Ask the expert: Building a home studio workstation

I am planning to assemble my own personal graphics and video editing workstation. What are some of the key factors I must consider?

Several key factors go into ensuring that you get the best out of your computer.

Video Card

You need a solid video (or graphics) card in order to capture the video from your camera and for it to display properly on screen. NVIDIA, ATI, BlackMagic, Matrox which will do the job depending on the memory capacity. Cards with at least 512 Mb of RAM are preferable, especially if you are running dual monitors.

Processor

Working with digital video is a processor-intensive task. Most laptop and desktop workstations can be configured with Intel dual or quad-core processors. At the low end, a dual-core, 2.5 GHz processor could run your editing program just fine. Of course, a faster processor will make for smoother performance and faster render times.

RAM

While you can get away with a lower-end processor, you do not want to be stingy on RAM. These days it is pretty inexpensive, and the more you have, the faster your machine’s performance. If it’s a choice between RAM and processor, go slower (but not too slow) processor, and max out on RAM. You’ll want at least 2 GB of it for efficient editing.

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Hard Drive

Digital video takes up a lot of hard drive space — about 12 gigs for every hour of DV quality video.

You’ll need space for storage of your original video clips, your output, and the renders of your audio and video effects or manipulation. It is always suggested to keep your video on a separate drive from your OS, so having one or two external hard drives (or internal, depending on the kind of workstation you have) is key. You’ll need to determine the quantity and capacity of hard drives based on the kind and frequency of projects you are doing. Consider multiple drives of at least 500 GB.

Also consider organizing them into a RAID array, which optimises the flow of data and can create redundancy should one of the drives fail.

Monitor

Vital to giving you the strongest foundation for quality editing results rests in how much on-screen space you can afford. Most editing programs that you’ll be using, such as Adobe Premiere, will display a timeline for cutting and manipulating clips, and one or more video display windows to see your work in progress. Having two monitors across which you can spread your workflow will allow you to increase the size of timeline and display windows, and better organize how they are laid out on screen. This means greater precision in editing and examining the video elements with which you are working. Of course, there are a multitude of other factors to consider when taking on video projects — cameras, capturing and editing software, compression software — but ensuring your workstation itself is fully prepared for the task is a solid first step.

Suzzanne Rebello, 3D artist and educator in computer graphics, will respond to your queries.