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Entry Level Digital Video Editing David Dorn introduces you to the delights of the hardware you might need to produce digital videos… Even Steven Spielberg had to start somewhere, and it’s actually quite simple to produce nicely edited and titled videos, instead of showing the world and his wife (ie your neighbours) chunks of video interspersed with great gobbets of digital snow. Given that the price of a decent Digital Video Camera is dropping almost daily, and they nearly all have IEEE 1394 output (FireWire or I-Link), it need not cost an arm and a leg to get into editing your video on your PC. There are one or two things you’ll need, though. Hardware. The first is the means of getting the DV from the camera to the PC – and that’s the IEEE 1394 interface card. There is a standard for these – OHCI is its moniker – and the better ones adhere to it. Cards from Adaptec, Belkin, Digital Origin and others are available. I’ve used all three, and for daily use I’ve settled on the Belkin in one machine and the Adaptec in the other. Whichever card you choose, though, go for one that has more than one socket available to you – IEEE 1394 is a much more capable standard than USB, and more and more peripherals featuring it are coming out every month. That’s because IEEE 1394 is not dependent on the host processor – so, unlike USB, it won’t stall if your PC is doing something heavy at the time you need to use it. Which brings me nicely to… Processing Power Don’t be misled by aging reviews of dedicated video editing PCs you might have glanced at many moons ago. You don’t need the very latest whiz-bang warp-speed megabucks multi-GigaHerz processor to do DV on. A lowly 200MHz PII will suffice for most DV edit programs, as long as the rest of the system is up to scratch – so it’s likely that you’ve got the basis already sitting on your desk. It is, however, important that the PC’s subsystems are up to it, hence…. A Big Disk Of vital importance is the means of storing the video stream. Digital Video (DV) is space hungry – taking up roughly 3.5MB for each second of film! That’s 210Megs a minute – or around 12 Gigabytes an hour. So, a tiddly little 6 GB hard drive isn’t going to cut the mustard – if you want to edit an hour’s worth of video together, you’re going to need at least 12 GB for the raw capture footage, another 12GB for the edit footage and perhaps another 12GB for temporary space – so it’s no exaggeration to say that a 40GB drive is likely to be where you want to be if you really fancy dressing up your masterpieces. Thankfully, a 40GB hard drive is very cheap these days – but, be aware that it must be capable in your system of maintaining a data transfer rate of 5MB per second. UDMA 66 is a must, and UDMA 100/133 is even better, as are 7200RPM drives or faster. If you want to step up a notch, and be sure that the hard disk is going to be both big enough and fast enough, many vendors have a FireWire connected 80GB unit for sale. Now you know why I advise getting a three port IEEE 1394 card! Memory It’s also useful to have rather more RAM available for DV editing applications to run in – and it won’t do any harm to the other programs you run, either. Most, if not all, DV editing systems are happy with 128MB, but it’s been my experience that more usually means better. Given the price of RAM these days, you can shovel half a Gig into your machine for not a lot of money, so there’s no excuse here. Recording And finally, there’s not a lot of use in editing your video if you’ve got no way of showing it once it’s complete. Unless you’re going to use a PC based (or Web based) performance mechanism, you’ll want to be able to output to video tape in one manner or another. If you haven’t yet bought your DV cam, then, you may want to make a note that some are available with DV-in enabled via their I-Link. It’s also possible to get little widgets that enable DV-in on your otherwise non-enabled DV Cam if you search the small ads in video camera magazines. The alternative is a TV-Out capable graphics adapter in your PC, linked to a standard VHS domestic VCR. The upshot of these recommendations is not to get you to buy a dedicated DV edit PC – you simply don’t need to. In fact, if you were to nip out and buy a decent PC tomorrow, the chances are that it would be more than capable of handling DV editing as well as everything else you’d want to throw at it – and the great by-product of making sure that your PC can handle DV editing is that it will be very well suited to running any other application, too.
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