What to Look for in a Digital Video Editing Computer

Editing digital video takes a fairly significant amount of processing power, but most computers built within the last three years should be able to handle it no problem or with minor system improvements.

In order of priority, here is what you need.

1. A firewire connection If you’re using a desktop computer this is accomplished by having a PCI card or on-board firewire; if you’re using a laptop, you either add it on with a PCMCIA card or some laptops have it on-board as well. Without firewire, you can’t connect your camcorder to your computer for video, and that’ll end your hobby right there. Most firewire boards or cards cost between $50 - $100, and come bundled with software that you can use to edit video. The only significant thing to ensure when getting the firewire card is that it is “OHCI compliant”.

2. Minimum hardware specifications I’d recommend at least a 300mhz Celeron chip; anything else is going to be very slow. Almost any video card with do the job, but it should have at least 4 megabytes of video memory, and you can edit video with as little as 32 megabytes of system RAM. A sound card will be necessary to hear the sound in the video, but it’s not mandatory - although it is useful to hear what you’ve recorded.

3. Stable operating system Firewire and digital video capture is still being perfected, and it didn’t reach true stability until Windows 98. Windows 2000 and XP seem to have no trouble handling digital video, and Macintosh computers supported firewire from day one. On Windows platforms, ensure that you have the latest version of directX (now at version 8.0a), available for free from Microsoft.

4. Hard disk speed and space Digital video takes up a lot of space on the hard drive - 3.6 megabytes per second. If you do the math, a half hour of content will take up around six and a half gigabytes of space on your hard drive. And if you consider that you need almost as much space in order to edit, you will require double the size of your end product. I would start with at least a 20 gigabyte hard disk. As for speed, if your hard disk isn’t fast enough, it will drop frames as it transfer the data. Fortunately, hard disks in the range of 20 gigabytes didn’t come out until the last couple of years, and they’re fast enough for the task of digital video.

5. Editing software I hear that Windows XP comes bundled with some editing software, but I doubt it will offer users the level of functionality in a more mainstream video editing program like Premiere or Media Studio Pro. Most firewire cards come bundled with editing software; let that form part of your decision to buy.