Increasingly most people are spending their time online watching videos since it is more relaxing and requires less effort compared to reading. Hence more people are creating and uploading videos online. The videos they make using the video camera is not perfect, the footage often has to be edited to remove unnecessary content, the images may have to be improved, audio inserted and captions added.
Hence people are using video editing software for making changes in the video footage and would like to find out what computer hardware do you need for video editing, so that they can choose a computer accordingly
File size
Before finalizing the computer, the person who is planning to do video editing should be aware of the fact that video files are far larger than pretty much all other computer files. For example one hour of high definition (HD) video footage will take up 13 GB of disk space on the hard drive. More memory will also be required to load these larger files and manipulate them.
Typically the hard disk of most computers is approximately 500 GB so the standard computer hard drive is not sufficient for storing a large number of videos, especially HD videos. Hence the user has to make a provision for a larger internal Hard drive or connect an external hard drive. Laptops made for video editing will generally have larger hard drives.
Storage capacity
The capacity of the computer hard drive can be increased to some extent by using the higher capacity hard drives available in the market, like the two Terabyte hard drives. Alternately external hard drives can be used. Mechanical external hard drives are comparatively more inexpensive though the rate of data transfer is less. Solid state drives (SSD) use memory for storing data, they do not have any mechanical moving parts, so data transfer is faster.
However, these drives are more expensive compared to the mechanical drives and are available in lower capacity.
Data transfer
The video footage is usually recorded using a video camera or camera in the smartphone and is transferred to the computer for editing using the USB port. Hence depending on the hardware used for the USB port, the speed of video file transfer will vary.
For example for USB 2.0 the speed of data transfer is 480 Megabytes per second while the data transfer speed for USB 3 generation 1, is 5 GB per second, and USB 3, generation is 10 GB per second. So the time taken for transferring the video file from the camera to the hard drive will depend on the type of USB port which is installed.
Computer memory
Other important factors which affect the video editing are the computer memory and the graphics card which is used. The computer memory affects the speed with which the video files are loaded, and the changes which will be made in the files. Ideally 8 or 16 GB of memory should be used so that the files can be loaded quickly and if there is less memory the time required to edit the files will be more. After the computer has been used for some time, it will become slower, so there should be a provision for expanding the memory of the computer, adding more hard disk capacity, memory in future.
Conclusion
Video and graphic editing are some of the most intensive uses of computer resources, and as such it takes special consideration when choosing hardware. These above factors should provide enough guidance to help make the decision easier.
