What specification for a video editing PC?

[zx2012]

I've just spent 20+ hours this weekend producing 7 DVDs containing photos from 7 year groups. There were 180 photos on each DVD.

 

I have Windows 7 on my Laptop:

Acer Aspire 7720

Intel 965 Express Chipset Family

Intel Core2 Duo T5250 1.50GHz

System Bus 667Mhz

L2 Cache Memory 2MB

SSE

SSE2

SSE3

 

2GB Ram

 

I used Windows Live Movie Maker and Windows DVD Maker. The results are suburb but it took an age to do!

After importing the photos and music into Windows Live Movie Maker the Save movie.Burn to DVD took around 30-45 minutes for each video.

 

The sizes of the photos were:

640x480

1190x1031

1216x912

1728x2304

1536x2048

2048x1536

2304x1728

2304x3072

2736x3648

3072x2304

3648x2732

 

Burning the DVD took up to 1h:45m to encode and burn each DVD. The actual burning to DVD was very quick it was the encoding that took so long.

 

What specification for a video editing PC would make this process much faster?

Edited July 11, 2011 by zx2012

[synaesthesia]

We've just started testing some builds for this, and for comparatively little money we are able to build machines with Core i5 2500k, 4gb DDR3, discrete graphics cards, mini ATX intel motherboards and a decent PSU and case (Antec).Price is good enough that we've also been able to spec them with both SSD's and VelociRaptor HDDs. They're so much faster than the frankly still excellent Core2Duo stuff it's just shocking; I'm still saving up/finding things to sell to buy a new mainboard, cpu and ram to replace my q6600 setup. Also bear in mind you're using a cut down core2duo which is significantly slower than it's desktop counterparts.

[jamesfed]

The biggest thing to check is to see if your editing application can uses the CPU or the GPU for its rendering.

Windows Live Movie Maker uses the CPU for processing so the higher the clock speed and the more cores the better.

Something like a AMD Phenom II X6 (six cores for about £125) should work a treat or if you need to save on cash then a AMD Athlon II X4 (quad cores for about £75).

[sonofsanta]

Intel Sandy Bridge on a H67 or Z68 board. There's a new technology in them called Quick Sync that's designed for video encoding, and for applications that can make use of it, it is far and away the fastest way to encode video currently available.

 

Any of the 2nd Gen Core i's should do the trick - Core i5 2500k would be a good price/performance balance, the i7's even better due to Hyper-Threading.

[featured_spectre]

As stated before you need to check if it is GPU and CPU processing.

 

If it is GPU you will need to have a beefy GFX card (nVidia work better for this)

If it is CPU you will need to have a beefy CPU chip (the more cores and higher GHz the better)

[AyatollahPies]

AMD is your cheap and cheerful friend for Video Encoding.

[K.C.Leblanc]

As stated before you need to check if it is GPU and CPU processing.

 

If it is GPU you will need to have a beefy GFX card (nVidia work better for this)

If it is CPU you will need to have a beefy CPU chip (the more cores and higher GHz the better)

 

Which is best for Song Vegas 10?

[Ignatius]

I provide IT support for a company that does a lot of video editing as a commercial venture. When I'm there next time, I'll get the spec of their systems but it's likely to be a little while (unless something falls over tomorrow!).

[m25man]

I just equipped our Media manager with a new HP Z400 with an NVidia FX3800 1GB GPU and a pair of Full HD 1080p Monitors and Adobe Production Premium Suite 5.5

Some tasks that were taking him 45 mins on the old PC are now completed in less than 5 mins...

Now Im going to give him a 24TB ReadyNAS to keep all of his work on as well...

[RTFM]

We put 30 pc's into our media suite with the following;

 

i5 processor (think its a 320 but that could be wrong).

4gb Ram

1gb gfx card

 

Run Adobe CS4 fine, i have one of the above but upped it to 8gb ram and it's plenty fast enough for all the video / photo editing i do.