ideal system for video editing

[brosbros]

To all the video enthusiast out there. i want to get into video editing as a hobby, and i would like to know that what is an ideal system requirement for the job? I mean in term of time and speed to convert and decode a video format....


any suggestion would be appreciated....

kindly regards,

[solarfox]

Well... ideally, you build the fastest damn system you can get your hands on. However, if you don't feel like maxing out your credit cards this week, it is possible to do quite a bit with a lesser system; it all depends on what you want to do and how impatient you are.

My first video-editor system was built with the following specifications:

K6-2/380 CPU on an Epox motherboard
256MB PC100 SDRAM
8Gb primary master HD, containing Windows 98SE & applications
20Gb primary slave HD, containing video projects
ATI 3D Xpression video card (mostly because a local surplus place had a boxful of them hanging around, and it was a decent card for doing 1024x768 @ 24-bit color depth)
Turtle Beach Montego-II sound card (because onboard sound, as a general rule. sucks )
Western Digital IEEE1394/Firewire card

Initially, I used my Sony Digital-8 camcorder as the video source; later, when I began converting my VHS tapes to VCD (and later to DVD-R), I added a Dazzle DVBridge to do the analog-to-DV conversions because my particular camcorder lacks the passthrough feature.

Performance with this system was respectable enough when I was doing DV projects, with the camcorder footage, that were intended to be exported back to tape (in DV format) as a master for later duplication, and it wasn't too bad when making 352x240 MPEG-1 files for VCD. (Typically about 2 hours to reencode an hour of DV footage for export -- not bad when you factor in that I was adding frequent transitions, video effects, and titling to the raw footage -- or 4.5 hours to encode a 60-minute VCD. Note that all of this was being done with ULead Media Studio Pro 6.x, so your mileage may vary depending on the software you use.)

Rendering times for making 720x40 MPEG-2 files for DVD, though, were ridiculously unacceptable; well into the 15-hours-or-more range for a 2-hour movie. A 1GHz Duron chip on an ECS motherboard, with 512Mb of PC2100 DDR RAM, slashed that encode time down to about six hours for a 2-hour movie, and my current Athlon XP2000+ cuts that to around 3.5-4 hours. (Sometimes less if it's just a straight 1:1 encoding, but when I'm converting VHS recordings I'm usually cropping about 2% of the frame all the way around to get rid of noisy edges and head-switching glitchies.)