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Low Budget PC Editing Systems for the Holidays
by Jeremy Hanke

I've been fielding some questions for folks this Holiday season on what would be the best hardware for editing their films with. Obviously, this is a stick wicket, because it has a lot to do with whether you prefer a Mac or PC editing system. This has quickly become a war between Vegas and Final Cut, as these are the only exclusive editing suites, since both Avid and Premiere Pro will shape shift to conform to either platform. (Granted, Avid does seem to prefer Mac whereas Premiere Pro tends to lean toward the PC.)

With that said, for this Holiday hardware guide, we'll look at some potential PC editing suites, leaving the Mac/Final Cut Pro solutions for a later issue.

Before we begin, let's remind you of your main choices for editing software for the PC:

- Sony Vegas 6 $449 - Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 $699
- Avid Xpress DV 7 $499 - Avid Xpress Pro 7: $1695
- Avid Liquid $499

This article isn't going to be here to recap all the differences between these softwares, but suffice it to say that you have a number of options.

As we're going into this look at video editing PCs, I want to explain what this article is not: this is not a recap of the most groundbreaking PCs on the market. If you want to spend $30,000 on your editing PC alone, then you can go to any of the pseudo-'Indie' film sites that are out there that will be happy to recap one of these uber-systems for you. For those of you who didn't recently come into an astounding inheritance, win the New York Lottery, or just sign an exclusive three-picture deal with Paramount, this article is about how to go about purchasing a decent editing system that will let you make in-roads into HD.

Sadly, none of these editing systems are going to come in below $1,000. However, none of them are above 2,000 either, so things have gotten substantially better in the PC-cum-editor market.

With that said, let's explain why we decided to look at the manufacturers that we are looking at. So that we would be totally unbiased on this, we didn't solicit any of the companies, but, instead, looked at their public offerings and their reputations. I used to be a computer salesman for a time and got very familiar with the street credit of the different companies. Without bringing up the problems with the companies we didn't select and risking libel suits, we boiled it down to two companies who had enough quality and customizability to suit the job of editors out there. The two we looked at were: Dell and Alienware.

Although these two companies were the best of the ones we looked at, this doesn't mean they are perfect. Dell uses highly proprietary power-supplies and certain other internal components, while Alienware is substantially more expensive than Dell. Ironically, both companies actually boiled away their own internal competition to present a single budget editing system per company.

For an editing machine that can work with HD, you need to be considering something that has a 3.2 Ghz processor with HT technology. Additionally, a minimum of one gig of ram is pretty much standard for these HD editors. Because of the necessity to have decent sound, firewire inputs, and fairly powerful video cards, we looked at them with a minimum of a 128 MB video card and a SoundBlaster Audigy card with Firewire port. (For those of you who want to realize more of the benefits of the RT-programs like Magic Bullet Editors 2.0, you can boost the Ram on the video cards for an additional cost.) A minimal 250 Gig Serial ATA hard drive was looked at with both of them. We also looked at them both with a 3 Year Warranty, as none of us want to have to have to allocate money to replace our editing system before 3 years is up.

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