Best system for capturing, editing, and projecting Video fil

[harbin2]

Our Church is looking to upgrade the hardware we are currently using
to capture, edit, and project videos. Our current PC is an HP 700mhz
P3. It has 512mb of ram, an ATI Radeon 64mb video card, and an
external Dazzle capture card feeding an internal firewire card. We
are using Adobe Premier software for editing the captured files.

Most of what we do is to capture 3 to 4 minute videos from commercial
VHS tapes and DVDs, edit them, save them as .avi files, integrate them
into a Power Point presentation. We then display them through a
video distributor to two monitors and onto a screen through a video
projector.

It has been working reasonably well but the video clips suffer some
from lost resolution, graininess, and dropped frames. Also, our
current configuration is somewhat slow in saving crunching/saving the
files and our volunteers have a limited amount of time. We are
searching for non hardware related solutions but are also consider
hardware upgrades.

Can anyone recommend what to focus on for upgrading. We don’t
want to get the biggest and most expensive of everything you can buy,
hoping some part of it will solve our problems. In other words, where
can you expect to get the most value for your money in performing the
kind of tasks we are doing? Do we really need a dual processor, 2G,
P4? More ram? Better video card?

We are thinking about a 1.6G Dell P4 with 256 ram. Is this a good
choice? Would dual processors cut the time of processing the edited
video in half? What other video hardware would you recommend? Can we
expect reasonably good results without spending more than an
additional $500 or $600? Would it help considerably to have an
installed DVD (to avoid going from DVD to analog, and back to digital
through a capture card?).

Are there any good websites (besides VCDhelp.com) that we could go to
for this type of advice?

Thanks in advance for your advice. Ron

[Rich927]

Get more memory too. A large Hard drive (7200 mbs). I would skip the analog card and go straight to a Firewire card. BTW why are you going thru analog card before the firewire?