Need a New PC

BUCKETOBOLTS

BUCKETOBOLTS

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Joined
May 4, 2005
Location
Faith, NC
I'm afraid my 7 year old HP is about to take a dump. Shoot I think it was out dated when I bought it. Anyhow I was looking at ordering a new Dell. I'm not an IT guy and get kinda confused browsing at all the specs. I really don't know what to look for. I want something that is able to burn CD's, and able to edit video's when I get my digital video camera. What do you fellas recomend?
 
Memory (RAM) - 512 would probably be fine, 1G would be better.

Pentium 4 processor - The standard CPU in most PC's are fine for what you need. 2 Ghz or higher is fine.

Most come standard with a CD burner, the standard burner is OK.

When talking to your salesperson, make sure it comes with a USB or a firewire port for your camera. Most come with USB anyway.

When you get your Camera is will probaly come with some video editing software to get you started.

For home video editing don't let them talk you into the $1200 stuff - If video editing is your worst requirement, then above is all you need. You should be able to come out for under $500.
 
Gotta disagree with the above, though it depends on the size of the video's you're planning to edit.

My last machine was an Athlon 3200 based machine with 1GB RAM and it took forever to even convert a 1 hour video to DVD format (over 45 mins once it was on the HD) My current rig runs 2GB RAM, a pair of 160GB drives in RAID stripe and a dual core 3.0 P4.

Time to convert now? <18mins

Hard drive speed and processor make the single biggest difference when working with video since the files are so large. If the video's you'll be playing with are sub 15 minute then you can probably get a machine for no more than around the $1000 mark, if you're looking for either professional level video editing, or working with larger video's then expect to be around the 14-1700 mark for a machine that will get the job done.

Also make certain you get Firewire, when trying to bring video over using USB I've found one of two things happen, either a) I get no audio or b) I drop roughly 1 frame of video out of 10 causing the audio to be substantially ahead of the video. Firewire handles large file streaming much better than USB 2.0 does.

For the camera I still use an old Canon ZR65 and found it does fantastic work given my limited skill with the camera. For basic editing/conversion to DVD the software that came with it does great, for more advanced stuff (plus I now convert my old VHS to DVD) I've found Dazzle from Pinnacle studio's to be a reasonable alternative to Adobe's premier.
 
BUCKETOBOLTS said:
I'm afraid my 7 year old HP is about to take a dump.
Click to expand...

Holy cow. 7 years.

I would recommend statements from both of the above posts.
Considering you cannot build your own, Dell is a decent way to go. If all you are doing is internet and videos streaming. Firewire is the best way to go,atleast 1 GB of RAM, (should be upgradble to more, and a good cache speed). A fast hard drive and decent processor (2 - 3 GHz again upgradble). This will determine your file swapping during editing and how fast they go.
Make sure motherboard is PCI as well everything is going to PCI nowadays. One thing not noted to think about to is video card. Although you might not be playing the worlds best games etc.. your video while watching will be dependant on this. The overall product during video production will not suffer, but if you are like I am I want to be able to have good picture so I can see exactly what I am editing.
Also what software are you using for your editing? Camera?
 
Processor, RAM, and disc I/O are key to working with video and the video card itself is secondary but still important. If you are just planning on doing some home movies and have some patience that Dell should be fine but you will want to upgrade the RAM on it. As Vercer said, get firewire. USB sucks for pulling video off of your camera and you will more than likely end up with choppy video due to dropped frames.
 
I agree with the above. Definitely use Firewire for your video capture. If you can add a pci-e video card, a SATA hard drive, and at least a GB of ram, you should be fine
 
Not a bad choice, it offers a Firewire PCI card, also comes with an entry level X300 Radeon card.

HD is SATA but no RAID controller (not a big deal but I'm a performance freak). Machine also has another internal HD bay for expanding later.

Get a minimum of a 160 GB hard drive to start with, if you get a DV camera you'll find one tape eats a little over 40GB of space when you bring it down at full quality (before compression). After compression it's still a little over 4GB per hour.

Depending on the budget, also take a look at the XPS 400 from Dell, the dual core chip makes a noticeable difference when converting raw video to MPEG, and the available RAID 0 array is pretty as well.
 
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