We have just loaded in 2 hours of HDV footage from a Sony 270 onto a four year old pc with Pinnacles Liquid Edition( same as AVID's liquid ) and it took all the footage but when viewed in preview and on the time line it was jerky. We assume its the pcs processors letting the side down but it has twin AMD chips and works well with SD. Pinnacle recommend twin 3.0GHZ Pentium 4 chips as ideal with I gig of memory. The question is how would that compare with a pc with a quad core intel chip (or two) as the quad core chips are rated at 2.6GHZ. Has anyone any experience of editing hd with quad core chip based pcs or any suggestions?

Barry,

there is quite a bit of good info in the PC section of this website, see http://dvinfo.net/conf/forumdisplay.php?f=31

a quad core intel would of course outperform 2 amd chips, but your cpu isnt the only factor.
I recommend doing video editing on at minimum 2GBs of RAM.
you might also want to consider your graphics card. if youre editing HD video a lot of the processing is done on the GPU as well.

Barry, Pinnacles' 'suggestion" suggests to me that the software box/manual you were referencing is a few years old; Pentium 4's are a much older technology. Though a quad core is rated at say, 2.66 ghz, its probably about 4-5 times as a fast as a P4 at 3.06 ghz.

Memory is faster these days too, and I would suggest a minimum of 2 gigs. If you use two or more programs at the same time, extra ram is a must.

You should be able to put together a pretty darn fast computer for around $1,000 -$1,2000 US. If you are working with HDV, standard 7200 rpm drives should be ok, if you are thinking of working with higher data rate HD footage, you might want to check into Raid drives. There are a lot of various issues to understand if you want to get into it... for instance, there are some DuoCore cpu's that still out perform most quad core cpu's!

And there are a number of good threads on the subject, just remember to check the posting dates as a thread a year old may be just too out of date. Good luck!