I am going to be buying about 5 mid-class pentium 4 machines to put them on a gigabit switch and use them as a cluster for video editing. I know that Adobe After Effects supports rendering with a cluster, but does Adobe Premiere Pro 2 support a cluster? Basically...i want the cluster to be used for all rendering...even previewing my work on the timeline. Can this be done?

Also, im curious as to how these two setups would compete:

1.

AMD F-62 Dual Core
4 gig RAM

2.

5 x Pentium 4 2.4 GHz 512Meg

Basically...should i go for a huge explosive single machine...or go with a cluster of average pentium 4s?

Thanks!

Daniel, I wouldn't go blowing a pile of dough on a cluster of computers when most of the members of this forum are using one machine to do their capture, editing and burning on. The computers are in the 2 to 3 Ghz range with some below that and with memory ranging from 256Mb ram to 1Gb. So a Pentium 4 with 512Mb Ram + Hyperthreading certainly speeds things up (I have 1 GB myself) and a 3.2 Ghz processor will do everything you want. A 250GB hard disk will get you up and running but a second hard disk is highly recommended for just video work (hard disks fill up so quickly - so buy the biggest you can afford). I haven't used a RAID system, others on this forum are better qualified to talk about them. What kind of editing are you planning to do? Are you opening a small production studio? I'd be very interested to know.

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