I just bought an HV20 and now am moving towards the editing station for it. I'm just starting out, but i do plan on shooting much more than birthdays and family dinners.

Looking at Mac it seems i can't get away with much less than 12 or 1300. I'm curious, without a monitor is it possible to build a decent editing station for 1k or less?

Searching around it seems that Xeon is out of the question, so now i'm trying to decide which CPU/Mobo combination has the best bang for my buck. It seems that CPU, motherboard and Video card are the three that i need to worry about. I'm been out of the pc game for a while now so all the new chipsets are completely foriegn to me, and doing research on editing video specifically is a bit difficult. Any help is appreciated.

Well people are using Mac Mini's and MacBooks for Final Cut Pro although I haven't tried myself. Visit our Mac Forum for info on this. All Macs include iMovie HD which should work with your camera, but if you want Final Cut Studio then that will cost you $1,300 just for software.

If you are just starting and want to get your feet wet then most any new PC will be fast enough, get a second big hard drive for storage and buy something like Ulead Moviefactory 6 or Premiere Elements 3. As you get more interested you can move to something a little more powerfull. You should be able to get the above for a lot less than $1000, might even make it for less $800.

Ron Evans

any rec's on a vid card, or is it really not that important for a begginner? VideoGuys recommend a Quadro.

How well would this work with video games? It's a distant secondary concern, but i'm still curious.

There is a big difference between editing home video from one camera and making multitrack editing with lots of effects from many cameras. If you want to do the latter in HDV then get a really powerful computer!!! IF however you make a video of a family event and then want to make a DVD for yourself or family with titles etc chapter markers it does not need a powerful computer as I previously posted. Any computer with a Core Duo or AMD X2, 1G RAM, DVD writer, 120 boot drive 250G storage drive and LCD monitor. You can get this from even Dell for less than a $1000. The video card is not used by most video editing application and I would view this capability more for games play than video editing. The applications I suggested are for home beginner use. Allow you to do simple edits, colour correct and make a DVD. They have the added advantage over the more Pro NLE's in that they support Dolby AC3 audio and will edit from DVD cams etc and have simple wizards that make use easy for the beginner. They are also cheap!!! There is also Vegas Movie Studio + DVD that also falls in this catagory.

Ron Evans