Mine is a custom built rig - I must stress that I'm definitely not an expert - I was really surprised how easy these things are to build. They go together like Lego
I bought a 'How to...' book - read it from cover to cover, bought the bits the book told me too, and hey presto....a working PC
It's not a real high-flier - but I did spend a chunk on the processor, an intel Q6600 quad core cpu, which has dramatically decreased the time spent waiting for video to render. The rest of the bits are standard, low-end graphics card (nvidia 9800), 4 gig of not-so-fast DDR2 RAM (very cheap now) standard 500 gig HDD etc.
I've learned that it's not all about processing power or RAM when it comes to video rendering (although it helps to have loads of both
), it's about time and settings.
My laptop which is puny by comparison, can do exactly the same job, but it takes much longer to do it, and my software has a smart rendering setting (which I'm sure most video editors have) which means it won't re-encode the captured video when it's exported, thus retaining the original picture quality.
Too many processes between capture and export can ruin the quality - which was illustrated recently with yoz's CDG MINI GAME video - the first one was awful, I had put that through three processing stages, and it practically destroyed it. Then I found a way to avoid it and get the captured video straight into the editor without any need for unnecessary processing - and the results are excellent.
If you're looking to buy a new PC yoz, and one which you intend to use for video editing, I would say get the fastest processor you can find in your budget, that will decrease the rendering time much more than stuffing it full of RAM, or fancy graphics cards etc.
Although I enjoyed building my PC, I wouldn't do it again - a full system restore is a nightmare beyond all nightmares - Every component driver has to be individually installed, in the right order, whereas an 'off the shelf' PC, it's all taken care of on one disc-plus it's cheaper nowadays to buy ready-built.
Of course, if moneys no object - you could buy a fully loaded Mac Pro and Adobe CS4 Master Collection - a snip at $20,000
........I really need to win the lottery
