what is an editing card, and do I need one?

[sdsumike619]

what is an editing card, and do I need one?

[OmegaSupreme]

Editing cards usually provide hardware acceleration for special effects and other digital manipulations.

what is an editing card, and do I need one?

If you have to ask, then you don't need one.

[sdsumike619]

you mean like when doing an external preview how it plays back slowly, or choppy sometimes? The editing card makes it play frame for frame (even with a lot of effects) ? How much are they?

[edDV]

Realtime effects usually require multiple RAID streams usually from a central server.
This is what separates the big guys from us "sumers".

Lowest entry examples are like the Canopus Edius (with hardware)
http://www.canopus.com/products/nlesystems.php
or the Matrox RT.X100 Xtreme Pro or Matrox RT.X2
http://www.matrox.com/video/products/rtx100xtremepro/home.cfm
http://www.matrox.com/video/products/rtx2/home.cfm

At the little guy level, effects are usually processed in software non-realtime and the speed depends on CPU power. Vegas adds the ability to assign a render task to several CPUs over a network as one way to speed things up.