ir just buy the most expensive, newest, fully load AMD based system. That's basicly what you're looking for.

There are hundreds of posts on this in the past six months. Do a search. Bottom line on all the posts: the CPU is everything. Get dual core. Get dual processor. Get both, if possible. The RAM, disk subsystem & video card don't really matter. The bus architecture does matter, but I haven't researched this lately so I can't give you specifics. If you search the other threads, you'll get the answers to this question.

The graphics card makes a big difference if you plan to use the Magic Bullet Editors plug-in. Buying one from the "approved" list gives you real-time playback and rendering which makes a huge difference.

Richrad Hunter

Here is a link that has a lot of information on system building.

j razz

Edit: I put the wrong web address, I should have left it as it was funny, but I digress.

It sounds like no one wants to do your legwork for you but here are a few thoughts.

The kicker here seems to be your need to capture from three cameras simultaneously on each machine. You definitely need to research that. The question has been asked and answered here before and I don't remember what the answer was but I'd be inclined to use hard disk recorders on the cameras before I tried to capture three cameras live on one machine. Nevertheless, I'd expect to have three firewire cards capturing to three separate sata drives. Just a guess here.

For systems, other NLEs seem to go for the HP XW9300's. You can build a pretty killer machine for less than $10k but this might actually be more than you need as it has 133 MHZ and 100 MHz PCI-X slots. It would be good if you get a BlackMagic HD card or if you need a card to capture over SDI.

Boxx also builds high end systems for editing and they have some familiarity with Vegas. If you were to get systems from them you should tell them about your desire to capture from three cameras at once.

Rob Mack

i don't see the point in doing legwork. Whe someone ask's "what's the best" the answer is "the latest, best, most expensive thing." It might not be worth it for 0.000001 seconds decreses in render time, but it's what they wanted.

if people said "I've got $XX, what';s the best for that" then it's a whole different story, but if there's no money limit then we can all discuss details but it won't make a difference because the latest thing is always the best.

If it were me I wouldn't waste the $$ on making a machine that can capture 3 camera at once but build 4 machines, one good for editing & three POS's that can capture to huge drive's. A p3-667 can capture DV just fine so build three of those for $200 each & then build a killer editing/rendering machine.

Currently I am using an HP m490n media center computer. Has 1 gig mem. with a 3.14 ghz system.

But I am also using it for church records, audio production and DVD production.

Vegas seems to keep crashing during the rendering. I figured it could be I have too much running in the background for the other programs I use.

The hardware added is a printer, scanner and 3 external harddrives and added 21 enternal harddrive.

Jeff