Mine will do 2.4GH in a 1/4mile....

 

pfffftt...3.06 HT here bubba

 

FREE, the speed of the PC doesn't really have anything to do with the quality of the end video, it only has to do with how long it takes to get there. The faster the better though. The DV transfer rate is such that you should be able to reliably transfer DV footage to a PII 233 without dropping frames, but there are other factors that come into play.

Ideally, you will want to have a 7200 RPM hard drive instead of the cheaper 5400 RPM drives. This will help in several areas. Other than that, CPU and RAM help render speed considerably, and the next step is dedicated video hardware (Matrox RT systems and such).

Also, with the hard drive, the bigger the better. One hour of MiniDV footage is equal to 13GB on a hard drive. Non-hardware rendering requires disk space as well for preview generation. Also, make sure you do video captures and editing on a non-system drive (meaning don't capture to C:, the OS is doing to much other stuff with the drive).

Just get the fastest system in your budget range with the biggest hard drives, and have fun. You can always step up the system later after you see if it's worth the money to you or not.

 

a 6 year old pentiumII 350 with 320k pc133 ram, 10gig hard drive thats almost full. and a pice of crap video card . I guess that i will have to upgrade sooner than I thought.... thanks Jay, btw what about the books? what are some good books on filmaking? I want to make music video styled shorts.

 

Isn't the fatkid always hungry???