PC Setup For Movie Encoding?

Okay so we're needing to buy a new machine that'll be used exclusively for movie related work, encoding, burning to DVD etc etc and we were kinda hoping some of you folks who do a lot of movie or DVD related stuff could give us some pointers as to the type of setup we'll be needing, nothing to fancy right now just the basics to get us going.

Should we be looking at an Apple Mac for movie orientated stuff or is an IBM machine just as good?

What about memory requirements etc, we're going to be needing a variety of software packages to get us started so any of those you could advise we bundle together with the purchase would also be appreciated :)

Your thoughts?

Regards,

Lee

lots and lots and lots of harddrive space hehe. in fact you'll probably end up with at least a couple external harddrives. we use a PC to encode and do all the digitizing work and what not at our office. a top of the line Dell. and in the process of running through a single movie we can use up well over a couple hundred GBs. now once we have the file complete and upload it and then create backup copies, we can clear it off the harddrive. but in the meantime, that one file takes up all the space.

or at least did until we got some huge external HDs for it

pc's work fine for video encoding. most people will tell you the more ram the better, and i totally agree. that being said, i am using a computer with only 512 for encoding, and it's working just fine for me.

to be specific, i'm using this box:
http://www.mypccity.com/proddetail.asp?linenumber=1182

perhaps things would be faster with another - i don't know much about video - but i have no problems to report capturing, or using sorenson, ulead video toolbox, or several other video programs.

if you're planning to strore a bunch of videos, get the biggest harddrive you can. our raw videos are between 3 and 9 gig each when stored.

We just purchased an Athlon 64 with the dual core, and it makes a noticeable difference in encoding time, even over a regular Athlon 64... and MUCH faster than a fast P4.

The other thing I'd highly recommend is getting a Buffalo Terastation. It's a new, inexpensive Raid-5 storage server. We got the smaller one, about 500 gigs ($700, i think), but with Raid-5, if any one drive fails, you can still read all of your data, and install a new drive and it will rebuild automatically in the background... so for data reliability, it should be much better than even a primary plus backup drive.

We may be unusual, but we've had a *lot* of drive failures using external USB drive enclosures. My guess is the drives simply get too hot when they're on for any length of time. Most of those cases don't have any real ventilation or heat sinking, and so that may be causing them to fail prematurely. We still use 'em for backups and archiving, but we are switching to the Terastation for all of the online storage.

Other than that... I'd say a gig of ram, one or two 250G drives in the internal bays of your machine, fast processor, and make sure that your entire network is gig ethernet so you can move files quickly from one machine to another or from the terastation to the computer.

alot of people prefer mac's for video stuff. I've never used a mac and I honestly don't think you need one.
Get a dell with 3+ Ghz P4 and at LEAST 1 GB of RAM a DVD +/- R Win XP Pro and you should b all set.

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Originally Posted by curiousbunny

alot of people prefer mac's for video stuff. I've never used a mac and I honestly don't think you need one.
Get a dell with 3+ Ghz P4 and at LEAST 1 GB of RAM a DVD +/- R Win XP Pro and you should b all set.

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I would prefer the Athlon 64, but thats just me. You should be able to look up third party benchmarks before you make a choice, it's worth studying as much as possible before you take the dive.

i have a dell 2.4ghz and it only had 256 of ram a dvd burner and it did a good job i just upgraded my RAM last week to 768.

A 3ghz+ processor and as much ram and hd as you can afford.