[badkitty]

SO im a HUGE gamer. that what i build my systems for. My father-in-law is getting into video editing. Taking peoples old photos, digital photos and videos and combining them into a seemless movie on DVD. its not just pics and videos, any text the people want to add with pics or videos,special songs to go with a series of pictures.... anything u can think of to turn what people ,back in the day with those old SLIDESHOW projectors, wish they could have done to make them FUN and actually enjoyable to watch. they really do come out cool. apparently a decent need for this exists. Its not cheap as it takes ALOT of time to build these.

Anyway. he was wanting to me to build him another pc. the fastest that i make it. He wants the best, so i guess cost isnt TOO important , just not rediculous.

Now i know CPU and RAM and HD speed have a big impact on EVERYTHING that a PC does...what i was wondering is this, does video card really matter that much for what he is doing? he doesnt play games, but he DOES want dual monitor. I have the ATI X1950XTX that has dual HDMI, does he really need something like that or will anything that has dual outs work just as good.

i've seen him have up to 20-30 windows open at once doing different things with videos. while he's processing one, he's working on others.

I guess what my real question is what would be the best setup for video editing with todays newest tech.

[uzi9mm]

fast cpu
fast and alot of memory
FAST AND LARGE HARD DRIVES

i cannot stress how important it is to have fast and large hard drives.
DV video is 3.5mb/sec... And that is MegaBYTES not bits.
HDV video is anywhere from 10-15mb/sec.
The video card really does not matter for video editing. Either way you need to render the project when you are done, and that is all in the CPU.
But a good video cardwill help if you want to have what i call a good "workspace" ie: running the OS and video editing NLE at a high resolution.

[advancedgeek]

you might want to get quad core cpu which is Q6600 or maybe wait for Q6750 or Q6850 if you can spend alot and also lots of ram like 4 2GB 800 MHz RAM and also 10k RPM Hard Drives for sure or 15k SCSI drives if you can afford it.

[nu2duo]

I agree with all of the above. However, if he is doing "light" video editing than he can get by with a system like mine. The only think I'd upgrade are the hd's. The 10k rpm drives will help a lot. Also, wait until July 22 when the cpu prices for intel drop.
Now, if he is going to be doing hardcore video editing(very time consuming) then I suggest top of the line hd's, cpu, memory 4g's and a large widescreen monitor or two 22"s side by side.
Good luck.

[fastrandstrongr]

get an 8 series nvidia gpu, they take stress away from the cpu during encoding.