Building Computer for Adobe Premiere

[FlashFrame]

I am gonna build a computer that I will use mainly for Adobe Premiere Pro, Aftereffects, Audition, Encore and Photoshop. I need to transfer VHS and Hi-8 Home videos to DVD. I will also be editing these videos using quite a few effects and transitions. I will also be learning to do animated cartoons using AfterEffects. I just need to know what parts i will need for what i am doing. This is what i have from my previous computer:
180GB Internal Hard Drive
120GB external Hard Drive
500 Watt ATX PSU
Creative SB Audigy 4 (WDM)
NVIDIA GeForce FX5700LE 128MB
2x PNY 512MB DDR

Any suggestions on what i need or if any of the items i have should be replaced. I was also wondering if a processor with Hyperthreading would be better?

[bugster]

Lots of CPU power, lots of memory, is what you need for that kind of thing.

Consider one of the Dual core AMD processors, and budget for 2-Gigs of Ram.

[rallynavvie]

How much are you looking to spend?

[wwaag]

Agree with Bugster--lots of CPU and memory. However, if you want to use Adobe Encore, you may want to stay away from certain AMD processors. See this thread. https://forum.videohelp.com/viewtopic.php?t=291902.

IMO, you'll also need additional storage (not external). You might also consider a dedicated video editing card. You also need to consider "how" you will "capture" your Hi8 and VHS footage.

Bottom line is that there are lots of options and lots of ways to spend $. Your first priority is to decide "exactly" what you want to accomplish now and possibly what you want to do in the future.

wwaag

[guns1inger]

More HDD. I would be putting 500MB internal. Once you start seriously doing effects, you should be rendering to still frame (tga) sequences, which eat a lot of space.

[rallynavvie]

More HDD. I would be putting 500MB internal. Once you start seriously doing effects, you should be rendering to still frame (tga) sequences, which eat a lot of space.

Yeah but you need to be very specific about your drive configuration. I'm a huge proponent of a three HDD minimum for video systems. You should use a good quick drive for your boot drive, the 10k SATA Raptors or 10k+ SCSI drives are ideal but any <120GB 7200rpm drive will suffice. Use this drive only to install your OS and applications so they can run unfettered. The other two drives should be as large as you can afford as they'll be holding your files and used for swap space. Second drive will have your "My Documents" mapped to it and will be your "storage drive" where you do your final encodes to. The third drive is your swap space where you capture raw footage to or store works in progress. Ideally you'd even want another fast drive for extra fast-access scratch space for your pagefile, application scratch disks/cache, or overhead for some editing apps.

And this is just your hard drive configuration. It only gets better from there

[guns1inger]

True. Although most systems now support some form of raid configuration as well, you don't get the full abilities in most cheaper boards. In fact, if money were no object, I would be looking into server based hardware and building the graphics subsystem on top of that. Better disk management, higher fault tolerance. Overkill for a hobby, but if it's your livelihood . . .