Ten years ago, it was totally beyond imagination to set-up a video editing station without over-priced video capturing cards, fancy-expensive hard drives and top-notch processors. However, the dream of having an editing station in your house with just a consumer DV-camcorder and a personal computer have become a reality now. You may just need minor changes to your PC to make it work for editing.
Computer Specification
All of the computers that are designed for multimedia can easily handle video editing. These computers can be over-priced for having gaming specifications that you do not need for video editing.
So, if you want to buy a new computer or upgrade an existing one, check for the specifications that are important and do not pay for those that are not:
CPU power : This is important for rendering your video and video effects. Pentium III and IV processors with speed higher than 900 MHz are good. If you want to have powerful computer that you can conveniently edit and render video with, go with Pentium IV 2.0 GHz or higher.
Memory (RAM) : Have at least 512 MB of RAM for video processing. 1GB RAM would be ideal.
Hard Disk : You need a lot of space on your hard disk for video storage and rendering. Also, the hard drive should be fast to read and write video data. Have at least 40-60 GB free for you video data and rendering. It would be ideal to dedicate one hard drive to video (you can buy big hard drives for a cheaper price these days.) The speed of the hard drive should be 7200 rounds per minute (RPM) or higher. Slower hard drives may cause dropped frames during video capture and jittery playback.
Laptops (especially the older models) do not usually carry 7200 RPM hard drives. If you want to edit your video on the laptop, it is recommended to use external firewire (or USB 2.0) hard drives.
Graphic Card : Video editing is not like computer games that need intensive graphic power and memory. As long as your graphic card can display a video on screen it is good enough for video editing. Do not pay money for fancy graphic cards.
Sound Card : You need a basic sound card to hear the sound of the video. A fancy sound card is not necessary for video editing.
Screen Resolution : Higher resolution gives more room for different tools and monitors in the editing program. The resolution should not be less 1024x768 (for some editing programs like Adobe Premiere, you will need higher resolution.)
DELL, Sony and Apple offer the best selections of multimedia computers
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