camieabz,

I was thinking more in terms of one of these http://www.dell.com/uk/p/inspiron-620/fs i.e. the £349 deal and customise that oneself, plus add an Acer 22" monitor.

Guess a i3-2120 Processor may not be adequate though...however I edit HD stuff with a Core 2 Duo 2.93 GHz without too many problems...

Thanks guys for all the help. I shall have a look at the dell recommendations get back to you guys on what you think. The budget of amount excludes vat.

In reply to a post by Anonymous:

I'm a PC user and make the odd video here and there, but to be honest, if your doing video's for any kind of semi professional reasons. You better get a MAC as the visual quality on video's and graphics is far much better.

If your doing anything else other then video's and graphics, then buy a pc.

What a load of rubbish, where on earth did you hear that from

A windows based is as capable of doing video editing as a Apple mac, in fact a windows based PC have more choice of software.

I use Sony Vegas myself, a fantastic video editor and i can tell you what comes out is as good as what comes out of my friends Apple Mac.

video and graphics make little difference to the final video, in fact ti don't make any difference at all, even if you say about the quality being better.

Apple Macs uses AMD video chips, so no different to what a lot of P.C runs.

People do come out with some trash

I do a fair bit of video editing, both SD and HD, I do use Sony Vegas and not Adobe lets see how much processing power we can take to run our software premier, but I do like After effects mind you.

Anyway, memory, as much memory as you can get, lots of hard drive space, because if you are going to go into Hd, you will need it.

My set up is AMD Phenom II quad core 3.5 CPU with 8GB of ram. My video card is a bit old a Nvidia 9400GT, but it does the job as the video card is not a major thing.

I can edit HD up to about 3 or 4 tracks depending on the effects in use.

A lot of people will say go for a Intel CPU, I like AMD.


Monitor wise I got a Hanns-G HH221, fully HD, it was just over the £100, but the latest model is under the ton now

Bad time to buy because of HD prices. ot sure if it has affected pre-builds yet, but something to keep in mind.

You make some very good points Adrian

Also a lot of money can be saved simply by using a good intermediate codec for editing: some folks spend a fortune on hardware just to edit native HD H.264 camera files directly when they could spend much less on a codec such as CineForm neoscene, use free codecs such as Matrox and DNxHD or even use proxies.

A modest pc can very easily be used for efficiently editing HD stuff.

In reply to a post by 4M2:

You make some very good points Adrian

Also a lot of money can be saved simply by using a good intermediate codec for editing: some folks spend a fortune on hardware just to edit native HD H.264 camera files directly when they could spend much less on a codec such as CineForm neoscene, use free codecs such as Matrox and DNxHD or even use proxies.

A modest pc can very easily be used for efficiently editing HD stuff.

I presume by proxy you mean editing with Sd and then replacing them with HD footage. I have done that.

To prove a point, a mate of mine have just edited a video with Vegas, using a AMD athlon II 3Ghz and 2GB of ram.

Here is the video


Some clips are from my mates Camera, some are from mine, The studio shots are mine. A couple are stock footage from Russia today
so some HD and some Sd
Nice to see my name up on credits

In reply to a post by 12eason:

Bad time to buy because of HD prices. ot sure if it has affected pre-builds yet, but something to keep in mind.

This is the problem at the moment, Hard prices are pretty high.

I just had a look as i have not really noticed the prices and yes, they are high.

Actually for the £140 for the extra HDD, it would be better to buy a 2TB external for half of that from somewhere like Ebuyer or Dabs (or a place of one's own preference).

You wan't get a 2TB external drive for that price now. More like £110. But the cheapest way to get a bare drive would probably be to buy an external one, take the disk out, and throw away the enclosure.