Starting at the computer, I need one, what's best?

You should be able to get them cheaper than that

If you have Video Editiong on your mind, consider just a pair of 120GBs to start with and spend some more on other more immediatlye relevant parts (i.e., the HDD is for storage -- after you have processed the video -- you might want to spend money on getting a better subsystem to help encode the video faster etc). Just a thought._X_X_X_X_X_[small]ASUS A7V8X-X, AMD2500+
Samsung 1024MB, PC2700
360GB [3x120GB, 7200, 8MB]
MSI Starforce, GeForce4 Ti4400 128MB

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Won't argue that. It's been a while since I've looked at any prices. That was a guess based on prices from about 6 months ago.

If it comes down to the third hard drive or a significant CPU/memory improvement, I'd agree.

 

For any video editng purposes 512MB might be a stretch... of course I never use 1GB ... so compromise 768MB hehe. On a more serious note, the HP systems, while nice and all, dont have what it takes to handle anything more than day to day stuff and certainly not (semi)profesional level work

 

For any serious video editing I wouldn't consider anything less than 512MB RAM. Considering that I don't recommend less than 256MB for a normal Windows XP system, and video editing uses more RAM than most applications. I do a quite a bit of editing and encoding and I have 768MB RAM, which seems to work fine. I used to have 512MB, and there's a slight, but usually noticeable, difference in performance (about 5%-15% faster) with the extra memory.

The amount of memory isn't the only factor involved. The speed of the memory, CAS latency, and, at least in the case of nForce 2 boards, running in dual channel mode can all improve performance.

Oh, and I wouldn't even consider an HP. Actually, if you really want to get what you need for something like this without paying an arm and a leg I wouldn't recommend any OEM PC. Budget PCs just aren't designed for it, no matter who makes them.

 

If what you meant was wouldn't, I didn't say the absolute minimum to work is 256, I said it's the minimum amount I recommend. You can run it with 128 as long as you don't do very much, but XP uses a lot more memory than older versions of Windows. In my experience, it takes about 192MB-256MB of RAM in XP to get the same level of performance as 128MB in Windows 2000.

Depending on the length of the video and the codec being used, hard drives become very important. I believe HuffYUV requires something like 13GB for half an hour of capture (could be for an hour - I don't remember) so storing it on a DVD would be extremely inefficient and time consuming. Besides which, hard drives are already the slowest link in the chain and DVD is much slower.

I don't think the video card is particularly important for video editing, but I'd agree about getting a good monitor. A relatively inexpensive video card and decent monitor will perform far better than a DVD player and TV, and I can't think of any of features in the very expensive video cards that would help in video editing or encoding. The money saved could be used for more useful components.

SCSI drives are a nice thought, but for a budget system, they're pretty much out of the question. I'm not knocking the idea of using SCSI. If it's in the budget it's a great idea, but SCSI drives big enough to be very useful for video editing aren't going to be cheap.

 

Okay, so we agree about the memory thing. ;-)