What Digital Video Editing Hardware Must You Invest In?
If you are on the way of becoming a professional movie editor, then it makes the best sense to keep your system at the highest configuration affordable. Digital movie editing can take up a lot of storage space on your computer and can bog down a great amount of its resources too. You can make do with lower configurations, but then you must not be a stickler for quality. Here we mention the optimal configurations of the digital video editing hardware you will need to perform your tasks efficiently.
1. The storage space
Digital video editing does take up a lot of space on your computer's hard disk. An hour of movie can take up about 13 GB on the hard disk, and multiply that by two for a regular 2-hour movie. Add 13 GB more for the unused footage in the video, which you might edit out later. In addition, you will need to throw in at least 2 GB for the effects you will be adding into the movie and 4.7 GB for mpeg2 footage. If you will be dumping the video onto your hard disk before beginning with the editing first, then you will need 4.7 GB more. Adding all these figures will give you a total of 50 GB, and that is what you must have, at least, to digitally edit a 2-hour video.
It is a good idea to invest in SCSI cards because they are external devices and can be connected from one computer to the other. The SCSI cards will retain the data within themselves, and so there will be no extra load on the computer itself. Also, they have cooling devices of their own, so the computer doesn't need to perform any extra work to keep the SCSI card running. Speaking in terms of storage for digital video editing hardware, it is best to invest in SCSI cards. 2. The computer configuration Since processing and editing digital videos will take up a lot of space on your computer, it is important that you invest in at least a P4. With Mac, a G4 or the iMac would do well. The best part of G4 and iMacs is that they have a Firewire card built in. Whatever your processor speed is, it is best to have at least 256 megs of RAM, since higher end digital video editing applications like Adobe Premiere requires that amount of memory for effectual processing. 3. The video capture card Here you will need a Firewire card for professional editing results. Firewire cards are available in a range of prices, and their features depend on them. The cheaper Firewire cards cost about $100, but they will not allow for editing in real time. For that you will need a more expensive card. Prices of higher-end Firewire cards can go up to $500. If you do not want to get a Firewire card, there are some other reputable manufacturers such as Matrox, Dazzle, Pinnacle, Canopus, Digital Origin and ADS. 4. The video input and output devices There is a very vast array of devices available for input and output devices, and you will have to make the choice depending on the budget. The VCRs are the cheapest, but you will need an analog to digital converter for converting the VHS to digital film format. In the digital scene, the digital cameras are cheaply available nowadays, followed by camcorders. You can select depending on the kind of features you are looking out for. In addition to all these, you will need to invest in some other digital video editing hardware such as an AGP graphics card, which should be at least 8 megs, though 16 or even 32 megs would boost the performance. It is also a very good idea to get a DVD burner, though your CD-RW could also perform the task well.
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