What hardware is most important for video editing?

What hardware is most important for video editing? I have heard that video editing uses the processor, while gaming uses the graphics card, and the more RAM the better for both. Is this true, and is it different for certain operations, like rendering and effects?
Asked by: Guest \| Views: 391

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Guest [Entry]

"There were some specialized cards, most notably by Matrox, that were able to preview render video in real-time. This needed support by the editing application as well, though.

I think such things can be accelerated by GPUs nowadays, at least for normal video resolutions it shouldn't be too taxing for the hardware (Premiere Pro allows for GPU-accelerated rendering since version 2). But final render to output or file and complex effects (such as in After Effects or similar) are very likely still rendered on the CPU.

More RAM always helps, of course. Back when I did such things it wasn't uncommon to have applications for video editing, image editing and DVD authoring all running at the same time. More memory doesn't hurt there :-)"

Guest [Entry]

You should have the fastest hard drives possible and have a separate drive for the application and OS and for your video projects. Some form of FAST RAID would be a big help as well. RAM helps but disk IO is critical. As mentioned by others, there are many cards that can assist in processing but there are many read/writes and that can create a real bottleneck