Just how much power do I need for video editing?

[jokerthief]

My computer is about 4 years old and it seems it's not powerful enough to edit videos very well. I can only edit real small files or the software will crash. I've been contemplating an upgrade anyway. How much power do I need to do anything I need to with editing videos?

[egordo877]

what software are you using? check the system requirements and just upgrade whatever's needed. (I don't mean to be cute.)

in general though, for commercial programs like Adobe Premiere, Avid Xpress or iMovie/Final Cut Pro you can get away with something like 512 mb of RAM, 64mb vram, 1 ghz processor if you can get an older version of the software and are willing to sit around a lot waiting for the rendering to finish or whatever. a faster hard drive helps too. in any case, using the latest editing software at a good speed tends to require a fairly new computer.

You might want to look into shareware/freeware editing programs such as VirtualDub; those types of programs tend to have system requirements that are much easier to meet. try a search on download.com or versiontracker.com.

[kabouter]

"Adobe Premiere, Avid Xpress or iMovie/Final Cut Pro you can get away with something like 512 mb of RAM, 64mb vram, 1 ghz processor"

I wouldn't even want to do any video editing with something like that, unless it's a very small file. If you are editing videos with a lenght of 40min+ I would definately consider getting a dual core (x2 but preferably core 2 duo), and 2gig of ram, ohw and a big harddisk. The faster the better offcourse, cause waiting 10 hours for a video to render is not fun.

You can get away with a slower pc offcourse if you don't mind waiting (or move down in quality)

[jokerthief]

What about the video card, does that make any difference and how highend do I need to go there?