What hardware do you need to use Vegas or Premiere?
 

I am going to build a system solely dedicated for heavy gaming and heavy video editing (of course, separating the two with two HDs/partitions). Now if I wanted to have good performance in these applications, would I need any special or additional hardware? I mean, would a regular video card like Radeon 9000 series or GeForce FX, or a regular sound card like the Audigy or even a sound card from the motherboard work? To extract or use different sounds, would I need any different hardware or to do anything else with?

The topic has been much discussed in this forum already, look
around. Search also turned up a couple of interesting threads
for you to look at:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...threadid=17364
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...threadid=12403
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...threadid=12937
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...threadid=12817

Graphics card and sound are not really that important when
editting. Sound is ofcourse important when you are doing your
audio mixing or when sampling some sound. Graphics card
most important factor is combined with your screen(s). The
higher the resolution you can comfortably display (and watch)
with the more screens the better in theory. It's nice to have
room for all the windows, scopes and timeline.

A game machine is something else then a video editing machine.
Gaming requires a good graphics card. I'm not sure whether it
would be wisest to mix these, I'd go with 3 partitions then:

OS + APPS, Games and finally Video material [DV files etc.]

All regular hardware works fine. I do think you will need a better
system for Premiere to get the same performance as with Vegas.
Both NLE's will work fine with any standard equipment (I'm running
Vegas here on a Geforce 2 MX card with onboard audio ).

Do keep in mind that Premiere Pro only works with Windows XP.

Ok, I will build a dedicated NLE/Gaming computer sometime within the next few months... any hardware I should try to get particular? I will definately get a P4 with the latest HT or what technology is available within the next months. Any hardware I should try to get particular (brand/model of motherboard perhaps?) suited for video editing? I will get two HDs with the 8mb buffer, of course for storage and better performance.

And also, I've been hearing something about firewire cards that are essential. Are these firewire cards separate? Cause I usually buy motherboards that have onboard sound/LAN/firewire/USB hooked onto them, will these work?

David integrated firewire will be fine for capture and preview/write to tape, you will not need another card unless of course you need more firewire ports and the motherboard doesn't have them. I use my onboard firewire without any problems.

Aaron

Processor- Rendering speed is pretty dependent on processor. The faster the better. The Pentium 2.6C and 2.8C are good buys.

AMD is slower but would make a good budget system. AMD processors are good at games, but generally weaker for video tasks. The AMD64 processors are interesting but I think a Pentium is still a better buy for video editing.

Motherboard- P4P800 deluxe, Abit IS7 are some decent boards. Useful features would be firewire and the # of hard drives you can connect. The above boards use the 865PE chipset, which is supposed to be the watered down version of the 875 chipset but the mobo manufacturers are sneaky and figured out how to undo what Intel did. So the 865 boards not from Intel are good buys. The Intel 865 board is also good if you don't want to mess around with anything (no overclocking, supposed to be more stable).

Video card- get one that supports dual monitors for video editing. Check the outputs on the card to check if it can actually drive both of your monitors.

For gaming, performance is highly dependent on video card speed, but CPU speed is also a factor. ATI 9100, 9600, 9600pro, 9700pro, 9800pro and the GeForce FX9800SE are examples of good buys. Check out this page if you want to do your own research: http://users.erols.com/chare/video.htm (site on how various cards stack up). The GeForce FX cards may not fare very well in upcoming games (i.e. Half-Life 2), and most aren't that great compared to ATI anyways. Check the game vouchers that come with the card too.