Building a Budget PC... for HDV editing!

There is a lot of good info on this board how to build a nice PC for gaming purposes - but I don´t want to play games, I want to waste my time with video editing!

Video Editing means working with HDV-sources (I <3 my HV20) and the programs from the Adobe Creative Suite - Premiere, AFX, Photoshop. Especially AFX seems to take everything it can get, but I don´t have the money left for 640 gigabyte RAM and solid state disks.

I think I can spend about 500€/700US$ on new hardware - I don´t need a new TFT (1680x1050 is not full-HD, but it´s alright), but about everything else.

I´m thankful for every recommendation.

Solid state disks would actually be a hinderance with video. Hard drives are still where it's at.

In any event, CPU and RAM are the big dogs when you're working with video, especially a long-GOP MPEG-2 codec like HDV. Disk speed won't matter so much, as it's 25Mbit/s just like DV. I guess you'll occasionally be using intermediate codecs from programs like After Effects where more disk speed would be helpful, but generally any SATA 7200RPM drive out today would be fine. If you're planning on dealing with multiple streams of less-compressed HD you'd want a RAID-0 array for scratch storage of captured assets.

The new apps tend to be multi-core aware, so I'd say a quad-core Intel Core 2 chip and 4GB of RAM would be a good place to start. Graphics don't matter as much unless you're going to be using GPU-accelerated programs, so a mid-level graphics board will be fine—the new Radeon HD 3850 is quite a good deal at only $150 and would provide for plenty of oomph in hardware-accelerated decoding or compositing. Obviously you'll need Firewire for acquisition, either on your motherboard (more convenient) or on a separate card (less convenient)...

Aside from that I don't have much else to recommend. I'm more a fan of Final Cut than Adobe Premiere, but obviously that requires a whole different kind of investment.

To be honest, I really thought about switching more than once, but I also love to use all those little tools like AVISynth and VirtualDub and I´m not sure if they are available with this different kind of investment.

At the moment I convert everything to a lossless codec before importing it into AFX, but that´s also a pretty time-consuming process.

What do you think about getting a graphics card with HDMI output? Not worth the investment?

Considering that DVI is backwards compatible with HDMI, I don't see the point exactly. Any real broadcast monitoring would require a dedicated input/output card and HD-SDI, so... HDMI wouldn't really net you anything significant.

As for AVISynth and VirtualDub, you'd be surprised how much QuickTime (the framework, not the player) allows for on the "other side of the fence." But it's not quite equivalent, I'll give you that. I think there are other good things about the software, but really it comes down to what you're comfortable with. Knowing the principles of editing is way more important than knowing any one piece of software—software is just buttons you use to accomplish a task. You can learn new software pretty easily if you understand what you're trying to accomplish.