[witters]

Just ordered a DV cam and was wondering what are the minimum PC requiremants for editing etc? I currently have a P3 500Hz with a 20GB hard drive and 384MB RAM.

Is this deemed to be sufficient or should I look to upgrade?

I will be using the camera and editing software mainly for home movies.

Any help appreciated.

[vonhosen]

Depends on the editing program but if you want to do serious editing your are lacking processor power & hard drive space. Your processor is just about mimimum spec for some programs (not enough for others).

Ideally you are going to want a large drive dedicated for vdieo capture. DV is about 13Gb an hour of footage

[MarkE19]

As vonhosen said you really could do with more disk space.
How much of your 20Gb drive is still unused? By the time you add an editing program and then start to capture you could start to run out of space very quickly. 1Gb of space for every 4 minutes of captured footage and then more space required as you edit, create VCD files etc.
Also upgrading with more memory would also speed things up. Your proccessor is fairly slow so any help you can give it will improve things no end.
Hard disk and memory should cost less than £100. Once you get going and see what you can, or want to do then you can decide if it is worth upgrading the PC further.

Mark.

[witters]

Thanks for the advice guys - looks like a PC upgrade is in order. Any idea where I can pick up a latest spec PC online please?

If you are going to add another HDD, make sure it spins at 7200rpm and NOT 5400. To buy latter will result in you spending your days watching your HDD busy LED while it retrieves data. Not funny at all.

[MarkE19]

Originally posted by Mike Swannick
If you are going to add another HDD, make sure it spins at 7200rpm and NOT 5400. To buy latter will result in you spending your days watching your HDD busy LED while it retrieves data. Not funny at all.

The spin speed is not important. What is is the seek time & data transfer rate. Some 5400 drives have a faster seek/transfer time than some 7200 disks.

Originally posted by witters
Thanks for the advice guys - looks like a PC upgrade is in order. Any idea where I can pick up a latest spec PC online please?

For dedicated video editing systems buy a copy of 'Computer Video' mag or for general systems buy a copy of any PC mag such as 'Micro Mart' etc.

Mark.

[m@rk]

Well it depends how long you want to wait.

My editing machine is

Celeron 433MHz
512-MB RAM
Onboard 4-MB graphics card
Cheap firewire card
Running Win2K Pro and Premiere 6

It captures video from my cam fine.
Editing in Premiere does not have me waiting for stuff to happen

BUT

Once you have all your film ready and start to create the final file and render all the effects, you might as well leave it running overnight.

I recently did a 20 minute film and it took about 3 hours to render and output back to tape.

On top of this, as the others have said, you will nead loads of hard disk space (although my main HDD is only a 5400rpm drive).

Welcome to the real world