Power Up Your PC: Configuring the PC for Digital Video Editing

Just a few years back, the thought of digitizing video onto a personal computer was laughable. After all, full-motion, full-screen digital video--where every pixel of every frame of a 30-frame-per-second image is represented by a computer-friendly "0" or "1"--is a huge amount of data to store and move. Yesteryear's computers just weren't up to the task. Editing broadcast-quality digital video on a home PC was about as far-fetched as composing a major symphony on a child's toy piano.

Today, even inexpensive new PCs offer the raw speed and processing power required to store, edit and play digital video. A relatively painless $1,000-$1,500 investment will bring more raw computing power to your desktop than NASA used to land Apollo 11 on the moon in 1969. These days, raw power is the easy part. The challenge comes in getting the machine configured to do digital video correctly, without computer bottlenecks that cause chunks, blocks, artifacts and other digital video maladies.

There are enough combinations of PC hardware, software, operating systems and other goodies to fill several books. Instead of trying to cover it all in the next few pages, we'll tackle some of the greater issues of capturing and editing digital video on a PC. Nailing down the specifics of your system is up to you, but these concepts should give you a good foundation to work from.

One of the key factors affecting video performance of a PC is "throughput." Throughput quantifies the amount of data a computer can consistently move from one component (hard drive, video card, etc.) to another. Since the combined video and audio data streams represent a massive amount of information, everything must be working well to play back video without dropouts or distracting hiccups. When any part of the computer fails to pass data quickly enough, it is called a "bottleneck." It only takes one sluggish component to bring a digital video computer to its knees. Finding and eliminating data bottlenecks should be a major priority for anyone getting into digital video.

Understanding how the key components of a PC work together is a good place to begin. We can divide the digital video editing computer into major sections, including processor, bus, RAM, permanent storage, video capture card and video display system. Each of these has an effect on the performance of the computer, though some are more critical for video applications than others.

At the very heart of the PC sits the central processing unit (or CPU), which is roughly analogous to the computer's brain. The speed and type of processor is one of the first characteristics of a computer we notice (i.e., "It's a 266MHz Pentium"). Faster processors result in faster performance in certain areas.

Some software may be happy running on a 133MHz Pentium or slower, but most of today's software is coming out with greater minimum requirements. A 233MHz chip is considered entry-level, and 400MHz machines are becoming commonplace. Many motherboards (the main board containing the key computer chips and circuits) allow you to upgrade the CPU with a faster model. You may want to find out exactly how fast a processor your motherboard will support and how much an upgrade will cost.

Pentium, by the way, is a brand owned by Intel Corp., the largest and most popular CPU manufacturer. There are other fast chips out there that are cheaper, and some would argue, equal or better in performance. Pentium is the benchmark, however, and the other high performance chips are considered "Pentium-class."

A faster processor will net you a great performance improvement for processor-intensive tasks. These are operations that rely heavily on the computer's main processor, instead of one of its many support chips or components. Combining two scenes into one during a transition (called "rendering" a transition) is a common example of a processor-intensive task used in digital video editing. Creating complex, overlayed titles or 3D animations also tax the processor heavily, as does applying video "filters" to a clip. The creation of transitions takes a lot of time with most digital editing systems, so investing in the fastest-possible processor you can afford makes good sense.

It's important to understand that a faster processor will not fix a bottleneck occuring in another system component. You must eliminate those problems at the source.

The computer's "bus" is the digital "highway" that carries data between all the various parts of the computer. The bus is part of the "motherboard" which you could equate with the central nervous system of the computer. It has slots and sockets where the processor, video card, RAM, modem, CD-ROM, hard drive and other components all connect. The motherboard houses the bus circuitry that allows all these components to work together to pass data back and forth.

Until quite recently, all PC busses were ISA busses, which means they chugged along at the same rate regardless of processor speed. Today, you can pick up a computer with a faster bus (PCI or AGP, for example) for improved performance. There's no way to upgrade an existing computer to the faster bus without replacing the actual motherboard, but the performance increase this affords may be well worth it. And as long as you're tearing out the guts of your machine, you might as well spend the additional effort to upgrade your RAM, video card, and anything else you can afford.

You can think of RAM (or random-access memory) as being your computer's counter space or work area. When the computer opens an application or file, it usually loads its contents into RAM. The more applications you have opened at once, the more RAM is required. Making the computer operate with too little RAM is like asking a gourmet chef to prepare a six-course meal on three square feet of counter space and one eight-inch cutting board.

With RAM prices falling quickly, it's easier than ever to afford adequate RAM for your computer. Most systems are sold with a minimum of 16MB, which is the minimum amount required to run Windows 95 and 98 operating systems. While 32MB of RAM once seemed like a lot of memory, for digital video it's really not enough. A better starting point for video editing is 64MB, and doubling this to 128MB can offer substantial performance improvements in certain video editing applications. RAM costs on average about $1 per megabyte and as RAM prices fall, software developers are expecting today's digital video computers to have plenty of memory. If you don't keep up with this trend, your video performance will suffer.