Turnkey Video Editing Systems (page 2)

Market: casual to serious video editors who use their computers for other tasks as well.
For many reasons, Apple Macintosh computers have always been popular with video editors. Nearly all Apple computers come out of the box yearning to edit video. Apple's iBook, starting at $1,099 is no exception. Laptops are always a compromise between price/performance/ portability. Quite honestly, editing video on a small screen using a touchpad is not terribly fun, but if you need portability, nothing else will do. This laptop is no slouch though, with an impressive 800 MHz G4 processor, 30 GB hard drive and 256 MB of memory. iBooks also come with a fast FireWire port for connecting to your digital camcorder or an external disk drive. It's constructed out of rugged high impact plastic for editing on location, which makes it a great option for your college student.

There are many options for desktops in the under $5,000 range such as the strikingly cool looking Alienware Roswell Performance, available in such exotic colors as Martian Red and Saucer Silver. It stacks up an impressive array of features at $2,674, including a 2.8 GHz Intel Pentium 4, an entire gigabyte of RAM, NVIDIA Quadro FX 500 video card, a 240 gigabyte video drive, and the Matrox RT.X10 DV editing system. Alienware also provides one year's worth of 24/7 telephone technical support.

Market: serious enthusiasts, education, small companies.
The $5,000 - $15,000 price range gives a lot of great possibilities for people who are serious about video work. For $7,231, Promax will deliver the Macintosh powered Xpress Pro-G5-2GHz-DP, a dual processor G5 with 1,024 MB of RAM, a 250 GB video drive and Avid Xpress Pro video editing software.

For around $6,000, 1Beyond will deliver a 2.06 GHz Dual Xenon Power with RexRT Pro, 2 GB of RAM, a Canopus ADVC 500 Breakout box, 400 GB of AV drive space. That's a whopping 37 hours of DV video. Adding high-end software like RexRT Pro will bump up the price by nearly $4,000 while something more economical such as Avid Xpress DV will only run you $550 extra.

Market: high-end corporate customers, broadcast facilities, offline post production facilities.
Lots of professionals use video editors that cost less than $15,000, but if you're editing a feature film, where time is money, you would use something a lot beefier and more expensive. The advantages of a really high-end system are rendering, which is real time, and in areas such as technical support. Of course, the really high-end systems also have really high-end software.

If you have serious video demands, like a professional post production house does, Discreet's Smoke 6 software comes to you on an SGI Tezro Unix-based computer with four processors and a throughput so fast it may melt your eyeballs. With a starting price of $68,000, it may melt your wallet too.

The Avid Media Composer is an industry standard and editors who have celebrity motion picture directors breathing down their neck don't have the time to waste waiting for renders. At the low end of this line, Avid Media Composer's new Adrenaline starts at $24,000. At these prices you won't be buying out of a catalog, you'll be working with a vendor to come up with a price and configuration that you can both live with.

"I hate computers!" barked Great-Uncle Bernie from behind a pillar, waving a bottle of champagne at me. "Aren't you in jail?" I asked. I was surprised to see him.

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