Or is the bottleneck in your editing systems more to do with the RAM and/or the storage throughput?

Andrew

And is it better to spend the money on 6 processing cores in an i7 processor than just the usual 4 cores?

Andrew

Which NLE app did you have in mind, Andrew?

The full Creative Suite 5.5 Production Premium, combined with a Matrox MXO2 and an assortment of PPro/AE lovin' plugins including Magic Bullet.

Andrew

In the long run everything turns into a bottleneck. The different apps in CS use resources differently. AE needs a lot of RAM, but Premiere needs a good CPU-GPU tag team. There's nothing wrong with maxing out your RAM at 24GB and having a 4-core i7.

That leaves your storage - RAID or otherwise. Working with and playing back heavy uncompressed files will always be slower, no matter what system you have (unless maybe a supercomputer).

I think the only time you want to bother with running uncompressed is when you're doing chromakey work, etc. I'll happily run with HDV and AVCHD on my RAID5 storage.

Andrew