Minimum System Requirements?

[pclark]

Having recently acquired a digital 8 cam with firewire port. I have a shed load of old standard 8 tapes I need to convert bwo the cam to the pc. Having only a 533 celeron, you can imagine the amount of dropped frame alarms i got on attempted capture.
My question is what would you guys recommend as minimum system to guarantee no dropped frames?
Do I need 2 HDD?(ATA100 or 133)
Is RAID worth considering?
Pentuim 4 or Athlon? (clock speed?)
Is there a problem with VIA chipsets on motherboards?I seem to recall a post stating dropped frames with VIA chipsets.
Would a GF4 MX440 8xAGP card be adequate for editing?
Is Vegas Video a good app for capture and output as MPEG2?or is there any other software that is less processor intensive?

Sorry for all the questions, but if you could help I'll have an idea how much to budget for my pc upgrade.
TIA
Paul

[DJRumpy]

Your Cam is doing the capturing. Your only going to transfer the file to PC after the fact, but a upgrade is definately called for if you plan to do any serious video editing (celeron 533? eesh... 8) ). You conversion to whatever final output format you choose will be slow because of your slower processor.

I would start with a faster processor (P4 or equivalent). Look for at least a 2GHz or better. More ram (min 128MB..512MB better. Make it DDR, or RDRAM), and a current ATA/133 or SerialATA hard drive (7200 RPM). SCSI would be even better, but the price is prohibitive, for the size drives you'll want. Raid is always a good speed boost, but the actual encoding won't benefit from it that much, as most of the work is cpu intensive, not hard drive intensive. Drives are cheap though, and most newer boards come with IDE RAID controllers. You can always buy one, and upgrade it to a Raid later on.

[pclark]

thanks a lot,

helpful indeed you are
Paul