Video Editing Equipment Buyer's Guide

As a videographer, you have several choices with which to perform your post-production work. You can buy an ordinary desktop computer and sufficiently augment it with the hard-drive space, processing power, editing software and capture capabilities of your liking. You can also choose an off-the-shelf option, purchasing a turnkey editing computer pre-outfitted for video editing. Or, you can pick up a dedicated editing appliance, like those offered by Applied Magic, Edirol and MacroSystem US. These editors, which range in price from $1,295 to $4,995, are pre-loaded with hardware and software that are completely committed to video editing.

In order to gain more insight into editing appliances, we enlisted the input of representatives from each of the three companies. While all were loyal to their particular brands, they agreed on one thing - editing appliances have a more-than-credible place in the video world. All of the manufacturers concurred that editing appliance benefits include reliability, easy leaning curves and quality results.

"The chief advantage of a dedicated, stand-alone video editing appliance is its reliability," said Rick Barron, director of marketing for MacroSystem US. "Any software or hardware added to our system is by definition fully compatible with the system.

Applied Magic Marketing and Communications Director Aleta Walther pointed out some other advantages. "An appliance solution's user-interface is easier to learn and use compared to a PC-based solution that is bundled with a variety of hardware and software applications, each with its own learning curve and compatibility issues," she said. "Let's not overlook the fact that conflicts among multiple applications are often responsible for crashes that result in project loss or corruption.

"Plug in your monitors, USB keyboard and controller and you are editing within minutes of opening the box," said Edirol Vice President John Broadhead. "When you have an optimized OS and a dedicated, focused hardware platform, the user enjoys a stable environment that makes the tool transparent so you can get on with the job of creating and editing.

"Non-tech savvy individuals purchase an editing appliance because they do not want to 'play' with the technology," Walther said. "They are video enthusiasts, hobbyists, event, wedding, corporate videographers looking to take a solution out of the box, plug it in and go to work.

"The type of person who most benefits from our products," Barron said, "is someone who really wants to get their footage edited and their production completed, with a minimum of complexity and a maximum of speed.

And Broadhead, who prefers to call his Edirol DV-7 a turnkey or a stand-alone video editing system rather than an appliance, based on that unit's non-proprietary operating system (BeOS), said his machine "is suited to the prosumer videographer. It caters to the person or organization wanting to do high-quality DV editing without having to learn a specific OS or a multi-menued, more complex editing tool."

Look inside one of these units, and you'll see several ordinary computer parts. Editing appliance manufacturers, however, don't get caught up in a race to include Intel's latest, fastest processor in their machines. You won't see a 2.4GHz chip in one of these units. In fact, most editing appliances don't even house 1GHz processors. They don't need to. These streamlined machines exist for a single purpose - to edit video. They don't run Windows or any other elaborate functions, so 500MHz processing power on these units is typically sufficient. Random access memory in these stand-alone systems follows the same pattern, with all units housing 256MB of RAM or less.

Editing appliance hard drives, utilized to store your project's video files, range in size from 20GB to 120GB. The drives are not necessarily the quickest on the market, averaging 5,400 RPM, but the optimized systems are sufficiently fast for flawless hard-drive performance of all capture and output operations.

Along with analog input and output ports, most editing appliances have FireWire inputs for capturing Digital Video (DV) footage. They use proprietary capture and compression software to get video onto their hard drives. Rather than relying on editing software from big-name companies like Adobe and Apple, the editing software integrated into these units is also proprietary.

Two appliances, MacroSystem US's Casablanca Kron and Prestige, read and write to DVD.

While editing appliances generally contain the same components as traditional desktop computers that have been enhanced for editing, their mission in life is quite different. Rather than trying to be all things to all people, an editing appliance is designed, built and dedicated to only edit video. They may be one-dimensional, but they've got that dimension well covered.