then you also have Windows Movie Maker, a basic video editing program. It is fairly limited in what it can do and you may soon find that you want something with a little more oomph. Have a look at the free video editing software packages you can download, 

Software:

This link will take you to reviews ot the main video editing software packages but of course your PC needs to have a lot more than just video editing software. Starting with the Operating system, which version of Windows do you go for? Speak to your PC supplier about this. There are some versions of Windows that are not compatible with some video editing cards, there are some versions of Windows with known problems with certain video editing software, and that discussion is beyond the scope of this page. Do be guided by your PC supplier on that as they are the ones who'll eventually field the support calls ;-)

There is only once company we recommend as specialists in Non-linear digital video editing computers: Poweroid.com. Visit them now.