So I have used Avid quite a bit in the past. I used it while in school on the school's systems and my first job out of school was editing baseball highlights at a TV station. So now I'm ready to build my own Avid suite. My question is is what do I need computer-wise to be able to make it run smoothly while doing HD. I was wanting to stay PC if possible. If some of you could list your HD setups for me that would be a huge help so I can get an idea of what I need. Thanks.

Avid has a list of certified systems, both PC and Mac. Buy one, and you'll be just fine.

Vidoeguys also specs a DIY computer that works very well.

Hi Mark,
The windows specifications for Avid MC5 are listed at the bottom of this page:
Avid Knowledge Base (http://avid.custkb.com/avid/app/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=362927&Hilite=windows+specifications)

Please read the notes listed with each machine setup carefully.
If you are wanting to run a previous version of Avid you might get by with an older/slower system.

The only Windows machine that I still have running is a HP xw8200 that is running Avid MC3.0. I would suggest a faster machine for running HD material in general. But it all depends on the formats and codecs that you are dealing with day to day. As each new HD codec that appears tends to put greater demands on editing systems in general I would suggest to get the fastest most recent machine that you can afford. My other systems that I have are now Mac based and are running MC4 and soon MC5.

Best,

Mark:

I have MC5 running fine on a system built using the Videoguys DIY7 recipe. The differences are: (a) I used a PNY nVidia GTX260 display card rather than the Quadro that Videoguys listed; and (b) I'm running dual computer monitors plus an external HDTV display via a Matrox MXO2 Mini (with the 3.01 software). I also have both an internal RAID 0 and an external Raid 10 running off a G-Speed PCIe card.

Thanks for the info. I'll be checking out Videoguys for sure.

Thanks for the info. I'll be checking out Videoguys for sure.

Just be aware of what this means in terms of trying to get support from Avid. Certified systems are certified for a reason.