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DV
Desktop editing is currently going through a difficult phase. To get the easy part out of the way first – pretty well any PC or Mac less than about three years old can edit DV. If you want to do several layers or lots of effects in real time, then you can’t have too much power, and an accelerator board such as Matrox’s RT X10 will make life easier. But essentially you don’t need to worry.
As always, the quality of your output will depend on the quality of what you put in. Essentially, in desktop DV editing, you’re taking the digital video data from the tape to your disk; editing it there, and laying it back to tape. If you do no more than cuts and mixes, there won’t be any appreciable decoding and recompression and the edited video will effectively be of the same quality as the original.
HDV and HD
Problems come when you want to edit HDV in real time. Because HDV is highly compressed – and the pictures, being High Definition, are large – it takes a lot of computing grunt to uncompress, display and manipulate HDV in real time. Most new PCs will run HDV video, but you need to look at the top end with lots of RAM and probably dual processor or a dual-core processor to do effects in real time.
(Oddly enough, true High Definition video is easier on the processor, because it’s already uncompressed, so it doesn’t have to be decoded on the fly. But you need very very fast hard disks to get the pictures off disk and onto the screen, and this comes expensive.)
So let’s forget bedroom HD.
Bedroom HDV is a reality, and becoming easier; but, for now, think fast dual-core processors, lots of RAM, and as much fast hard drive space as you can afford – ideally in a RAID to increase the throughput. Quite honestly, if you don’t know what this means, then you should go to a specialist dealer.
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