Video Asylum

Posted by Some Guy on November 12, 2003 at 06:40:46

In Reply to: Making music video posted by antares on November 11, 2003 at 08:41:40:

>Scouring the internet I figure we should have a 'non-linear editing'
>software to sync up the digital video footage that we'll be shooting
>ourselves to the music track.

You shouldn't have much problem. If you can find an older version of Adobe Premiere (5.5 or 6.0) or Sonic Foundry Vegas Video (2.0) for cheap (around $200), you'll be able to do everything that you need to do without much effort. Those are EXTREMELY capable editors that have a lot of bells and whistles you probably won't need to mess with. You don't even need something that elaborate as there are a ton of other home video editors out there... look around and see what you can find.

A decent speed PC (about 2GHz) would be a big help, but isn't absolutely necessary if you've got the time to render it all. What you will need is hard drive space. Video can use a TON of space, so a new hard drive might be in the budget as well. A 40GB will be enough, but you may want to get a bigger one if you can get a good deal.

About the only other thing you'll need is a video capture card. An ATI All-In-Wonder series card will do fine... Anything from the Radeon series (about $120-400 depending on which one) will do. There are also a lot of dedicated capture cards, but I don't have much experience with them. I will suggest avoiding any USB models as they routinely get complaints about lack of speed and dropped frames.

All told, you should be able to build an AV system for under $1000 even if you have to buy a brand new computer. Most likely you'll be able to do it all for under $300.