importance in system
 

i'm getting a free 1.0 ghz p4 system soon.. 512 ram blah blah whatever..

just wondering if ram or processor is important in an editing system..

i'm a college student so money is VERY hard to come by, and i currently dont have much to edit on.. if i take this system, i'd have more money for upgrade type stuff to make it better..

so what i'm getting at is.. could i up to to 2 gb ram, a few more HDs and make it worthwhile? is the processor gonna cut it? i could probably overclock if needed and add some cooling.. if it were to work, would vegas or premiere work better.. i use premiere now, but have access to vegas as well, just not the knowledge.. any comments or suggestions would be much appreciated..

thanks,
ryan

Up until a few days ago, I was doing all of my editing on my old Athlon 900 system, 512mb ram. No problems with Vegas. Rendering was on the slow side. More important to you will be you hard drives. You need a seperate hard drive from your OS to get clean captures pref a 7200rpm model. They are cheap, go for the biggest one you can afford, and your system can handle. There are a lot of editors out there using even slower units. Consider going online to find out if there is an acceptable upgrade to your cpu, everything from 2.8 and lower are really cheap.

Ryan,

A 1GB system probably won't take 2GB of RAM, more likely 768-1.5GB. Either way put in as much as it will take/you can afford. For actually cutting thhe 1GB processor will be fine but effects will take time to render. I'm still using my old PIII667(@933) with 512MB and cutting is no problem with Vegas 4, Premiere, or Avid Free DV. Rendering effects and encoding MPEG2 is where the processor speed comes into play. If you want to speed up your older system try to get your hands on a hardware NLE card from the likes of Canopus, Pinnacle, or Matrox. The older versions can be had quite cheap and will help your system along.

You should be fine with 512MB of RAM. More RAM doesn't help Vegas much at all. How much RAM you have doesn't have much of an impact on rendering speed.

Vegas runs pretty well on low end systems, except for rendering speeds. Certain filters will take very long to render (median filter in particular). The speed of your system is closely linked to the CPU clock speed, so a 3.0ghz pentium is ~3 times faster. Still, for simple stuff, that computer will be pretty decent and you can sleep while you're rendering (you'd have to anyways with faster machines).

Premiere Pro might/will choke on your system, but you can always try the demo. I'm guessing it won't run too well (Adobe recommends a 3ghz processor!).

You can overclock it mildly and get "free" performance with stock cooling. A faster CPU would help even more, but again you're on a tight budget. You might be better off getting more hard drive space, because performance drops if you don't have enough. ;)

thanks for the input guys.. it really helps..

if you dont mind my ignorance - what exactly is a hardware NLE card and what does it do?

my rendering will be done overnight, or during the day so thats not bad.. (i'm a student, it will hopefully keep me off the computer and get some work done :)

also in vegas (a little OT) can i preview the effects in on the timeline before i have to render them?