Video Editing Best Practices Part III: Build the Ultimate Video Editing PC Discussion

Video editing -- especially working in high definition -- will eat every last ounce of performance you make available, so it's vital to have a balanced machine to work off of. We offer up a checklist of steps to ensure your PC is tuned to make video editing as efficient as possible.

Read the full content of this Article: Video Editing Best Practices Part III: Build the Ultimate Video Editing PC

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Nice Article, good read for someone looking to get into video editing and doesn't know much about hardware. I disagree that one should stay away from notebooks as long as it's powerful enough they can come in handy if you get a editing job at a location that doesn't have the software/equipment you like... I am currently thinking about the Asus N53/G53

It is a shame how overpriced macs are, I agree for the advanced user Windows can do just as good a job as a video editor however I fix computers on the side and unfortunately the average PC user including video editors get there computer bogged down by spyware/viruses and need a reformat way more often than mac users, so I do think a mac is a good option for a lot of people. Although CS5 is a step up from FCP I think it will continue to switch back and forth as new version come out. If apple would just make there prices more reasonable and update there hardware as often as PC manufacturing I think they can sell even more computers unfortunately there current marketing and tactics are making them very successful so I don't see them changing the way they price/update there hardware anytime soon.

 

Ultimate Editing PC?

Easy!

CPU - Needs a strong cpu (multi core) core speed does not matter here all editing programs that are wort a hoot use mutlicore to its full potential, all the encoding/rendering is done with the cpu for the most part so this is very important if you want fast editing and encoding.

RAM - Not as important but if your working with HD and like a RAM preview or have a lot of effects loaded up at once having enough RAM to keep it from writing to disk will speed up your workflow. 4GB is probably enough and cheap but if your in doubt or think your seriously into this get 8GB since RAM is again pretty cheap these days.

GPU - Not important with editing, unless your using a form of hardware accelerated encoding/rendering. The gpu will just be displaying the images on screen and wont have alot of load like it would for gaming so this is where ou can save the most on your system to make up for upgrading the other parts that matter more.

Screen - If your serious/pro this can cost you a lot because 99% of any monitor out there with a "good" price is a TN panel and these panels are not sophisticated enough to properly display the full color gamut that you would have in your video. I say pro because a regular person can easily get by without a IPS+ screen and not many people would ever know or notice the difference. I consider a pro monitor more important for photoshop since a still image gets a lot more focus on the color than moving video and you generally do a lot more specific color changes in photoshop while with video you generally only make some broad global adjustments.

So your looking for an IPS panel and also need to calibrate it if your "serious" otherwise just get a monitor that has good black/white levels and no backlight bleed or obvious banding.

HDDs - If your working with a lot of footage it will take up TONS of space so you may want to get large disks and avoid the SSD's if you need a speed boost video editing is one of the few places RAID 0 makes sense and will give you a great boost in speed. In most cases though other than when transferring files the HDD is not the limit on speed it will be your cpu so just make sure you get 7200RPM drives and not 5400RPM and get a good size and you should be fine.