Today in DCC Workstation

Building a Digital Video Editing System --Good, Fast and Cheap: Pick Two.
The PC Hardware You Need for Good, Better and Best Digital Video Editing

by Charlie White

--INTRO--; --GOOD, BETTER, BEST DEFINED-- ; --GOOD-- ; --BETTER-- ; --BEST-- ; --CONCLUSION-- ; --TABLE 1: Video Storage Requirements-- ; --TABLE 2: Sample Configurations-- ; --TABLE 3: For further information-- .

GOOD

With our price points and objective in mind, let's roll down the river of digital video editing, and find out what you can get for your money. First, we start with a basic system -- one that would be perfect for capturing video clips for the Web or CD-ROM use. In addition to a computer, at least a Pentium II 400, you'll need a capture card. There's a variety of choices in this market segment, and many won't cost you more than a few hundred bucks. ATI's All-in-Wonder 128 card not only lets you capture video from any composite NTSC source, but has a cable-ready TV tuner and 16MB of video memory on board as well. Another market leader in this segment is the Marvel G400-TV by Matrox, offering similar features at comparable prices. Either way, for less than $300, you'll be capturing video that's ready to be compressed into MPEG, Quicktime or Microsoft Media for the web or compressed via Cinepak for CD-ROM use. Since most computers sold today include a hard disk that's at least 4GB and fast enough to handle 320x240 video at 15 frames per second, you may be able to get away without even adding hard disk space. It's a good idea, however, to capture your video into a separate partition, so you'll be using a continuous space on the disk onto which your video data will be recorded. Even when you're dealing with half-sized frames, it's important to keep the data moving as efficiently as possible.

Rounding out the package would be plenty of RAM, especially if you're using Windows NT. NT runs best with at least 64MB of RAM, and really shines at 128MB or more. To stay within our $5K category limit, though, let's put a cap on it at 256 MB. Hey, no need to worry -- RAM is cheap, and getting cheaper. And what about software? The good news is that many of the capture cards in this arena offer "lite" versions of Adobe Premiere (the LE version, with a slightly less enhanced feature set) or Ulead Media Studio Pro. Going all-out with the latest, full version of one of these popular editing packages will set you back another $500-$600 at current street prices.

Lead on to Better

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