Hi all

I own a digital video camera for about 5 years already, and I never use it because I have never had the means to buy a PC for editing the video that I record.

I have the money now and after asking around quite a bit, every PC Expert has a different idea as to what I should put in the system.

One of the quotes that I got that looked the best to me was the following.

350W Casing
Intel 945 p Chipset Motherboard with Firewire etc.
256 MB Radeon RX 1300 Pro Graphics card
Dualcore 3G Pentium Pro
2 X 1 Gig DDR 2 RAM 667 MHz
160 G HDD Serial ATA 300
Dual Layer Lightscribe DVD Writer

Can Someone please give me advise as to what I should change on this in your opinion. If anything here is overkill for a novice home movie editor, please tell me. This is more or less what my budget allows for when I stretch it.

Thanks

^^ it all depends on what software you will be editing with - movie maker/premire/avid etc.. .. but that systems fine and should run any editing software... but if your just going to use movie maker than that is abit orverkill...

the main thing to change is to get more disk space if you can. By the time Windows and s/w are installed you will have somethign like 130-140Gb free. Assuming you are edting standard def you can assume 12Gb per hour of uneditied footage. You will soon run out, trust me.

Look to getting something liek an 80 Gb drive for your C drive and a seperate physical drive for your video drive. make it as big as possible. 250-300 Gb minimum or you'll be looking online for a new drive in a few months.

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I'm not young enough to know everything!

Exactly as Alan says, but I would also up the 350w PSU to 450w because you have extra drives, firewire card, two processors, big hefty graphics card and probably an extra exhaust fan or 2 to power.

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Edius Pro 4 Broadcast, Edius DVX, ADVC300 -- PremPro 2.0, Matrox RT X100

Hi Everyone, this is my first post! Woohoo!

Van, your system will be fine. It is overkill for now, and the "latest and greatest" software probably won't bog it down for a couple years.
In addition to the good comments from miwhel and Alan, I would recommend you not overlook the mouse... get a laser mouse, not one with a ball in it. You'll be really glad.

HD space: Pinnacle will die if it doesn't have 30G of free disk space. That means Pinnacle is installed, your mpgs are on the hd, and you are ready to begin your project... you must have 30G of free space left on your defragmented HD.

Think first about getting an extra 200G drive just for your video data: mpgs and projects. Then also think hard about a directory structure in which you archive old mpgs onto data dvd's, labeled and retreivable, so that they can be reinstalled in the directory that the project expects to find them in. Don't ask me how I know.

Hope this helps. Once again, Hi everyone!