starting editing dv info
 

hey id just like to know what kind of editing system i should purchase after i get my vx2000 if anyone could shed some light on that. also whether my dell dimension 4100 from a few years ago with a kind of slow pentium III processor would be ok for editing, or if i should get an imac, g4, or some type of pc that would be ok. thanks

It all depends on how much money you are prepared to spend. For the "I've got no money left and need to cut my video approach" you could try products like Ulead Video Studio or Pinnacle Studio 8. Both will get you editing on your current machine for a couple of hundred dollars, providing you have enough disk space and RAM.

If you have more cash to play with then you have more choices. For a "take it out of the box, plug-in and start editing" solution then one of the Mac machines could be your bag. An IMac comes with IMovie and will run Final Cut Express, even Final Cut Pro but with limited functionality. From there you go to the big Gs, you can pick up a superseeded G4 at the moment for a good price if you shop around. The G5 are also out this month and offer excellent performance for your money.

The PC route can be cheaper than the Mac but it can also be more difficult if you don't know anything about computers, hardware compatability,IRQs, and OS config. If you do go the PC way then you have many options both hardware and software based that will extend as far as your budget will allow. You could go for a simple IEEE1394 (firewire) card coupled with Vegas Video 4 (cheapest but still very capable), Premiere 6.5 (cheapest but still very capable), the new Premiere Pro (not yet released but promises big things), Pinnacle Edition (new kind on the block but proving to be very good), or AVID Xpress DV (big bucks, big Real-Time performance) and be quite happy. Another option is a capture card based system like Pinnacle Edition Pro, Canopus RaptorRT (budget), Storm (mid-range) or Matrox X-100

With any PC setup it's advisable to go to a pro who specialises in building machines for Non-Linear Editing. With any NLE get as much disk space and RAM as you can afford.

My old "work-horse", is a K6 2-450 amd with 512 mb of ram. So unless you have a really small P3, it should work. Of course, my new machine is an AMD 1800+ with 512 of ram. But my old machine has always been a hard worker, and one I still use for many things.

thanks a lot- by the way, what do you mean by "limited functionality"?

I've tried
imovie (VERY easy to use, not that powerful)
Final Cut Express (a bit easier than final cut)
Final Cut Pro 3 (very nice program)
Premiere 6.x
Vegas Video 4

FCP3 is a great program. It has been stable for me with the updates and is very powerful. Some parts of it is a bit slow (the new and improved titler is very slow, and the color corrector is sluggish on a DP500 G4). I don't like Premiere because it lets you lose sync and everything takes a few extra clicks/keystrokes. I've tried Vegas Video briefly and it's really cool, but it has a very different feel than everything else.

PCs are much more stable now compared to win 95/98. You don't have to know anything about IRQs unlike the DOS days and many things are plug and play (installing a firewire card was a breeze). They have gotten easier to use an troubleshoot.

If you can build your own computer then a PC is definitely the best price/performance. With Macs, I wouldn't mess around with an iMac unless you are going to be doing cuts and dissolves editing. Rendering is not fun.

I would download the demos for PC NLEs and see if they are good enough. You should definitely check Vegas Video out.

By limited functionality I mean that the lower processor speeds and available RAM with mena that you will not be able to use some of FCPs tools as efficiently as they were ment to be used. Rik Sanchez uses FCP3 on his Ibook in OfflineRT mode one location then dumps his offlined cuts onto his G4 when he gets home.