Six Ways to Soup Up Your Computer for Video Editing

Computers that are capable of editing video are quite common in today's marketplace, so much so that one entire computer platform--the Apple Macintosh--has made video editing a prominent feature on all of its computers. Affordable desktop video has become almost as common as the word processor or spreadsheet.

Even so, there are a number of tweaks you can perform on today's off-the-shelf video-editing computer that can greatly enhance the performance of your machine, resulting in fewer crashes, faster rendering and smoother video playback. Though developed over the years by experts in the computer editing field out of necessity, these system tweaks are very easy for novice video editors to perform using today's operating systems.

In this article, we'll look at a number of simple things you can do to your computer to change it from a typical workaday desktop computer into a lean, mean video editing machine. We'll cover simple, no-cost performance tweaks as well as some more high-end, cost-intensive solutions for creating a high-performance video editing machine that professionals would be proud to own.

Dedicating your computer to video-only is probably the most important piece of advice we can offer, because a computer system dedicated to video editing will have far fewer problems and conflicts. It's also the most difficult to achieve, because not everyone has the money to invest in a separate computer system just for editing video. If you must use the computer for other tasks, or if it's a shared computer, you should set yourself up as the computer's administrator, if you can, and enforce healthy rules and permissions on other users--or even on yourself, if need be. The goal is to keep the computer from acquiring all of the random junk it tends to acquire when people aren't paying attention to keeping it error-free. It is possible to run a healthy computer for both video editing and other purposes, but it requires more forethought and care.

The hard drive that came with your computer may be able to store 80GB or more. Even so, your system will be much happier if you invest in a hard drive that's dedicated to video storage. A separate video drive affords the luxury of regular formatting, defragging, and all-around housecleaning between projects, which will greatly improve performance by providing a clean slate to work on each time. Also, keeping your system files and software installations separate from your video capture drive will help keep your software and operating system running smoothly. And finally, can you ever really have too much storage space?

If you can afford it, consider getting a RAID for your video editing computer. They're not cheap, to be sure, but they can solve problems of massive storage size and performance all at once. Caution: though many newer operating systems offer a simple way to create a software RAID, this solution is not what video editors are after. To get the added performance that video editing machines love, go all the way and purchase a hardware RAID.