HardwareCentral - Desktop Video: A Starter's Guide to Video Editing.

Desktop Video: A Starter's Guide to Video Editing

What Do You Need?

August 19, 1999
By Daniel Renaud

The following segment will address what's needed to start working with Desktop Video on a PC.

Source

Before you can edit you have to have something to edit. Your source can be any of the following: video camera, VCR, and/or television. Your source just requires a video output of some kind (of course your capture device must have the same style of input).

Video formats are as follows:
DV: Digital format similar to MPEG-2, almost broadcast quality. About 500 lines of resolution.
HI-8: Analog, good quality. About 400 lines of resolution.
8-MM: Analog, decent quality. About 300 lines of resolution.
VHS: Analog, poor quality. About 250 lines of resolution.
Betacam SP: Analog, professional quality. 500 Lines of Resolution.

Computer

Get as powerful a system as possible.

Processor: P-II 350 or higher.

Due to the complex mathematical nature of compression codecs, the faster your CPU is the faster your projects will render. I have noticed that Celeron systems are almost as fast as their equivalent P-II or P-III processors while working with video. Most major software editing packages are planning to support the Pentium III's new SSE instructions, so if you can afford a P-III it could be a wise investment.

RAM: 64 Megabytes of RAM or higher.

Video editing is very data-intensive and requires constant data updates. The more RAM, the less your hard drive has to be accessed. This in turn speeds up the responsiveness of your editing software.

Free PCI slot (for the capture device).

Sound Card: 16 bit 44khz PCI sound card or better.

Why PCI? Well, PCI sound cards tend to have lower CPU utilization rates than ISA, which in turn frees up more CPU time for compression and decompression. This lower CPU utilization also tends to create videos with better sound synchronization.

Hard Drive: 8.4 Gigabyte Hard Drive or better (get a 7200 rpm drive or faster if possible).

Video capturing and editing are just plain space hogs, so get the largest drive you can afford. 7200 rpm (or better) drives are recommended because the higher spindle rate translates into better data transfer rates. Because of the immense amounts of data being pushed through your computer while editing, even a slight increase in transfer rates will speed up your work. Buffer size seems to be only important up to 512K; larger buffers do not improve performance dramatically.

Capture Device:

This is how you get the video into the computer, a very important part of the overall video editing system. Most capture devices do pretty much the same thing, but the more expensive ones tend to do it faster. Get as good a device as you can afford and you will save time and effort in the long run. Of course, if you're only going to be producing video for the Web or a CD-ROM, then you won't need the extra speed and features of the of the higher end devices.

There are two types of capture devices, analog and Firewire.

Analog capture devices take the analog signal of a camcorder, such as a Hi-8 camera or VHS camera, and digitize its video into a format the computer can handle. These devices tend to compress the video file on the fly, as the computer captures the data.

Firewire capture cards only work with Digital camcorders (DV or Digital 8) with a Firewire (IEE1394, or I-Link) on-camera interface. The Firewire capture card does a straight digital transfer of the camcorder data onto the hard drive. Since the data is already compressed, further compression is not required. Firewire cards and Firewire-capable cameras enable the consumer to create video with no "generation loss" whatsoever, because an exact duplicate of ones and zeros is all that's being used.

Previous: « How Does it Work?

Next: Capture Cards and Software »

Skip To Page