How Do I Turn my $400 Dell into a Video Editing Powerhouse?

February 27, 2008 9:53 PM

I want to edit video on my bottom-of-the-line Dell Dimension 3100... cost-effective suggestions for success?

My 2008 resolution was to buy a Mini-DV camcorder and get various family members telling stories about life in the old country. So far, so good...I'm building a nice little stack of tapes and would like to start cobbling some of it together.

If possible, and if cheaper than purchasing a new system, I'd rather upgrade my very basic Dimension 3100. Here's what I have...what else do I need?

Dell Dimension 3100 P4 2.8Ghz with 500MB RAM and 160GB HDD
I figure for about $500 I can upgrade to 2GB of RAM and a second HDD - is this all I'd need? Do I need this? Worthwhile?

I figure I'll have about 40hrs of raw footage when I'm done interviews, mostly talking heads, and the most complex thing I'll want to do from a post/editing perspective is adding subtitles to parts where the dialog isn't in English.

Primary audience will be extended family and future kids and grandkids. Still, I'd like the quality of the edited video to be good enough to screen to people unrelated to me.

FWIW, I'm using an external mic and taking manual control of things like white balance and focus, so I'm feeling confident about the quality of the filming...more concerned about being able to do the edit 'right'.

Thanks.

posted by dismitree to computers & internet (12 comments total)

Well, RAM can be had for $30 per GB, and hard disks are about $100/500GB so your budget is a bit high. You might need a firewire PCI card assuming your videocamera uses it and if your computer doesn't have it.
posted by alexei at 10:03 PM on February 27, 2008

Like alexei said, those two upgrades should cost quite a bit less than $500. I would recommend buying what you need at newegg.com. Extremely reliable and their prices are way below what you will usually find at brick and mortar stores.

I think the memory upgrade will help alot. You should have no trouble editing videos at that point.
posted by meta87 at 10:51 PM on February 27, 2008

That machine will definitely edit video, given a Firewire PCI card and the right software.

Keep in mind that DV is about 12GB/hour, so if you actually capture all 40 hours at once you'd need 480gb storage plus some extra for rendering final output. You could do it with significantly less space if you were fairly ruthless in deciding what not to capture, though -- it comes down to the cost of storage vs. the "cost" to you of -not- capturing everything you want, assuming you want to capture all 40 hours.

As far as software goes, I would suggest you download Avid FreeDV, but that seems to be discontinued. I cut on Final Cut Pro on OS X these days, but I've found the Pinnacle editing products to be not-entirely-crappy for consumer-grade editing. If you can get your hands on an older version of Premiere / Premiere Pro, that would probably maximize capability-per-dollar, but might have more features than you want and cost more than you want to pay. I will say I'm not a fan of Windows Movie Maker, though. Bleh.
posted by Alterscape at 11:07 PM on February 27, 2008

I've edited whole TV shows on computers less powerful than that, so that's good.

My preference is Avid (Xpress Pro or Media Composer) but that's going to be out of your budget - although if you qualify for an educational price, that's only $295 for Xpress Pro.

If you think you can do it in short order, you can get a trial version of Adobe Premiere (not sure how long the trial runs these days). Pinnacle Liquid (owned by Avid) is about $500.

Another option is Canopus Edius Neo - It's fairly powerful I believe, but a bit quirky.

As for upgrade - yes - you need RAM, and you need a harddrive (you don't want to use your system drive) and you need a Firewire card. That should all be fairly inexpensive.
posted by sycophant at 1:40 AM on February 28, 2008

Check with Dell about the memory. Some motherboards require the memory to be matched. All that means is the two memory modules are the same brand, speed and size. You may need to buy the memory from Dell. Even from Dell you likely won't have to spend $500.
posted by Galen at 3:05 AM on February 28, 2008

More HD space. Plus a backup system to make sure you don't lose it all. And a firewire card to caputure the footage. If you habe DSL Mozy does backups over the internet for a fixed amount without any file size restrictions - I have backed up multiple 8 Gb video files through them. Yes, it takes days to upload but it happens in the background. It's quite awesome.

For software Windows Movie Maker works fine. Just make sure to capture at full DV resolution - this wil take the most space but will result in the best quality final product.

Really, you're 90% of the way there. Your PC will be fine.
posted by GuyZero at 7:15 AM on February 28, 2008

My crappy old bottom of the line Dell Dimension only accepts 1Gb of RAM
posted by criticalbill at 9:22 AM on February 28, 2008

OP Here. Thanks a lot for the helpful answers already. I have a follow-up question on getting a second hard-drive:

Aside from storage capacity, what else should I be looking at in the way of specs? Are there minimum threshholds of RPM I should be after...and does it matter what interface it uses? IDE, SATA, SCSI mean nothing to me - should they?

GALEN: Check with Dell about the memory. Some motherboards require the memory to be matched. All that means is the two memory modules are the same brand, speed and size.

Thanks -- Just called them up, that appears to be the case. The memory upgrade will run me about $175 Canadian thru their website.

ALEXEI: You might need a firewire PCI card assuming your videocamera uses it and if your computer doesn't have it.

Thanks -- neglected to include in my original post. Bought and installed a firewire card last weekend to test things out and right way started to experience system lag, inconsitent transfer quality, etc.
posted by dismitree at 9:25 AM on February 28, 2008

you really shoulder buy your meory from dell. Google for the memory specs on your system, then pick up a pair of matching DIMMs from newegg. If your system doesnt have empty slots, don't feel. Ad about replacing what is already there. As for the hard drive interface you want whatever your computer supports. Probably IDE(aka EIDE, PATA, ATA/133) or maybe SATA for your computer. You could also do OK with an external firewire drive, and truthfully, for what you are doing, USB2 would be fine. As for RPMs, most anything you look at will be 7200 rpm. These days that is more than enough for DV editing.
posted by Good Brain at 10:03 AM on February 28, 2008

sorry, I butchered my first sentence:
"you really shouldn't buy your memory from dell"
posted by Good Brain at 10:05 AM on February 28, 2008

Aside from storage capacity, what else should I be looking at in the way of specs? Are there minimum threshholds of RPM I should be after...and does it matter what interface it uses? IDE, SATA, SCSI mean nothing to me - should they?

THe drive should have a lot of space and fit in your box. You probably need an IDE drive as I doubt your machine has a SATA controller. But higher RPM speeds, etc are not really that important. Any modern drive is fast enough for DV video.
posted by GuyZero at 11:52 AM on February 28, 2008

You should be fine with a big internal IDE drive. Don't worry about SATA (small additional expense) or SCSI (big additional expense) in this context. I'd go for 500mb to start, for the reasons I outlined above.

Agreed that buying memory from Dell is silly. Find out the specs of the memory they want to sell you (this should be documented online) and buy similar RAM from NewEgg.

If you're looking at DDR memory, which I imagine you are for that age machine, the "PC2700", "PC3200" etc identifier should be the main thing you're worried about. When I was an enthusiast system-builder I got lost in things like CAS latencies, etc, but really for what you're doing all you need is probably a matched pair of 1gb sticks in the appropriate speed category.
posted by Alterscape at 1:22 PM on February 28, 2008