NLE: Your Suggestions

[Jason Mar]

I have never shot pro video, but am a hobbiest. I do want to get into the trade as a pro-hobby and have been pricing NLE SW&HW for HD editing. What I came up with is around 3k for a dual core 64bit AMD system with 2 gigs ram, dual 300gig hd and plenty of high end essentials (monitors, burners...). Including the Vegas & DVDA bundle I should top out around 3k.

I'm wondering if 2-4k should be the range for a single machine dual monitor workstation. Am I underestimating HD requirements?

Thanks

[Devin Eskew]

You are in the "entry" level of the ballpark. That should run fine, however you need to factor in an HD monitor of some type as well or you won't really see the fruit of your labor. Otherwise it sounds good.

[Dan Minor]

I use the Adobe Premier Pro 1.5 suite with the Matrox rt.X100 Xtreme Pro real time editing card. I love it for anything from Weddings to short films to training videos. I use MultiCam from United Media to perform my multicam edits. I have done several TV commercials fro local businesses using Adobe After Effects and have never heard anything but praise. I highly recommend this system. If you build the PC for the Matrox card be sure to check out there site for compatible motherboards, chipsets, and video cards. Other than that it is easy.

[David McKnight]

Here's another vote for Vegas+DVD. I used to use Pinnacle Studio 7 and 8 products, and when I was looking for a move up, I chose Vegas over Premiere and Liquid Edition. Pinnacle's support with Studio was unexcusable. I don't know if it has gotten better - I took a very short look at Liquid Edition and decided against it, based primarily on their lack of support.

The Premiere demo crashed on me within two hours of installing it; This was version 6.x I believe. That was my one personal experience with it, but I've heard from several others about crashes. Ditto with FCP, though I don't own an Apple any longer and have not seen it first hand.

I downloaded Vegas 4 and never looked back. I've used 4, 5, and now 6. In hundreds of hours of use, I've only had one - literally ONE - system freezeup. And I think that was because I had Photoshop running with a bunch of open documents going back and forth.

Personally, if I were in your shoes, I would download the trial versions from different vendors and do a project in each of them, depending on what their trial limitations are. The nice thing about this board is that you will get a cross section of NLE users who will report good and bad things about the NLE's they use.

I know this can be seen as a negative, but I prefer the fact that I don't have to have a special PCI card with Vegas. That way my NLE is always as fast as my computer (ie, when I upgrade my PC everything about the NLE gets faster). Plus, I don't like being tied to proprietary hardware.

(edit) Vegas also has an extensible scripting layer that lots of folks have already tapped to provide unique and useful goodies. My favorite is Ultimate S 2 from VASST (dot com) which includes a slick realtime multicam utility, along with a bunch (60 or more?) of other cool stuff.

I hope this helps - good luck!

David