Editing Appliances: Cracking the Case

Editing Appliance. Its name evokes images of refrigerators, dish washers, microwaves and toasters. Turn it on, stick in some video, set the timer and wait for a finished project. Well, almost. While they are relatively easy to use, these boxes are anything but simple. Inside they are more like high-powered computers than kitchen gadgets.
What exactly is an editing appliance? If you're a regular reader, you'll probably recognize names like Casablanca and Avio from Draco Systems and Screenplay and Sequel from Applied Magic. With the entry-level prices for these devices now below the $1,500, editing appliances have become extremely attractive to first-time editors and budget minded pros. Many people are still confused about just what appliances are and how they do what they do. In this article, you'll get to know the anatomy of an editing appliance as we perform an appliance dissection.
Pull the lid off any editing appliance and you'll find some pretty ordinary computer parts, a hard drive and some specialized software. Like computers that can process video, editing appliances have CPUs, memory, capture/compression hardware, one or more large, fast, hard drives and editing software. They also have connectors for input and output devices. Some have "slots" for smart media cards, some have CD-ROM drives and others rely on floppy disk drives to allow software updates and effects plug-ins. Let's take a look at each of the major pieces one at a time and see how they work together to make an editing appliance tick.

Processor

The CPU, or Central Processing Unit, is the heart of any computer system. Many of the editing appliances use processors that may seem rather slow compared to the state-of-the-art CPU technology in your home computer. Not to worry though, the CPUs that come in editing appliances are more than sufficient for the task at hand. Remember, unlike a PC or Mac, which must do everything for everyone (including running Windows, creating spreadsheets, word processing, playing games, balancing checkbooks and accessing the Internet), an editing appliance only has to do one job: edit video. Editing appliance manufacturers strike a balance between the CPU's cost and performance. And while the CPU speed can factor in on the rendering times of transitions or special effects, many editing appliances now provide real-time or near-real-time rendering that works independently from the CPU.

Memory

Memory comes in many forms and is just what its name implies. An editing appliance stores its programs, data and video in various types of memory, including both volatile and non-volatile memory. Volatile, like its name suggests, is not stable. You lose its content when you turn off your computer. Random access memory (RAM) would be one example of volatile memory. Non-volatile memory usually resides on a disk or hard drive and you retain its content even when you power down your computer. The storage capacity of a computer's hard drive would be an example of non-volatile memory. A PC running Windows, for example, requires tens of megabytes of RAM to function smoothly, but an editing appliance needs only a few megabytes of memory. Some use as little as four megabytes of RAM. But, as we've already seen with the CPU, what might be inadequate for a PC may be more than enough for an editing appliance.

Hard Driv…