Buying a Computer for Video

by Robin Liss
Published on Jun 22, 2001 12:00 AM



Do you feel as dumb as a caveman when shopping for a computer for use with video. We'll you may not feel that dumb, but shopping for a computer for video can be very intimidating and hard, were going to break down for you what you should look for when shopping for a computer for use with video. When your buying your computer for use with video you will need a fast machine because of the heavy processing that video editing takes.

Price. Everyone wants to save money when buying a computer for anyhing, but you should make sure you don't go to cheap and get a computer that won't work. You should expect to pay $2000-3000 for any computer for video, that does not come with a fire wire card or any other type of expansion. As you get more and more features the price of your computer will surely go up, but you want to make sure that you aren't paying to much money for just a brand or useless features. Many people will be compelled to go with the top name computer maker, but with that computer manufacturer's name also comes increased prices. Its not always nessicary to go with a brand name computer, as long as you can get good warranties and know that the company your are purchasing from has a good history. If you don't go with a brand name computer, make sure you search around the web for information about the computer maker and their history and rep.

Space. The thing that every computer for video user needs is space, and a lot of it. Hard Drive space is the amount of area that you have to store your video's or other footage on. You will want enough space to store 1 or 2 hours of video or if you are planing on editing long movies, you should look for having 3 to 4 hours of video space. A good way to measure the amount of space any video will take up is simple, it will take you about 1 gigabyte of space for 1 hour's video, or if your going for high quality it should take 2 gigabytes. When your shopping for your computer you should really look for a hard drive with more than 14 gigabytes of hard drive, posibly more than 20 if your doing big projects. This will give you enough space to hold all the programs and video that you will need. You will also need to consider the speed of your Hard Drive, because you will be working with very big files. There are diffent "protocols" that your Hard Drive will use to comunicate with the rest of the computer. The best ones to go with are Ultra Wide SCSI and EIDE. Another option with Hard Drives for video are RAIDS, these Hard Drives made up of multiple hard drives so they are extra fast, if you have the money in your budget look into a RAID Hard Drive.

The next computer part to look into is RAM. RAM is like temporary hard drive for your computer, the more you have the more intensive computing you can do. When you are runing your video editing program the more RAM you have the faster your porcessing can go, and if you don't have a lot of RAM your projects can take a long, long time. I've had to let my computer "think" or render a file for over 14 hours!. Because of the drains that video editing can have on your computer, you need a lot of RAM it would be best to get a minimum of 128 megabytes.

Chip Speed. The ultimate thing that determines the speed of your computer is your Central Processing Unit. This chip is what controls the entire computer and its kind of like the traffic cop for the computer. Chip Speed is constantly increasing, under something called "Moor's Law" the chip speed of a computer will double every 1 and a half years. Currently the fastest chips you can get in a desktop computer, are 1 GHz. Chip speed is explained in Hertz. Around 2 years ago chips ran at about 300 Mhz's. Chips are getting so fast that they are two fast for your needs, and any videographer who is going to be editing videos will not need a chip at this point that is any faster than 700 or 800 MHz. If you can afford a fast a chip go with it, but they are getting so fast that you won't need the speed.

External Storage. When you run out of space on your Hard Drive your going to want to use external storage for extra storage space. External Storage is anything that stores data from your computer on a removable or versatile disk or cd. The first option for exernal storage is disks, the smallest disk is your standard 3.5 inch floppy disk. The floppy only holds 1.44 megabytes of space so you won't be able to use it for video. The next step up is the ZIP drive. ZIP drives are created by Iomega Corp., and are the most popular storage medium next to the CD. They hold 100 and 250 Megabytes of storage each and cost about $5-10, but again they won't really hold enough for video. CD-R is becoming a more and more popular format. By burning information onto a CD you van share it with your firends and almost anyone that has a computer, the downside is that you can only write to a CD once. CD's hold 650MB, which will hold some video but not enough for a large project. The next option is the Orb Drive, its fairly new and untested but it holds 2.2 gigs of space, enough for an hour or two of video. It should cost around 300 dollars for the drive and $30 per disk. Writeable DVD's haven't come out yet but when they do they will be perfect for video. DVD's can hold 5.2 Gigabytes of storage! Thats enough for atleast 5 hours of video. Currently the cheapest DVD writter costs about $6000 but in a year or two the price should be cheap enough for the home videographer.

With these few tips you should be able to pick out a computer that will suite your needs for video. One thing to keep in mind, always shop around and get multiple opinons. Look into the waranties of companys selling you your computer and their history before you make any purchase. If you follow these simple tips, you should find a computer for video that is perfect for your needs!