New to video editing, need hardware/software advice

April 18, 2009 11:23 PM

I just purchased a Canon HV20 and am clueless as to the software I should use and the hardware requirements I'm looking at.

I've been shooting with dSLRs for about a two years now, but I decided I'd like to experiment with video. I bought a Canon HV20 and am looking to get some suggestions for video-editing software for the PC. I'm not averse to something slightly less "user friendly" if it lets me get better control over the footage. I'm quite interested in color correction and pulldown.

As for hardware:

My current box is custom built with an AMD 5400+ X2 (running at 3 Gigs), 2 Gigs of RAM (will probably go up to 4), a Hitachi 1TB HD with a WD 250GB scratch disk, and a 24" Samsung monitor running XP Pro 32-bit.

This current setup handles my 40MB A900 RAW files pretty well, but I know HDV is a whole other animal.

posted by lattiboy to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

That hardware should handle HDV fine, although you may want a second TB before too long. As far as software goes, what's your price ceiling? I cut with Final Cut Pro at work and Final Cut Express at home, on Macs. For a decent software-only editing package PC-side, I'd recommend Avid Media Composer ($2,495, or $295 if you can get the student discount) or Adobe Premiere Pro ($799), but both of those are pretty ridiculously expensive unless this is career-path.

Below the pro-level software, you'll have much less control over editing, color correction and the like. I've used some Pinnacle home-user-level software before, and it wasn't bad, but the workflow wasn't too pleasant and this was pre-HD-era. A coworker of mine used to work on automatic color correction algorithms for Ulead's low-end video editing package, and she's really good, so I'd at least give them a look...
posted by Alterscape at 6:58 AM on April 19, 2009

Response by poster: Thanks Alterscape! I really despise the UI for Photoshop, and I'm guessing Premier is similar? The one thing I've read about getting is Neo Scene which apparently batch processes the 24p weirdness inherent with the HV20 (something about 24p in a 60i wrapper?).


I have friends who are CS majors and Art majors so I can get student rate on just about anything.
posted by lattiboy at 1:58 PM on April 19, 2009

I have an HV20, and I would recommend upgrading your RAM to 4 gigs as a minimum sooner than later. I use Cyberlink Power Director video editing software, which works well.
posted by BozoBurgerBonanza at 5:34 AM on April 20, 2009