Turnkey Video Editing Systems

I was a little surprised when my Aunt Betsy ambushed me at Cousin Tia's wedding, announcing that she wanted to buy a video editing system. She still uses 110 film and finds automobiles "upsettingly modern." But when she mentioned that it was for my 18-year-old cousin Scooter, who is a skate enthusiast about to head off to college, I felt a little relieved. Just then, the wedding videographer, who had been sleeping behind a large plant, chimed in, "I was thinking of getting an editing system myself, but I don't know anything about computers." Video editing devices are like kitchens: different ones for different people.

"Well," I said, "you should both consider a turnkey solution." It may just have been my imagination, but it seemed the festivities stopped and everyone turned to listen.

It used to be that if you wanted a video editing system, you went out and bought yourself a computer, a video capture card and some video editing software. Then you sat on the living room floor and built yourself an editing system. Computers can be fickle things and setting up the editing software to work with your capture card and your display card could be a frustrating and time consuming task. For this reason, many people today, opt for a pre-assembled turnkey system, so called because all one theoretically needs to do is "turn the key" to make it work, just like a car.

Whether or not a turnkey system is for you depends on several factors. Most importantly, do you have the time and skill necessary to put together a video-editing computer? If so, you could save several hundred dollars (after a lot of aggressive Internet price shopping) by doing it yourself. If you're working at the high end of video production, the do-it-yourself options are more limited, because of specific special features and hardware required.

"Now," I said, trying to lean around the DJ who had thankfully stopped playing the Chicken Dance, "There are two different types of video editors: ones based on standard home computer-based systems and appliances, which are dedicated systems that work without a computer." Both of them span a variety of price ranges from about a thousand dollars to well over fifty thousand dollars, depending on what you're doing. In the past few years, computers have risen to meet the challenge of video editing. Almost any new computer out of the box today is potentially capable of editing video as long as it has a FireWire jack or two. This means that you'll be able to produce decent video even at the low end of the scale.