So you've decided to become the next Speilberg? Before you prepare Oscar speech, you'll need to buy few items of video editing equipment. Some of these aren't cheap, but you'll achieve professional results on a limited budget; and you'll probably own at least one item on your shopping list. So here's the essential buyers guide from the digital-director.

The Camcorder

The camcorder is the essential piece of kit and If you're serious about editing, you'll opt for a MiniDV camcorder. The miniDV format was specifically engineered to allow for hassle free editing and is natively supported by all Non-Linear Video Editing applications such as Adobe Premiere. You may be tempted to opt for either a small MPEG4 camcorder or convieniant straight to DVD camcorder, but both of these would provide a bad investment (as users on videoforums have frequently posted). Although there's growing support for MPEG editing, it's flaky at best due to the nature of MPEG technology. The general rule of thumb is that if you plan to edit, go for miniDV. MiniDV camcorder rrices start from around £200, but there are a thousand and one specialist video editing publications just itching to tell you what one to buy (click here and for a FREE issue of Videomaker Magazine) and a few users have posted camcorder reviews on our forums. You can't go wrong if you spend a around the £1,000 mark, but shop around as there are some marked differences in prices.

Going through the myriad of camcorder options available would be a complete guide in itself. Luckily most of the features can be wittled down to a few main points:

1) Buy a "3CCD" camcorder for the best image quality. Don't be fooled into thinking bigger megapixels mean better image quality; this represents the image quality of stills taken by the camcorder. It's the size and number of CCDs that make the difference: 1 CCD means the 3 primary colours (Red, Green and Blue) are captured on the same CCD, 3CCD means each colour is kept seperate resulting in improved visuals. At the time of writing Panasonic offer the cheapest 3CCD cameras at around £500.

2) Ignore the digital zoom and look for the camera with the highest Optical Zoom. The digital zoom can be acheived just as easily in post production. The optical zoom uses the lens to zoom.

If you're approaching the higher end of the market (or simply have too much money to spend), you may be tempted to opt for a HDV (High Definition) camera. My advice would be to wait. The market for HDV is still in its infancy and to really benefit from High Definition would require a means of displaying your improved image. That's not really the case at the moment and mass take up of HDTV is still a few years away. Until then, I would advise the budding amateur to stick with the mature miniDV option and leave HDV to the guinea pigs (that is until there's an easy way to edit, output and display High Definition video). For more details in HDV, see http://www.videoforums.co.uk/reviews/Features/p2_articleid/23 

The Video Editing Computer

The non-linear (NLE) aspect of digital video makes it so accessible to the complete beginner: rather than using expensive specialised equipment, camcorder footage can be captured and edited directly on the family PC. The majority of households own computers sufficiently powerful for use in NLE, and video editing can be no more complex than arranging text in a Word document. For this reason, professional standard video editing is no longer the preserve of the specialist.

If you're about to build or configure your own system, you'll want to ensure buy a PC that maximises your video editing capabilities. If you're not a computer wizard, you'll be buying a ready made system so ensure the system you buy meets the minimum standard for NLE. Most modern PCs will adequately cope with digital editing - check out the deals available from PC World and Dell for example. When this article was first featured in 2001, I recommended at least a PIII 600Mhz with 256 RAM. Technology has moved on dramtically since then and so has the minimum recommended specs for video editing. You may ask why the minimum specs have changed when the aim is still the same.

The issue here is exactly the same as the video game market: the software needs your hardware to work harder and faster. With real time previews now the de facto standard and users demanding complex effects such as the "film look", the demand on the PC is now much greater than it was. There's a lot of change in the PC industry at the current time, with the introduction of 64bit computing and dual core processors making recommendations difficult. But feel safe in the fact that any new computer will be up for the job. The thing to look out for in PC benchmarks is video encoding times.

The first step in video editing is transferring your video from your camera to your PC. This couldn't be simpler using a DV camcorder - all you need is a FireWire (sometimes called IE1394 or ilink) card and suitable software such as MediaStudio Pro 6.5 or Adobe Premiere. Windows will automatically recognise your DV Camcorder, and you'll even be able to control it from the software. If you're using an older camcorder (e.g S-VHS), you'll need an analogue to digital converter such as the Hollywood Dazzle or a canopus ADVC device. You can make do with using a video in connection on a TV card, but if you're after top quality, it's best to go with a dedicated converter.

Next up is the video editing process. If you opt for a bog standard FireWire card, you'll probably get bundled software such as Ulead VideoStudio. These will perform adequately, providing video capture, edit, encoding and output. However, going for a more expensive dedicated video editing card card such as the Matrox RX.100, expect bundled software to include Adobe Premiere with real-time encoding and hardware acceleration.

The faster the processor, the faster your video will encode. When we talk about encoding, we mean converting your DV video clips into a more compressed format; DVDs are encoded to MPEG2 for example. If you're a speed freak with money to burn, you may be interested in buying a dual processor system. You'll be limited to Windows XP Pro or 2000 as your operating system, and few programs will take advantage of your setup. Personally, I'd leave this kind of set-up for the pros. However, the new technology of Hyper-Threading is available on the new P4 3.06 chips gives the advantage of a dual processor system on a single processor PC. For more info, click here.

Just as important as the processor speed is the amount of RAM installed in your system. 1GB is the advisable minimum. However, it's not advisable to go overboard here: there's a limit to the amount of RAM your motherboard can handle, and increasing past a certain limit will achieve marginal results. How much RAM will help your system? Consult the Memory Calculator ™.

When considering that just five minutes of DV footage eats 1GB of hard drive space, you'll need to buy a large capacity hard drive. I tend to shoot and store a lot more footage than I need so a 60 minute film often requires a hard drive capacity of 60GB+ before editing. And that's just one film. Don't skimp on the hard drive either - it can often be the bottle neck of a superfast editing rig; a disk drive rated at 7200 RPM will prove a wise investment over a 5200 RPM - a slow drive will inevitably result in dropped frames in capture. Also consider the cache size - drives with an 8MB cache increase performance accordingly resulting in faster encoding times and less chance of dropped frames. If your motherboard supports it, now's the time to switch to Serial ATA (SATA) drives. These typical offer increased date transfer rates of upto 150MB/sec compared to 100 or 133 offered by the IDE drives. Finally look into setting up your drives in RAID.

For those planning to distribute their film on DVD, a DVD burner is another essential piece of kit which has significantly dropped in price in recent times. Expect one as standard on a new PC. Dual layer drives enable twice the amount of data on a disc, and are equal in size to those used in Holywood movies, however support for playback in Standalone player isn't great and media still expensive. Most editing applications now support DVD authoring, but dedicated DVD authoring software such as DVD Movie Factory usually provides a few extras not included with your editing package. Finally, you'll need a clear crisp monitor picture for video editing, so a 15" monitor is a no-go. Opt for a 19" at the very least: Video editing programmes have a multitude of windows and you'll want them all open at the same time on the same screen. LCD screens have also vastly improved and rapidly dropped in price since the first version of this guide. I would now throughly suggest you consider buying 2 x 19"+ LCD screens for editing. You may also purchasing a graphics card with a TV-out to record straight to VHS or preview your master piece in all its wide screen glory.  

The Video Editing Card

For those with san analogue video camera, analogue USB or PCI capture cards will suffice.  Dedicated analogue to digital converters take the strain of conversion away from the CPU and therefore speeds up transfer. Cheaper cards can produce fair results, but video transfer might suffer a loss in quality during the conversion process (when compared to the lossless translation of DV to your PC). Cards to look out for are the Canopus ADVC-50, Hollywood Dazzle or Creative Video Blaster (Visit the Creative Online Store for all your digital entertainment needs - Special discounts on selected products!). TV capture cards are a cheap alternative but rely solely on the processor to encode the video with no external hardware - this solution is more suited to those wishing to create short video files for email or the web. As the video is transferred and encoded in real time, quality will be sacrificed on a slow computer and may result in dropped frames (a "jumpy" picture). Even capturing uncompressed footage may result in drop frames above a certain resolution due to the sheer volume of data.

For those with digital camcorders and fast computers, you'll want to buy a Firewire card. Firewire cards come in various guises but are essentially all identical, producing a data rate of 3.6 megs per second. Video quality is also not an issue given the loss-less conversion to your PC (the video is already encoded in the DV format). The difference in prices between low and mid range FireWire cards mainly boils down to the software provided with them. If you already have the software, go with the cheapest card. If you're looking for a great deal on software, shop around for some superb bundles. The more expensive cards will come with a full version of a leading package such as Adobe Premier at a significantly lower price than the software itself. If you want to buy a mid range video editing card, you'll be treated to the benefits of real time rendering of transitions and effects. Lower end cards rely on the processor to render these clips, which may result in considerable waiting times on even fast PCs to preview footage. Some packages may include a stripped down special edition of a leading program. Bear in mind that with FireWire cards and DV cameras, you're going to use up a lot of hard disk space (1GB per 5 minutes) and a will buying a fast processor to convert your movie to a smaller file format is a must. 

The Video Editing Software

This is where the creative work starts. Once again you could spend as little or as much as you like. When buying a video editing card, consider the software already bundled with it: the included software is often a key factor in deciding which capture card. This software will provide the following functions: capture video from your camera, edit these captured clips and then arrange them into a sequence on a time line. It then enables you to add transitions, credits and a soundtrack before finally exporting the movie back to the camera or a suitable encoded file format (DVD, VCD etc). You may need to buy additional software to encode your video to the highest quality or add special effects, but many of these are often professional tools unsuited to the beginner. Many leading software firm offer their full programs as trial software and are readily available for download. Check out the software reviews from digital-director.