Ive been given an assignment to spec a sound and video editing system. There is no real budget but obiously dual £50,000 graphics cards are out the window. Spec me what you will.
what programs do you want to use. an avid/media 100 type thing or something like final cut pro? If its final cut then checkout the apple store and take a look at thier pro video solutions, I can't really think of much that I would swap in/out in those systems. add maybe but that depends on what you want to do in the end. for audio I would check out protools, they sell some prety damn good hardware/software systems. I've wanted an avid system but the $ range is kindof out of my league so I didn't even bother really specing anything out. I managed to price out a final cut pro system with everything maxed out upgrade wise w/ dual 30" cinima displays. I can't wait to set those suckers up. but in all honesty it really depends on what kind of projects and software you will be running. and also where you might want to expand.
you will probably find more help if you post this under the Software forums: http://forums.bit-tech.net/forumdisplay.php?f=34 or maybe under Electronics (depending on what kind of solution you are looking for and what you expect to accompish).
there is no specific software i must use, as witht he hardware anything goes forgot to mention though im not allowed to use apple (lecturer is a intel/linux fan)
I would run with an avid/protools rig then. Cruise thier sites and see what combination works for you. then build the machine to the specs for the software used to get eh best performance. I would still look into the dual 30" cine displays from apple though. they are just damn sexy. If I have a bit of time at work today I'll do a bit of a search myself. Also if you get really good working on an Avid/Protools system you'll be in more demand than most other editing systems, last I checked Avid had roughly 60% of the pro-editing market with Media 100 taking up most of the slack. Final cut is more in the semi-pro market, wedding videos and such, not really in the broadcast market yet, mainly because broadcast companies probably have deals set up with avid or media 100 already and prefer the status quo.
this is hard to judge considering that we don't know exactly what the person is running or what the budget is. If we know a price we can work out the best for that specific price.
On a theoretical unlimited budget, this is a scenario where springing for high end Pentium 4s is worth while. In an audio and video editing workstation, the Pentium 4 really does excel over the AMD option (which is vastly superior in 3D gaming for the most part). The best core for this is Prescott with its ludicrous branch prediction pipeline, coupled with a gig or more of RAM. LGA 775 is the socket of choice. The 5X series is reccomended over the 6x series in order to save money, as audio and video wont exactly exploit that extra L2 cache to my knowledge. Since this is a video editing PC, 3D graphics are not important, so you can use lower end stuff for this. A high quality audio card is obviously a must, and a TV capture card is likely to be your most expensive component. Dont bother with AIW video cards as their capabilities arent up to par with dedicated Video capture cards as I understand things. If a PCI Express model is available, that will be preferable as the PCI bus is much slower, and may bottleneck things significantly. Well, thats how my reccomendation goes.
I know you said lecturer is an intel/linux fan, but I'd have to go with an AMD Althon 64 system, primarily because you get more processing bang for your buck IMO. I was able to put together a system on www.newegg.com for about $1,000 USD This includes 1GB Corsair XMS PC3200 RAM, Sound Plaster Audigy 2 Platinum Pro, Athlon 64 3000+, PCI Express Geforce 6600GT with Video In/Out and DVI/VGA out. (supports SLI so you can go dual cards in the future) And of course it comes with a case and power supply, but no keyboard, mouse, or monitor.
I'd go with a dual opteron or 64 chips with dual sli cards and 2gb of ecc ram and dual 30" apple screens btw, boxx systems are very good
Not in the areas of audio and video encoding, oneseventeen; thats why I reccomended Intel over AMD in the first place.
like i said there is no budget, just be sencible about it like to 30 foot screen at a cost of 5 million just coz i aint got a budget, and im open to ideas for the software.
thats exactly the sort of thing i was looking for. whats the deal with this SLI thingy, would it benifit to get one of these?
SLI is Basically taking two graphics cards and combining the power of the GPUs in order to improve 3D graphics performance. Since this is not a 3D graphics station, this system will not benefit from SLI.
