A friend has worked his way from wedding photography into wedding videos, unfortunately his Lenovo is not up to the task of editing video.
I was going to update the video card, but even though there's one PCI-E slot, it's not wide enough for a decent card with an onboard fan, and the power supply is only 240W, so it would likely need upgraded too. I tried installing a spare video card into the slot just to see if there was any benefit, but the system isn't recognizing it, even though bios is configured to "auto". Add to the fact it's only dual-core, and it just makes more sense to get the right tool for the job.
So here are my questions:
1.) Is it possible to get him a decent video editing PC for under a grand?
2.) Can I find something out-of-the box that will accomplish this, or do I need to build him something custom?
While I have plenty of experience with PCs, and even music editing, I've never been involved with video editing so I'm not sure where to separate fact from fiction.
try this: http://www.choosemypc.net/
ssd is nice for video editing
Exactly what is he trying to do? Re-encode? Just cut and edit? For just editing, you don't need fancy hardware. It is just I/O. What kind of source? MPEG? DivX? What destination? DVD? I mean, if I can do it on this box, which I built about 6 years ago, using free stuff off teh intraW3bz, y0, anyone can do it fer free.
Look on http://www.videohelp.com/ at the how-to guides.
I got an HP at Best Buy (they offered me 0% for 18 months, so no brainer...).
12GB RAM, 2 TB hard drive, i5 processor. 700 dollars after tax, year and a half to pay for it.
The video editing software we have at work does not use the video card. Just like our rendering software. Its processor/ram/hd more than anything else.
That said, I'm not sure what software he is using, but you should definitely look into that. Find out if video editing uses the card at all, also find out how many cores it will use, ram, etc. I've seen way too many people spec good stuff where its not needed, and sub-par stuff where it is needed for this type of stuff.
Dr. Hess wrote:
Exactly what is he trying to do? Re-encode? Just cut and edit? For just editing, you don't need fancy hardware. It is just I/O. What kind of source? MPEG? DivX? What destination? DVD? I mean, if I can do it on this box, which I built about 6 years ago, using free stuff off teh intraW3bz, y0, anyone can do it fer free.
Look on http://www.videohelp.com/ at the how-to guides.
Quite honestly, I don't have a clue. He said he tried it with his Lenovo but it wouldn't handle it.
I've read a few of those online FAQs, which is what led me to the i7 conclusion.
If he tried it with whatever came on the box, yeah, that's not gonna work. The how-to's on videohelp.com are really good. There's free stuff out there and pay stuff. For a professional, he probably would want some good pay stuff like DVD-Lab Pro to build the DVD images, and maybe MPEG VCR (free trial available) to do the editing. Depending on the format he starts with, of course. If he is starting with something besides a DVD MPEG ready format, then he will need to re-encode them. None of that requires a high power graphics card. What he has will handle it just fine.
So, I'm going with Pilot Error here.
