Video editing/Burning DVD puter
 

Well A client of mine wants me to build him a computer for DVD making/ Video Editing. Pretty much what he does is owns a dance hall and has video camera's set up and records videos of peoples weddings. So what he wants to do is make dvd's to hand out to people of their wedding. Right now he does all the video editing/authoring on special video editing VCR's. How hard is gonna be just to make video's out of mpeg2 form and make them into playable dvd's for home? Here are what I am planning on making for specs. I figure it will be around $2100 with everything.

Pentium4 or AMD Athlon Xp processor
Sony DVD + - Drive
1 gig of ram
ATI AIW 9700 pro card
ASUS or Gigabyte Mobo
Dual Western Digital 120gb 8mb Buffer Hard drives.
P.S. I buy parts at cost so don't suggest anywhere to buy any of this.
Thanks

make sure u get a good monitor to go along w/ this.

why dont you also throw in a cdburner?

I won't put in a CD burner cause the dvd burner can also burn cd's

damn i'm stupid

Re: Video editing/Burning DVD puter
 

it's not hard it's all about the encoding process and not dropping any frames during it.

Are you planning to run both of the drives in RAID 0?
If you aren't, you could do a cheaper method. Get two drives. One huge, the other one smaller. Run the video off of the huge dedicated drive, and run the OS and the editing programs on the other, smaller drive.
It helped my cheapass out quite a bit.

yes, not to mention you need to scrub the drives all the time so it's very much better to have a dedicated drive that can be used just for the digital video being used and not also storage.

I thought about starting a thread to ask about building a computer on the cheap suitable for video editing. Then, I found this. Thanks for everyone's useful comments. Does anyone have any further suggestions? (Especially considering that the last post was 5 months ago).

I can add that in most benchmarks, that I've read, the P4 does better at video encoding/editing, so that along with getting more ram (which is pretty cheap now) should help speed things along.
I will also say that the upcoming Athlon64 could change things, but it won't be cheap/available for a while.

of course if you could find an inexpensive G3 or G4 mac... you'd get rockin' with one of those...

Get more HD space. Seriously, you need TONS.

You need more disk space. See previous
comments about having dedicated drives.
You won't believe how fast 120 gig disappears.

The Lite-On multimode DVD burner is cheaper
than the Sony and just as good.

Don't forget software. You need a NLE and
something to create the DVD image. I use
Adobe Premier to edit movies, import the
final cut into Ulead's DVD Workshop, add
the menus and chapter points, create the
ISO image, and burn from there. I tried three
other DVD authoring packages that had serious
flaws before I tried Ulead.

Finally, if you have any kindness for your client,
talk him out of the whole thing. Wedding
photography is a nightmare. Ask any pro.
Me, I stick to sports and documentaries, where
people are actually happy with the end result.

More harddrive space and I wouldn't go for less than 2gigs of ram. Video editing eats up ram. If you can wait a few weeks, the new amd64 would make a world of difference as well.

pr you can just buy him a nice MAc. Seriously..
DVDstudio Pro is really intuitive and great for this sort of thing. Also.. MORE HD SPACE.

What everyone is saying is true. If he is taping hours of footage in DV format and digitizing and editing it.. he's gonna need tons of space, some for scrubbing, storage, os/ proggies. also it would be nice for him to archive everything..

I actually have a PC just for this.

Some tips, research what software you will use to re encode. All in wonder cards can be very yukky with some capture software.

If you get a capure card with built in MPEG decoder (around 130 bucks) you will not stress the cpu and drop frames. Dropping frames sucks, and drives me crazy.

Have to agree with the AMD64 comment from above. This chip has great video editing potential, especially if any of the video apps get ported over to 64bit.