Have just joined and some help would be appreciated if possible. I am buying a new PC in the next few days and want to have a go at video editing so have read a bit and configured the following PC on Watford Electronics configurator:

Athlon 64 3200+ Boxed Socket754
MSI-6702 K8T Neo-FIS2R VIA K8T800 S754 Motherboard
512Mb PC3200 DDR RAM
Seagate 160Gb 8Mb SATA
LiteOn 16x IDE DVDROM + PowerDVD Software
NEC ND3500A Black Dual Layer DVD+/-R/RW 16x DVD IDE Driver
Sapphire Radeon 9600 256Mb AGP + DVI / TV Out
Creative SoundBlaster Audigy LS
LM17A 17" TFT Silver/Black Multimedia

I have a DCR-TRV19E Sony Mini DV camcorder (came with capture card and Pinnacle Studio V.8 SE)

Is this suitable for entry level video editing?
Any help on choice between the Radeon 9600 and an MSI FX5700LE-TD 256Mb AGP + DVI/TV Out graphics card would also be great.

Regards, Stretch.

That's certainly plenty to be getting on with. Much better than what i've got anyway

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That's a helluva system and one to be envious of. If there is an opportunity to improve it, it's perhaps only to sling in another hard drive. For a small fraction of your total budget for this, you could get a little - e.g. 40GB - hard drive - for your operating system and applications, and keep your nice big drive as a separate one for capturing video. And I guess doubling your memory wouldn't do any harm... In terms of video editing, I don't think your choice of video card makes any difference - that will depend more on which games you play as relaxation from editing...

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Millsy: when he said "I have a DCR-TRV19E Sony Mini DV camcorder (came with capture card and Pinnacle Studio V.8 SE)" I'd assumed that the capture card in question was a Firewire card. But maybe not...

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Premiere Pro, Encore, Photoshop, Ulead VS6, WXP Pro, Core 2 Duo, 2GB, 2 x 250GB SATA3 drives, 2 x 250GB USB 2 external drive, DVD writer, GeForce 7300 GS 256MB

The biggest fool can ask questions that the wisest man cannot answer...

Thanks for the help so far. I had a look round the site and there are loads of great threads to read through.

The capture card is the 6 pin firewire type with two firewire ports, 4 pin connection to the camcorder. Another question on this: Do I need to install this PCI capture card if the motherboard has a firewire port? (which it does)

Regarding the hardrive, I guess what you are saying is that having a separate HD for the operating system, applications, games etc keeps it all separate from the video footage that is downloaded to the larger HD. Is this just a best practise thing or does it improve performance and reduce the risk of ????
I've heard partitioning mentioned, any explanations on what this means would be useful.

Thanks, Stretch.

Stretch: the reason for having a separate hard drive for video capture is performance. If you capture to the same drive that your operating system and application software are on, there will always be 'contention' for the disk: it will be trying to load/unload bits and pieces of your o/s and app at the same time as it's trying to write your file to the disk. Reserving one drive to your capture means that there is none of that contention, and the capture process is smoother with fewer interruptions, reducing the chances of any errors. Partitioning is a different thing altogether, and is - AFAIK - more about housekeeping. You take a single physical hard drive and divide it into pieces, such that perhaps you have your o/s and apps on e.g. partition c and your documents on partition d - perhaps even your photos on partition e etc. They're all on the same disk, though. And if you already have a firewire port, I'm pretty certain you don't need to install your capture card.

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Premiere Pro, Encore, Photoshop, Ulead VS6, WXP Pro, Core 2 Duo, 2GB, 2 x 250GB SATA3 drives, 2 x 250GB USB 2 external drive, DVD writer, GeForce 7300 GS 256MB

The biggest fool can ask questions that the wisest man cannot answer...

Ian, thanks for the explaination.

Stretch

Get a 3000/3200 SOCKET 939 (90 nm)...it will be more upgradable in the future than 754 and supports dual channel

Get two sticks of ram instead of the one in order to take advantage of the dual channel

Thats my 2 cents...even if u dont do that, it should be a nice system

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Aspire X-Alien
460W Enermax
9800 Pro
SP-94 with Tornado
Panasonic GS200 on its way with:
3 DV Tapes, Tripod, Bag, Telephoto Lens, Lens Cleaning Kit

Thanks again for the advice so far, have ordered two 512 sticks of RAM and an additional 40Gb HD.

One more question:
I have asked them (Watford Electronics) to put all of the O/S and applications on the 40Gb HD and leave the other one completly empty, is this correct? I have explained that I want to use it for video editing.
I have no idea if the 160Gb HD needs anything doing to it and would guess that it acts as a slave drive, the other one being the primary.

One more very basic question:
What is involved when copying CD's or DVD's from one drive to another. By this I mean does the PC use HD space or does it use RAM or the processor to do this?

Regards, Stretch