Video editing requirements

[coconut]

Hi all,

My friend is asking me to build a video editing system for her. I know system building, but I know nothing about video editing requirements. From the little I've read, it seems people consider the cpu to be the most important part of the build. This is a bit of a head-scratcher for me: If all one is doing is changing the sequence of video clips, why would that be cpu-intensive? Wouldn't the HDD be the overwhelming bottleneck, not the cpu? Sure, for the final encoding, and for the rendering of effects, then I can definitely see needing a fast cpu. But just editing, without fades or anything? Help me understand this, please.

One other quick question for this build: Is the video card important? I would have assumed that video editing and effects progs would be gpu-accelerated (for rendering effects etc.), but people seem to be saying, again, that the progs rely solely on cpu for graphics rendering, and that onboard video is adequate. Seems like a big loss of potential computing power there; is it true?\

Thanks.

 

[hunter315]

For a video editing system i definitely suggest an i7 920, depending on the size of the videos 6 or 12GB of low latency ram, as for storage requirements, if it does not have to be guaranteed to be safe pick up some of the new samsung F3's and put them in raid 0, if data protection is needed then raid 5 will boost performance while still protecting data, an nVidia card should be used since more of those programs support CUDA than Stream but even offloading some of it to the GPU still leaves the CPU heavily taxed, i would never suggest onboard video for it, a system is all about balance.

 

[K2N hater]

memory and CPU depends vastly on what she's dealing with. filters and transcoding being a key reason to spend a bit more on it.

concerning disks... well that's a bit more complicated. people generally use dedicated SSD (1 or more on RAID-0) for scratch/working space. must not be the same drive you boot from. some prefer to spend a bit more on RAM and make a RAM drive to deal with scratch but, again it depends on what she's dealing with. a 500GB video can be extremely expensive to put on SSD drives while a 500MB video would make RAM drive a cheap and fast solution.

to store projects, reliability costs the most. a number of problems may lead to corruption of data so the cheap way to start is to buy 2 hard disks of the same size and make a mirror (dynamic disk/RAID-1) on windows. the mirror consists in reading/writing everything on both drives at once so if 1 drive dies the other will still have all the data untouched. if the problem is eventual corruption/loss of data because of any other problem, tape is still the best solution.

for more permanent archiving, DVD is a great deal.

 

[surya ravikumar]

Iam an fcp editor , if someone wants to stdy fcp, i can teach
contact me
;
surya.ravikumar1@gmail.com