Building A Video-Editing PC (slightly off topic)

[GrayStrickland]

I want to build a pc for the primary purpose of editing video. This will not, strictly speaking, be a home theater pc, because I have no intention of connecting it to a tv. I plan to use it to transcode non-copyrighted mpeg2 source material into Divx, Xvid, h.264 or MKV with no loss in resolution. Most of the source material will be 720x480. My goal will be to preserve multiple audio tracks and subtitle sets where the exist.

Is there any point in spending money for a dual-core or quad-core cpu?

I understand that multiple cores make apps run faster, but only if you're using an app which is written to take advantage of hyperthreading and multi-core processors. If not, then one core runs like crazy, but the others are essentially idle (or so I understand).

I want to buy all the cpu and memory I need to do this task quickly, but I don't wish to over-spend on hardware which doesn't really improve performance. Any suggestions?

[dphirschler]

If it helps you any, I am getting by just fine with a 3 GHz. A 30 minute program takes about 2 - 2.5 hrs to encode using 2-pass VBR in TmpgEnc, a notoriously slow (but great quality) encoder. Funny, but it seems an hour-long program doesn't seem to take that much longer.


Darryl

[ntscuser]

Is there any point in spending money for a dual-core or quad-core cpu?

Yes. All of my encoding programmes run at least three times faster with a dual-core. With what I know now, I'd have bought a quad-core.

[GrayStrickland]

ntscuser:

What are the specs of your pc and how long, roughly, does it take you to transcode 1 hour of source material?

[ntscuser]

ntscuser:

What are the specs of your pc?

If you click the "computer details" button above this post, it will tell you my PC specs.

and how long, roughly, does it take you to transcode 1 hour of source material?

I don't encode to XviD, only to MPEG2.