I'm know you've been asked this many a-time, and I've been looking through the site and Ed Gaskells book as well as talking to a couple of PC sellers but I am still unsure how best to obtain/set up a system for video editing.
I have about 40 hours of Hi8 video and a load of standard 8mm cine (some with sound and 1hr long) which I want to save in digital format for prosperity.
I have a cine to video converter box and a Sony DCR-PC350E DV camcorder with AV in and firewire out.
I have done a couple of 'event' videos in Hi8, editing down onto VHS which I enjoyed but it is limited, time consuming and suffers quality degradation. I'd like to use my DV camcorder and do more event videos, editing and then storing the results on CD/DVD. I don't think I'm missing any video hardware to get the cine and Hi8 into a pc via my DV camcorder but it’s the h/w and s/w spec for a pc system that I'm stuck on. I want semi-professional results but don't want to spend more than about £600. I could probably build up a pc and have a friend who has built pc's (1 for video editing), but with so many manufacturers and variables I don't want to make a mistake and get weird hic-ups or problems because of the way I've configured a system.
I have seen a shop built system with AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Winfast/Foxconn motherboard, 160Gb SATA 7200rpm, 1Gb/400MHz DDRAM, Radeon 9550 256Mb graphics card with TV out, DVD RW, on board firewire, 6 USB2 ports and 17"SVGA monitor. Also Dell have a P4, 3GHz, 256Mb RAM, 2x512DDRAM400, 160Gb IDE, Firewire PCI card and 17" FP display. Both just over my budget, but how do I choose? Is on board firewire better than via PCI card? Is SVGA better than FP? Is intel better than AMD and SATA vs IDE? If I buy the individual bits I may get a higher spec, but which manufacturers do I use? And then what editing software to buy? Help - I can't get over this hurdle!!
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