What would a reasonable video editing machine cost these days?

[Lightman]

8GB of RAM will cover you just fine and if budget permits I would suggest getting two fast and cheap 7200RPM drives for RAID0 to use as swap during producing and at least one other drive for OS and data.

I play occasionally with PowerDirector9 to do my home videos from BluRay camera AVCHD1080 and editing of large files is much better after I moved to 8GB RAM even though app itself isn't allocating too much of it.
Editing everything from one drive was painful at times where once I moved temp. and preview files to RAID0 of 2x1TB SammysF1 while keeping original material on another single 1TB Sammy helped a lot during production process.
My rig runs OS from SSD drive which is ideal solution but if on budget skipping it shouldn't affect overlay performance too much for you.

Here is an example of PD9 at work. Whole material was over 2 hours and took me 3 hours to produce the whole thing. Mostly deciding what to cut out and adding subtitles.
Back then on Phenom X6 3.6GHz I did all of that quite comfortable without any 'waiting' for computer to perform task required. Producing final material took about the same time as resulting video on that CPU.


Good luck with your build and have fun making videos

 

[Arwin]

Two fast harddrives on independent busses are probably some of the best performance improvements you can get for video editing, is the impression I'm getting of where most of the (initial) bottlenecks are.

 

[Pressure]

Incidentlally, as full quality isn't needed during editing, it strikes me as sensible for a video application to create low-res working copies for editing, and then the final render could use the HQ masters, but none of the software I've tried does that. Have yet to look at Adobe's offerings. That's where a machine that's comfortable working with 1080p50 AVCHD (why the hell do companies continue with the 50/60 fps Atlantic split in this age of digital video and TVs that can display both? ) would be a considerable boon, removing the reencoding step and giving better quality at the end. If a capable machine could be assembled for £400-500, I'll probably do it.

Most suites I have worked with support proxy files, which is what you are describing. Just use lower resolution video until you need to output (although having a fast enough computer removes the need).

The entire broadcast system is to be taken into consideration. Europe uses PAL (25p) and you have to look at shutter speeds. 1/50th matches up nicely with that and the 50hz utility frequency so artificial light doesn't create flicker when shooting in Europe. The same can be said about USA and 1/60th (nice pulldown to 29.97p and 24p) and 60Hz utility frequency.

Any new computer (Core 2 Duo+) is capable of 1080p video editing. Remember to have a nice scatch drive for faster playback (any RAID-0 with 2 drives should be plenty).

Depending on which editing suite (and since RAM is dirt cheap) I would recommend at least 8GB of RAM.

I would also recommend transcoding the AVHCD to something like Cineform or ProRes for faster playback and editing. They are far superior codecs for editing and grading.

Sound is treated as a separate entity for most suites until you need to output it.

 

[karlotta]

On that fat/big pile of RAM, no ECC with Intel consumer...