PC Build for video editing?

I purchased a MiniDV camcorder and I'm looking to do some video editting on a PC. My PC is in a transitional stage at the moment as I have sold my MB, CPU and RAM on ebay.

I still have left over of my PC:

Samsung Spinpoint 250GB SATA II
Maxtor 80Gb 7200rpm
Antec SuperLanboy Case
Antec 550w PSU

I'm planning on getting a dual core processor with 2Gb DDR2 RAM. Would it be worth getting a raptor 74gb hard disk and how should i use it to maximise performance for video editting?

Should I partition the 74Gb Raptor in half, one half for windows and one half for working on my video files (to avoid fragmentation). I suppose I could use my 250Gb for storing my video files once I've finished editing on them.

Can any video editing experts out there give me some advice?

What are you going to do with the video stream?

Do you want to uncompress the whole stream, edit it bits by bits then reencode it?
Or do you want to do simple transcoding from DV to AVI / DVD / MKV / WMV9 or whatever?

If you're doing all out for editing, I would recommend you to get may be 4x320G in RAID0, that will give you enough speed to scan through uncompressed / huffman clips. Video-encoding is very sequencial in nature and a raptor is not any faster than a typical 7200rpm sata300 drive.

Since you're reading content from disk, you don't really need that much ram.

A typical AVISynth + Virtualdub + Xvid setup will use no more than 200MB of memory during encoding, even if you run 2 copies it'll use 400MB at most (Typically 260MB for me)

If I'm you I'll do the following:
Use the 80GB as OS drive
Use the 250GB for output
Buy 2x320 or 4x320 for scratch drive for fully uncompressed stream.

Depends on which 550W Antec you got, it should hold Conroe or X2 fine but not Pentium D

DV Source should be around 60MB/s for uncompressed stream so half of that raptor drive will only store 10 minutes, or 40 minutes (i think) with the huffman compression.


If you're just doing simple transcoding, or simple cut/paste/clipping, don't need to bother with a new harddrive at all.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by arthurleung

What are you going to do with the video stream?

Do you want to uncompress the whole stream, edit it bits by bits then reencode it?
Or do you want to do simple transcoding from DV to AVI / DVD / MKV / WMV9 or whatever?

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I think it will just be some cutting and then putting it into mpeg2 format for burning onto DVD.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by arthurleung

Depends on which 550W Antec you got, it should hold Conroe or X2 fine but not Pentium D

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Its an Antec True550 EPS 550w with a 24pin power connector. Thx for the advice so far :)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by uk_sam

I think it will just be some cutting and then putting it into mpeg2 format for burning onto DVD.

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Thats just simple CPU intensive. Even 512MB or ram would be enough for that purpose :)

Thx arthurleung, I was going to splash out £99 on a raptor drive - now i can save it up for a better graphics card instead :) I reckon I'll see more of a benefit going to dual-core for video editing.

As Tim The Toolman Tailor says "More power!!"

thats what yo uneed for that kind of thing :)