Best system specs for the a video editing PC?
 

I'm wondering what components make the most difference in a video editing PC...

I've got an amd64 4000+ laptop with 1 gig of ram and an ATI X600 128mb in it and it edits/renders videos faster than my AMD 3000+ desktop with 1 gig ram and a nvidia geforce 6800 256mb.

Is the CPU the main factor here? or does the video card come into play much?

I dont know whether to build on the desktop (adding ram and what not) or just build a new one from scratch with a dual core CPU and a ton of ram. With all these new processors out lately (pentium d's, opteron's, etc) im not too sure what the benifits and disadvantages of each type are.

I'm tired of having to wait while i chop through 700mb divx and mov files.

go dual dual core xeon with a shit load of ram and fast sata drives.

get a dual output vid card and get an expensive one.

I'm pretty sure the CPU is what carries the load when you're rendering video. The GPU handles it when playing back.

also.. would the cache on the cpu matter? i'm looking at a bunch of them on this site http://www.memoryexpress.com/index.p..._menu=197&SID=

seems they range from 128k cache to 4 megs.

Would the dual core xeon 3.2ghz would be better than the dual core pentium d 3.6ghz?

video card will make very little difference, CPU + memory are most important :thumbsup

I hear a Texas Instruments Calculator R0x0rz Y0uR S0x0rZ when it comes to rendering

higher the processor and higher RAM makes video editing fast rendering... you laptop has a high processor with amd 4000+(i think its 2.4GHz speed) then your cpu with has 3000+ (2.0Ghz speed)

someone here had an awesome mac farm setup for vide rendering, it was fucking hot, wish I had the pic.

So...

Dual xeon 3.2ghz with 4 gigs of ram sound good? or would bumping it up to 8 gigs of ram make a big difference?

My biggest problem is when scrolling through videos with the slide bar in ulead video studio... on some formats it's really choppy and annoying to find clips. I want it to be completely smooth, if possible ;)

4GB should be sufficient for the majority of video editing. AS for the chip, I would go with the quad-core Intel chip (content creation on quad-core should kick complete ass) when it comes out later this year.

Tyan Thunder n4250QE (S4985)
http://www.tyan.com/products/html/thundern4250qe.html

I haven't seen a quad core yet for the new Xeon (771).

using dual core 3.4s 2x2mb l2 (newegg has em for $155 right now)
dual channel ddr2. i personally find that 1gb is plenty for my encode machines - some of mine only have 512 but i have 2gb on my editing boxes.

faster ram is better than more ram

u can use an 8mb pci video card on an encode box and it wont make a shit of difference.

128mb is more than enough for an encode machine, any 1/2 way decent card.

i dont use ulead but it may have a similar feature as premiere... premiere has some settings for scratch disc.. it helps to have source on 1 drive, output on a different drive, and scratch on another seperate drive

your editing from a divx file? that will dragass anyhow - probably wouldnt have the lag issue if you were editing from dv-avi

Ya, editing from dv-avi is totally smooth.. mpeg isn't bad either. Alot of my source files come in divx though (it's still the best quality video out there for the files that small). I imagine a 1 hour dv-avi file would be insanely huge if i converted it first.

Are you talking about this one?

http://www.stockimagelab.com/post/Render_farm.JPG


Thread is here:
http://www.gfy.com/showthread.php?t=...ghlight=cooled

The new Mac Pro puts them all to shame.

http://www.apple.com/macpro/performance.html

you mean now that it uses an intel chip? =]

dv-avi is about 12gb/hour - this is avi ripped right off a mini-dv tape. not to be confused with uncompressed/ms-avi which is larger, and a rendered avi (huffy for example) which would be larger also.

you wouldnt probably want to convert the divx first because it wont be lossless. i just demand the original source material =]

your talking about this one that belongs to Brad G.

http://www.stockimagelab.com/post/essog-render-farm.jpg


mines not as pretty...

http://www.bithosting.net/rack/images/rack%20001.jpg

Hey, never had a problem with Intel. Microsucks is the company I love to hate.
Lets face it IBM/Motorola were not keeping up so it was inevitable.

Like the TV commercial says, now that Apple uses Intel the true power of their chips has been unleashed.


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