I've
been fielding some questions for folks this Holiday season
on what would be the best hardware for editing their films
with. Obviously, this is a stick wicket, because it has
a lot to do with whether you prefer a Mac or PC editing
system. This has quickly become a war between Vegas and
Final Cut, as these are the only exclusive editing suites,
since both Avid and Premiere Pro will shape shift to conform
to either platform. (Granted, Avid does seem to prefer Mac
whereas Premiere Pro tends to lean toward the PC.)
With
that said, for this Holiday hardware guide, we'll look at
some potential PC editing suites, leaving the Mac/Final
Cut Pro solutions for a later issue.
Before
we begin, let's remind you of your main choices for editing
software for the PC:
| -
Sony Vegas 6 $449 |
-
Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 $699 |
| -
Avid Xpress DV 7 $499 |
-
Avid Xpress Pro 7: $1695 |
| -
Avid Liquid $499 |
|
This
article isn't going to be here to recap all the differences
between these softwares, but suffice it to say that you
have a number of options.
As we're
going into this look at video editing PCs, I want to explain
what this article is not: this is not a recap of the most
groundbreaking PCs on the market. If you want to spend $30,000
on your editing PC alone, then you can go to any of the
pseudo-'Indie' film sites that are out there that will be
happy to recap one of these uber-systems for you. For those
of you who didn't recently come into an astounding inheritance,
win the New York Lottery, or just sign an exclusive three-picture
deal with Paramount, this article is about how to go about
purchasing a decent editing system that will let you make
in-roads into HD.
Sadly,
none of these editing systems are going to come in below
$1,000. However, none of them are above 2,000 either, so
things have gotten substantially better in the PC-cum-editor
market.
With
that said, let's explain why we decided to look at the manufacturers
that we are looking at. So that we would be totally unbiased
on this, we didn't solicit any of the companies, but, instead,
looked at their public offerings and their reputations.
I used to be a computer salesman for a time and got very
familiar with the street credit of the different companies.
Without bringing up the problems with the companies we didn't
select and risking libel suits, we boiled it down to two
companies who had enough quality and customizability to
suit the job of editors out there. The two we looked at
were: Dell and Alienware.
Although
these two companies were the best of the ones we looked
at, this doesn't mean they are perfect. Dell uses highly
proprietary power-supplies and certain other internal components,
while Alienware is substantially more expensive than Dell.
Ironically, both companies actually boiled away their own
internal competition to present a single budget editing
system per company.
For
an editing machine that can work with HD, you need to be
considering something that has a 3.2 Ghz processor with
HT technology. Additionally, a minimum of one gig of ram
is pretty much standard for these HD editors. Because of
the necessity to have decent sound, firewire inputs, and
fairly powerful video cards, we looked at them with a minimum
of a 128 MB video card and a SoundBlaster Audigy card with
Firewire port. (For those of you who want to realize more
of the benefits of the RT-programs like Magic Bullet Editors
2.0, you can boost the Ram on the video cards for an additional
cost.) A minimal 250 Gig Serial ATA hard drive was looked
at with both of them. We also looked at them both with a
3 Year Warranty, as none of us want to have to have to allocate
money to replace our editing system before 3 years is up.
