recommended minimum system specs for lossless editing?

[leslie80]

I'd like to capture lossless video (huffy), edit, and burn to dual layer dvd....what do people recommend for minimum system specs?

I don't mind waiting hours while the video is processing into mpeg2, but I don't want the controls to be unresponsive when I'm doing things like scrolling through the video and making cuts in virtualdub.

Don't forget video card specs...one computer is a laptop with a 64mb card, can I even edit lossless on that machine?

Looks like I have to buy another capture card (hd 750 you suck) but before I even do that I thought I'd ask about the other requirements...

thank you

[redwudz]

Lots of hard drive space to start with. I use three HDDs in most of my computers. Some five. A small fast one for boot. I like a Velociraptor 10K RPM, 150GB. Then two larger drives, 500GB or 1TB for editing, capturing and archiving. The boot isn't good for capturing as the OS needs to access it all the time.

For CPU, something fast. I prefer a quad core, about 3GHz. I presently use a six core CPU at 3.5GHz as I do a lot of H.264 encodes and it is fast for that. For MPEG-2 a fast quad core, or even a dual core can work. But with a quad core, you can multitask much better.

RAM, depends on your MB and your OS. 32bit OSs can only use 4GB RAM. 64bit OSs much more, though much more may not make much of any difference in encoding or editing performance. Also there are still quite a few video programs and software that isn't 64bit capable. I use W7 32bit on most of my computers.

Display video card, depends on what you want to do with it. Some newer cards can help with encoding speeds, but I rely on the CPU for that. For editing, the video card is just for display most times, so not really critical.

Lossless shouldn't be that hard to edit, just needs a lot of HDD space.

No idea on capture cards. What are you capturing from, source and specification? Others here can probably give you some advice with that.

EDIT: You might also try Lagarith instead of HuffyUV. It's a bit more compact, but still lossless.

[leslie80]

thank you redwudz for your response. I realize that faster is better as a general rule for computers, and in the case of storage bigger is usually better. I changed the thread's title for clarity, but I'm really interested in what the minimum requirements should be in order for the computer to perform as I mentioned in my original post.
thanks again!