Subject says it all. :)

You don't need anything too extremely powerful. Most of the machines you buy off the shelf today will do just fine. It has a lot more to do with your choice of programs. There are hardware driven programs like Pinnacle studio or liquid that depend on faster cpu's and larger video cards. Or there are software driven programs like Sony Vegas that depend very little on computer hardware to do the job, so you can get away with smaller, less powerful machines. This idea that you need some sort of super machine to edit HD is a little over blown. If your machine is fairly modern then the chances are you won't have too many problems... PROVIDED you choose the correct programs.

I have a 2.8ghz P4 HT PC with 2GB RAM and GeForce 6800GT and I am able to view and edit footage just fine. Rendering time is a little slow, however.

Mtyson, I would get a duel core. The AMD X2 3800 on up will work. What I would however get is another hard drive. HP Computers are really nice because they have a tooless case that already have a spot for a second drive. Once you have a second HDD, you can use it to edit your movies. I would recommend 2 gig of memory max. That seems to be the sweet spot for Windows XP at least. I put 4 gig in my main editing machine and it didn't add anything in terms of speed. I upgraded to Windows Vista Ultimate on my main machine and the 4 gig did seem to help but I had some combatabilty issues so I went back to XP. I don't know of any software right now that can utilize and write in two threads while encoding or rendering. The reason for the duel core is so that while it is rendering, you can still surf the web or watch movies. On my last PC, I had a P4 2.6 ghz machine and while it rendered, I couldn't do anything else. Web pages would take a minute to load. I really liked Windows Ultimate but It doesn't work with Pinnacle and Capture DVHS. I also lost my ability to encode in Dolby Digital with Vista so I switched back. If they can get the bugs worked out, I think it should be fine.

You don't need anything too extremely powerful. Most of the machines you buy off the shelf today will do just fine. It has a lot more to do with your choice of programs. There are hardware driven programs like Pinnacle studio or liquid that depend on faster cpu's and larger video cards. Or there are software driven programs like Sony Vegas that depend very little on computer hardware to do the job, so you can get away with smaller, less powerful machines. This idea that you need some sort of super machine to edit HD is a little over blown. If your machine is fairly modern then the chances are you won't have too many problems... PROVIDED you choose the correct programs.

Would the Vegas Movie Studio Platinum Edition 7 be a good start for a beginner like myself? I have a HP Media Center dual core 3800+ new as of November 06'
My HD camcorder choice is a HV20.
Thanks
Jake

Would the Vegas Movie Studio Platinum Edition 7 be a good start for a beginner like myself? I have a HP Media Center dual core 3800+ new as of November 06'
My HD camcorder choice is a HV20.
Thanks
Jake

It should work fine for your machine.

Would the Vegas Movie Studio Platinum Edition 7 be a good start for a beginner like myself? I have a HP Media Center dual core 3800+ new as of November 06'
My HD camcorder choice is a HV20.
Thanks
Jake

It should work fine. There is a 30 day free trial download available. It is very similar to Vegas 7.0 Pro with the exception you're limited as to numbers of audio and video sources whereas with 7.0 it is virtually unlimited. It works perfectly on my laptop.

Charles

Here's a little blog from Mike Jones discussing the bigger NLE's.... it's an interesting read and may lend some help.

http://blogs.digitalmediaonlineinc.com/digitalbasin/entry/20070411

Does Vegas support the Quad Cores yet? Would it benefit me at all to upgrade to the Quad? I would like to cut the renedering time down as short as possible. Also, does FCP (mac) have quicker rendering capabilities/options? Thanks in advance!

Any core2duo will do just fine.

in fact, my XPS m1210 with 1.8ghz Core Duo (not c2d) does just fine.

Of course you can never be too thin or have too much PC power, so the more the merrier.

Quadcore at this point is an overkill IMHO.