On Fri, 11 Sep 1998 12:17:46 -0700, "Jennifer Kranenberg" wrote:

>After paying a large sum of dollars to an "editor" to cut a short film shot
>on digital video earlier in the summer I have deceided to build my own
>system. I have a 200Mhz Pent. but everyone in the know says use a Mac, I
>am familiar with both platforms, but am interested in cost effectivness,
>this is for a no budget feature and hopefully others to follow. Would like
>a few suggestions on best capture (best deals) on fire wire, also how much
>memory is enough? I'm guessing I'll nead a RAID setup?

No raid needed with mini-DV - nor do you need SCSI...
A 200mm Pentium (preferably with MMX...) will be fairly slow
in rendering, but tolerable. My K-6 200 (then 233 - don't ask! ;-)
with MMX has been OK for my purposes, and I have edited several
videos (up to one hour in length, though the current project is
a 2-hour extravaganza...! ;-). If you want to stay with the P200,
I suggest checking with DPS to see if your MB is compatible
with the Spark. If so, it (not the "+", and with ver. 2 software),
Premiere 4.2, two or three IBM Deskstar 8, 14, or 16 UDMA drives
(in addition to your current drive), 64-128megs of RAM or so,
and you should be OK for DV-editing. Take care to experiment with
audio interleave numbers before starting anything serious, making
sure you can successfully capture and play back 2(-)-gig files
(my system works with 4-frame interleave for capture, 2-frame
in Premiere when editing...). SAVE after EVERY change in Premiere
when editing to minimize crashes - and save to two different file
names every once in a while to prevent the possibility of major
losses if a crash occurs during a save. Have fun!