Win98 or Win2K???

steveh wrote on 7/5/2001, 3:51 PM

I just finished rebuilding my system to try to learn video editing on - upgraded to AMD 1.3 Ghz, 256 meg RAM, 27GB and 30GB drives. Currently I've got it running Win98, but looking at memory prices I've been tempted to load it up with RAM. The motherboard will take (3) 512meg dimms, but reading some of the posts made me go to Microsoft to see what the max RAM that works well under Win98. Seems 512MB is the limit for reliable operation for Win98, but Win2K doesn't have that restriction.

My first question I think I know the answer to: will having a ton of memory speed things up when editing or rendering? My guess is it will speed up editing, but not much effect on rendering.

Should I put Win2K on the system, or does anyone have any feedback on the relative strengths/weaknesses of each OS, related to video editing?

Thanks
Steve

Comments

wvg wrote on 7/9/2001, 8:14 PM

I have an AMD 1.2 GHz with 256 MB RAM of DDR running Windows 98SE and get decent rendering speed which is roughly 2 to 1, so a 20 minute MPG file with heavy editing and applied filters takes about 40 minutes to render. Unless you plan on doing very large movies more memory would be overkill. You may wish instead to set aside a seperate partition for your swap file and make it roughly twice the size of the largest movie you plan on editing.

I hope you're not rendering to AVI which creates huge files and takes forever because of it. If you have good media to start with the difference in quality between AVI and MPEG is hardly a issue.

Depending on what version of Video Factory you have you may have to download the MPEG plug-in.

SonyEPM wrote on 7/10/2001, 9:19 AM

The big benefit of Win 2k for video editors is that you can use NTFS-formatted drives. With NTFS there will be no file size limit.