Fair enough, JR....so help me out a little on what I should be looking for when I go to purchase a new PC workstation. If I'm going to be upgrading everything, I want to make sure I get the most bang for the buck. BTW, thanks for taking the time to reply....I really appreciate it when people like yourself take the time to share some of their wisdom.

Thanks,

Brock

I'd go with something like this...

Pentium 4 3.0 ( or higher ) gigahertz speed.
At least 1 Gig of RAM
A good 128 ( or 256 meg ) video card that supports two monitors
Two hard drives, one for your programs and operating system and a second one to use just for capturing. Maybe an 80 gig and a 160 gig ?
A good sound card. Spend about 100 bucks or so. ( to start )
A good firewire card that you use to import your video into.
A DVD drive for just reading DVD's so you save wear and tear on your..
DVD Burner. Even if you don't plan to make your own DVD's, spending 40 cents for 4.7 gigs of portable storage is great. Especially for those large video files.
Monitor, mouse, keyboard, nic card, etc....your off and running.

Take care and God Bless....

Stan

For the Church, I would find out what the budget of your church is and then price a computer from a reputable computer builder that has experience building DV systems. Boxx Technologies and PC Nirvana are two companies that are very good. You can buy a system with Vegas installed from both companies, or you can buy one without DV software and install Vegas yourself.

Also your Vegas license allows you to use Vegas on two separate machines as long as you never work on both at the same time. So if you have Vegas 5 on your home machine, you are entitled to install Vegas 5 on the church's machine. If you are the only editor, you will not be using both at the same time. This may say the church a small amount of money.

For your home system, Vegas will run on any well built PC. I would look at Dell Refurbished system and look for bargains in the 8300 or their workstations. The workstations would be preferable.

> so help me out a little on what I should be looking for when I go to purchase a new PC workstation

I can’t really improve on what Stonefield suggested. It is pretty close to the system that I built and use now. Processor speed is the most critical part for rendering. Many motherboards have on-board firewire now. For a soundcard, I would get an M-Audio Audiophile 2496 (around $99). Avoid anything from Creative Labs (i.e., Soundblaster/Audigy) like the plague. Get an LCD monitor at least 17” (or better yet two (2) 17” with a dual head video card) It depends on what your budget will allow. You might want to consider an analog capture device if you think you will need capture or print to VHS tapes. The Canopus ADVC-100 or ADS Tech A/V Link are two good choices.

Busterkeaton has a great idea about buying a turnkey system from Boxx or PC Nirvana. If you can’t afford a turnkey system, then get a good system from someplace like ABS Computers. They use only stock parts so its very easy to service and upgrade.

I know some here may tell you to buy a system from the business side of Dell (i.e., the "workstation" that Busterkeaton recommended). I’ve only purchased their consumer systems and I will never buy one again. It was a collection of crippled OEM parts that never worked right and Dell didn’t support it once I started upgrading it. Like I said, I would never buy nor recommend Dell again. You can get a better system with industry standard parts from someone like ABS Computers.

~jr

Great info guys...exactly what I was looking for. Thanks again for taking time away from your own projects to help the new guy out....

Brock

Hey Brock,

I just replied to your post over on the Cow and saw you posted here, too. I'm a Vegas guy who does church work and I work with a gal that uses FCP. I run Vegas on a laptop (Dell Inspiron 8200, 2 Ghz, 1 40 Gb hard drive for OS, 1 80 Gb for video, external 160 GB firewire drive, external DVD burner).

We just network her Mac and my PC and exchange files easily. She doesn't want to learn Vegas; I don't want to learn FCP. I have learned enough FCP to know that I don't like it.

My $0.02 (which I DIDN'T post on the Cow FCP forum for fear of being flamed) is this: if you are editing DV only, moving to FCP would be a big step backwards. I think you would find it very annoying and that it would slow you way down compared to the Vegas workflow. In FCP, unless you have a sufficiently powerful enough machine, the workflow is: Edit-add fx-oops gotta render - edit a little more-oops gotta render again... In Vegas, if you have a reasonable enough PC (say a 2Ghz running Windows XP) you can just keep editing, adding fx, tweaking audio, etc. and just do one render at the end. Add in the great audio tools, all the great things you can do with scripting, the ability to throw just about any format audio or video direclty on the timeline, etc. and it's just a no-brainer.

For me, editing in Vegas is a fun, creative experience; in FCP, it's a labor intensive annoyance.