Videography is one of those applications that can bring the fastest computer to its knees because it relies so heavily on all the subsystems in a machine – the CPU, the memory and the hard drive.
Rendering video takes a tremendous amount of CPU horsepower so the faster the CPU the better. Most Non Linear Editing Suites such as Adobe Premier Pro take advantage of multiple-core CPUs by splitting up the video stream so that it is processed by the 2 or 4 cores on a CPU simultaneously. In practical terms this means that the more powerful your CPU, the less time you will have to wait for your computer to render your video. Real time previews will play back much better, too.
Videography means big files – just 5 minutes of standard-definition digital video newly captured from your camcorder will take up 1GB on your hard drive. It’s a good idea therefore to get as much memory as you can afford.
For videography there needs to be a fast flow of data between the hard drive and the rest of the computer. The optimum configuration for videography is to have one drive for the operating system and applications and one drive or an array of drives in RAID configuration for video files. RAID, which stands for redundant array of independent disks, means two or more hard drives work together to provide data back up as well significantly increase the read and write speeds.
As with photography, unless you are rendering 3D video, a budget- to medium-range video card will do just fine.
Non Linear Editing Programs like Adobe Premier take up a huge amount of screen space so a monitor with a resolution of at least 1024x768 is essential. If you can afford it, try and go for dual monitors. This is possible today with even a budget video card and it will significantly increase your productivity.