Quote Originally Posted by gaybucks_chip View Post
I would say, for a machine that is going to be used to *encode* a lot of video,

- SATA RAID-5 with a hardware RAID card
- 2 to 4 gigs of RAM
- High-end video card with hardware MPEG and Quicktime encoding
- Core-2 Duo
- Reference NTSC CRT monitor, with a nice high-end LCD display (I'm told the Apple displays can be made to work on a PC)

All in for the above, you'd probalby be looking at $8,000-$9,000.

I don't think you'd see a major increase in speed by going with multiple processors, particularly if you use the hardware encoder card.

Also, if you're editing, most of the processor resources are used only during encoding and rendering. What we have is two lower end machines (core 2 and a P4 3800), with a KVM switch that our editor switches between, so while one is rendering, he edits on the other one. Then we have a third machine (core 2) dedicated to encoding the videos once they are rendered. That's a much better value for us, because our editor is never waiting for a video to finish rendering, and the encoding machine can sit and run all day. But different workflows work for different people.
Hey Chip, can you elaborate on the video card more. I'm only familiar with the gaming cards not professional video cards.