Video editing

awkgreen

New member
im looking to upgrade my old desktop to do some video editing.my current setup is,nvidia series 8 880gtx and 4g of memory. I have 40 g internal HD,and a 80 g external HD.Im unsure what's required for me to comfortably edit Hi-Def. iIm relatively new to video editing so all suggestions will be more than welcome
 
Go look up the system requirements and recommendations for whatever software you're thinking of using. Also, a video specific site might have more detailed advice than an audio forum.

The studio I work in just bought a Dell Precision Tower 5810, mostly for audio recording but with the expectation that we'll be editing some videos. We purchased Sony Vegas Pro 13 as an upgrade from Vegas 6 so I went to Sony's page on Vegas' system requirements and then found a Dell that exceeded those requirements.
 
Thanks ,my software is Power director 13 by Cyberlink. My main concern is my m/ board which is 8 years old, something tells me it won't cope with Hi Def.ill check out what you said though,thanks
 
Yeah, our old computer couldn't deal with HD, and with XP on it we couldn't even install Vegas Pro 13. There was no way around getting a new machine.
 
This isn't really the forum for video editing advice, although you might find a few knowledgeable guys in the video section further down the main page. Who knows...It's worth a try.
I can move the thread there if you like, but they'll definitely want more info.

CPU, RAM, and GPU all play important parts in different aspects of video editing, processing and rendering.
You didn't mention what your CPU is or how big your workload is going to be - Both of those things really matter.

Also, have you tried doing some editing? That's the real test...
 
Yeah, our old computer couldn't deal with HD, and with XP on it we couldn't even install Vegas Pro 13. There was no way around getting a new machine.

You're probably right, but 8 years ago there were some pretty powerful chips even by modern standards.
For all we know he's rocking a core2extreme or quad core xeon and beating a fair few i3/5/7s.
Unlikely, but worth asking.
 
My guess is that 4G of RAM is going to make it very slow for editing. I've got 6G and it bogs down doing HD processing. Also, not sure how much storage space you're going to need in the long run, (and what else is on your drives already) but 120 G of space will fill up pretty fast with HD video.
 
In my experience, typical desktop PCs wont cut it. You need separate memory for video, not shared with the O/S. I bought a use digital workstation that was for CAD-CAM and it was OK.
 
In my experience, typical desktop PCs wont cut it. You need separate memory for video, not shared with the O/S. I bought a use digital workstation that was for CAD-CAM and it was OK.

Certainly, for major video projects this would be the case.

But . . . I've been editing HD videos for several years using XP with 4mb ram and Vegas 11, and a Nvidia 9400, and I've been able to manage ok.

I do have plenty of disk space, and an i7 CPU, and they both help. But I do acknowledge that editing can be slow on lengthy videos. Most of the stuff I do is music videos, which only go for around 5 minutes.

But I once managed an 90 minute documentary using Moviemaker on Windows 98.
 
I edit video on Premiere Pro (which is a pretty resource greedy bit of software) and, on an i7 machine with 8 gig of RAM I rarely have problems that a bit of pre-rendering of effects can't fix. I have run PrPro on an early machine with a basic Pentium 3 and 4 gig of RAM without many problems.

However, an issue for you that I can see is your HDD storage. I just checked a recent project of mine and, for a 12 minute video with a bit over an hour of rushes and I had over 20gig of storage used. That'll fill you disk drive pretty quickly with one 40 and 80 gig drives. As a comparison I have an external 2 Terrabyte drive that cost me about $100.
 
Back
Top