CPU for a video editing machine

[Gadish]

Hi,

I'm looking to build a machine that will serve mainly for working with video (using Pinnacle Studio 10). Now please correct me if I'm wrong, but the processing when editing videos is done by the processor and not by the graphics card. I'm basing this whole thread on this notion, so if I'm mistaken please let me know

So the main Issue is the Processor of course. I've been out of the game for a few years now, I have no idea whether I should go for an AMD or Intel processor. And it's not just that, the are so many CPUs out there with different clocks speeds, different memory size, number of cores etc.. I really don't know where to begin. What more important for video editing? Higher clock speed, bigger cache memory on the CPU? I'd really appreciate some words of advice here as I'm totally lost here...

Thanks!

 

[muckshifter]

ANYTHING a PC does HAS to go through the CPU

The "software" is old, did they ever fix that version?

The box says you need ... Minimum System Requirements;
Intel Pentium or AMD Athlon 1.4 MHz or higher (2.4 GHz or higher recommended)
512MB RAM (1 GB recommended. 1 GB required for HD)
Windows XP
DirectX 9 or higher compatible graphics card with 32 MB (ATI Radeon or Nvidia Geforce 3 or higher with 128 MB recommended for SD. 128 MB required for 720p HD. 256 MB required for 1080i HD)
DirectX 9 or higher compatible sound card (Creative Audigy or M-Audio recommended)
1 GB of disk space to install software + 3 GB to install bonus content
DVD-ROM drive

... I should think anything built today will p*** through it.


Is it Windows 7 compatible.

 

[floppybootstomp]

I'm using Pinnacle Studio 10 with:

AMD dual core 3.2Ghz CPU
2Gb Memory
8800 GTS 640Mb Graphics card.

And Pinnacle 10 works perfectly and fluidly with that system. I've had no problems at all with Studio 10, all editing, rendering and burning functions do as they should do.

It was patched at some point, maybe that cured the bugs, if there were any. I will admit that it's getting a little long in the tooth now though, I think there have been at least two newer versions since.

The two most important components when it comes to video processing are the CPU and memory. The graphics card need not be high end. In fact a medium priced Matrox card is best suited for video processing although it will be a bit rubbish for games.

A dual, triple or quad core CPU with 2Gb memory will cope easily.

And FWIW, I've only ever used Pinnacle Studio 10 with XP so don't know if it's Win 7 compatible.

 

[Gadish]

Thanks for replying guys,

I should have mentioned that i plan on upgrading to the latest version, which is 12.

some guy on another forum suggested that what I'm doing is just graphical editing and not really Video editing and that i could do with a cheaper AMD processor.

What i do is get the movies from the DVcam to the PC, then chop them up, sequence them, add sound etc and compile the whole thing...

I can afford the ‏Core i7 920, s1366, 8MB or ‏Core i7 860, s1156, 8MB, with a good motherboard and 4GB of RAM. The question is, will those expensive processors give me significant improvement over the cheaper AMD versions for the kind of work I'm doing..?

What do you guys think?