Anyone have any advice on building editing machine
 

Hey all. I'm starting to think about building a new PC solely for video editing work. I've been out of the hardware reasearch loop for sometime and only ever get into it when I need a new machine. I run Vegas 4+DVD as my NLE and was wondering if anyone has any suggestions for things to look at so that I can cut out the chaff before I get really stuck into researching.

For instance:

Single processor vs Multiprocessor (can Vegas utilise multi procs?)

Buying top of the line (read expensive) or going 2x cheaper CPU's and using a frameserver render farm type of setup. One of the machines would only need the OS CPU and wouldn't need as much RAM or HD space etc. (I plan on doing this with my old machine anyway)

Athlon vs Intel. It looks like at present Intel is ahead on raw power.

Cheers
Aaron

well its quite easy with the cpu i think. when you are rich ;-) use a dual P4 Xeon machine (but i'm not sure if vegas is able to use 2 cpu's). whatever you do, you cant get enough cpu power.
when you arn't rich use a single processor system. i would use a new P4 with hyperthreading. they start at about... 2.4 ghz i thing (the new 800mhz bus ones with 200mhz ddr ram). but i think a 3.06 ghz HT which has 533mhz bus speed is good enough.
i can only speak with about my system and thats a P4 3.06 HT with premiere and it rocks (but i use a canopus dv storm realtime editing card. i'm not sure how vegas handles realtime effects like color correction. with the storm the realtime effects increase with increasing cpu power.
correct me if i'm wrong but why a rendering farm for a video editing system ? you only need to final render the movie when it is done and thats one step. let it be 1 hour or 1 day who cares how long the final rendering needs ?
use one pc and that top of line (my opinion).

Thanks Elmar.

I was thinking about the rendering farm from a pragmatic point of view.

1) When I upgrade I will have a spare machine (Athlon 1800) which I'll use for things like email, word etc. If I can utilise it's power when I'm doing mpg2 encodings all the better. Seeing as I'll use my new editing machine for encoding too the least itme it's being used the better cause then I can carry on with other work. But yes I won't die if I can't have a render farm ;)

2) The exorbitant prices of the top end CPU's might mean it makes more sense to go the lower spec'd way and build up one full machine and one basic machine both at say 2.4Ghz. I can get a small HD, small amount of RAM, case etc for cheap and just have the machine sitting there rendering when I need it and the price might end up being around the same cost as a top end machine, but getting more effective rendering power than a top end machine.


Vegas is all software so all the effects will take benefit of the faster processor.

Cheers
Aaron

vegas has software based realtime effekts like color correction ? like avid xpress ? you dont need a special editing card )
hmmm... i suppose i havn't heard of it because vegas isn't popular in germany. in europe premiere is the n1 seller i think.

Yeah totally software based and pretty grunty at that for what it is. It's seems to be a very popular piece of software for PC NLE probably due to the bang for the buck you get. It's pretty cheap and quite full featured.

One of the things I like is that I can do realtime output to firewire->camera->tv at full resolution (if you have enough cpu power for effects, encoding etc)

Cheers
Aaron