Will I need to upgrade for video editing?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Nate C.
  • Start date Start date
N

Nate C.

I will be buying a digital camcorder soon and am planning on installing a
Firewire card and a DVD burner so I can upload footage and do some basic
editing, splicing, etc. but nothing too fancy, then burning onto DVD. My
current system is an Athlon XP 1800 on an Asus A7N266-VM/AA with 512 mb RAM.
I know the more the better, but do you think I'd be able to get by for a
while with this system?

Thanks,
Nate
 
yep,thats ok for a start,try to get more ram and you will need a big hard
drive,I found a 40 gig hd
inadequate when working with dv capture and dvd vob files.I managed for a
while but you have to keep deleting files to make room...I have heard that
clock for clock pentium4 are faster than amd for mpeg encoding ..
my set up is..
athlon xp 1800
1.25 gig ram
40 gig hd
80 gig hd
This works ok for ripping ,editing etc.
I also have a second machine(athlon 2000) for farming out long encoding
jobs.It can take up to 15 hours for an athlon 2000 to convert a 5 gig dvd
rip to divx avi.
software i use.
nero6
dvdshrink
womble mpegvcr (this is good)
 
as "mr jumnles" said, that setup will be fine

i have found HDD space is the key, i do a lot of editing and my 120gb was
not enough along with my other everyday tasks so i got another 160gb
yesterday online for only £84 inc next day delivery, it is running sweet,
same model as my 120 just larger
 
I agree, I use a partitioned 120Gb for programs and the childrens rubbish
and a separate 120Gb for video files.

the_gnome
 
Agreed fine spec more HDD space.

JaMMeR


the gnome said:
I agree, I use a partitioned 120Gb for programs and the childrens rubbish
and a separate 120Gb for video files.

the_gnome


for for
Click to expand...
 
The critical thing is the harddrive speed. Standard drives are just to
slow to keep up while uploading dv via firewire.
You'll need an ata100 or even better an ata133 speed drive.
I have an athalon 1.2 gig system with 1gig of ram and it doesn't move
to slow.
I bought my computer to do video editing only to find out that it
wasn't up to snuff(salesman was a big fat liar.)
The drive was to slow it didn't have enough ram(128mgs).
I upgraded from 128 to 1gig(2 512 meg sticks) and put in a Maxblast
133 card and matching 80gig drive.
Now it never drops a frame during upload and imports my dv footage at
a fairly quick rate.
You should be able to get by on the ram you have for now and your cpu
is plenty fast for basic work, as long as you're patient during final
edit run.(If I do alot of edit points at one time I generally have to
walk away for 2-3 hours.(I do low end pro work though.)
You'll need to check to see if your mobo hd controller can be enabled
for ata100/133. If not you'll need to invest in a high speed
controller card.
Also your hd will need to turn at atleast 7200rpms to keep up with the
dv camera, else you'll drop frames, a BIG no-no.
I was reasonably satified with my intial set-up when I got it up and
going a year ago but am now looking at clustering my computer with
several other athalon units I have sitting around to try ang get my
video editing up to real-time speed.
If you have other questions or problem e-mail me and I'll walk you
through getting your system up to speed.
Harry
 
Back
Top