New User. Help with system specs

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rackemup_productions

New member
Hello everyone,
I am fairly new to editing video, but I love it and I am determined to make this work for me.
My uncle has given me his old copy of Premiere Elements to use until I can afford to purchase Premiere Pro.

The system I am running is a P4 2.8 Ghz, 3 GB Ram, 320 GB SATA drive, windows XP Pro.

I need to purchase a graphics card in the next few days and was wondering if you guys could give me any recommendations. I have a budget of around 120.00 for the card. I will be running dual monitors so I need dual monitor support.

I also need recommendations on setting up my system for additional drives for storage. Any advice?

I am hoping this system will be enough to get me through for a while once I get Premiere Pro. Will I be ok?

Thanks in advance for any replies.
 
Premiere doesn't really utilize graphics power very much. I think it might use it a little in the Quadro series but as I understand it your typical mainstream gaming card won't help much.

That said, Adobe and Nvidia have a good relationship and are working on a technology called CUDA that promises to hardware-accelerate things like H.264 encoding for the web and such. So I recommend Nvidia.

I don't know how much the Nvidia GeForce 8xxx and 9xxx series are costing these days (which have CUDA support, by the way), but I think they should do you just fine. They're decent gaming cards and I think are around $100 and offer dual-monitor support.

I'm not the person to talk to about hard drive optimisation. I'm really quite lazy about all of that, I operate with a laptop and have an assortment of USB 'passport' drives, Firewire drives and a new Esata drive. Some day when I get a desktop I'll do it all "right" and have a dedicated disk for renders, another disk for media, another for output, etc. Honestly my advice about hard drives is: don't worry too much about it. I think that's probably heresy in this industry and maybe when I build a "true" computer I'll see the light, too, but I've been editing off these consumer external drives for some time and haven't seen any significant problems.

Just be sure to go 7200rpm and NOT 5400rpm. The speed boost is absolutely worth it unless you're just buying a backup drive to sit on your shelf.
 
rackemup_productions said:
Hello everyone,
I am fairly new to editing video, but I love it and I am determined to make this work for me.
My uncle has given me his old copy of Premiere Elements to use until I can afford to purchase Premiere Pro.

The system I am running is a P4 2.8 Ghz, 3 GB Ram, 320 GB SATA drive, windows XP Pro.

I need to purchase a graphics card in the next few days and was wondering if you guys could give me any recommendations. I have a budget of around 120.00 for the card. I will be running dual monitors so I need dual monitor support.

I also need recommendations on setting up my system for additional drives for storage. Any advice?

I am hoping this system will be enough to get me through for a while once I get Premiere Pro. Will I be ok?

Thanks in advance for any replies.
Click to expand...


You really need to get rid of the P4 if you want to do HD.
Otherwise you can only do P2 type HD (non-square formats)
Even then, it will be a long road.

To make editing nice, you really need an i7 processor and a CUDA capable video card, with all the memory you can afford.

Hard drives don't do as much as the above will.
A P4 by todays standards is a dog.
 
Nvidia makes some really nice graphic cards. I would check to see if there's one
that fits your budget but more importantly, one that will fit your computer's specs.

You'll need to see what your mobo will accept/work with.

My suggestion would be to try and get by with what you have until you have
enough to get a new rig. Today's machine's are very functional and not really that
expensive.

If you are planning on using HD footage then the whole scenario changes a bit.
You need more processing power, memory and a better graphics card (just to
name a few pieces) to work smoothly with high def footage.

I have dual Quad Core processors, 16Gb of Ram and a FX Quadro 1800 in my rig.

Good luck.

Mark
 
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