Looking to build a mid video editing monster

[pharrari]

Hey! I don't know if this is where to post but I'll give it a shot!

 

I have been quite successful installing hackintoshes on a few of my PCs laying around the home. However, I am in need of a specific hackintosh at this point. I don't want to break the bank otherwise I'd buy a Mac itself.

 

Since Mac is the preferred O/S for processing video I want a build that would go great on video processing time. Nothing super hardcore or anything like the pros use in hollywood. I've looked at all the guides but I don' know the ranking of the hardware as for whats the beste vs whats compatible.

 

Would anyone care to help me out or maybe share the build they have that has great editing power?

[Swhay]

I think your best bet, is to figure out what video editing package you want to use. Final Cut Pro, Final Cut Express, iMovie or Adobe's video editing package, and then see what the minimum required machine specs are, and maybe bump it up a notch or two.

 

I have done some very mild editing (mostly trying to learn for the fun of it) and found my 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4GB of ram 27" iMac worked just fine. I think it's really the encoding/rendering that really takes some muscle, but then again if you don't mind waiting an hour or more for the encoding/rendering a Core 2 Duo is probably more than enough.

 

I think having at lest two hard drives, one for a scratch drive (at lest for Final Cut) with at lest 2 to 4 GB of memory is more important than CPU muscle and the video card must be completely supported by OS X (an Nvidia 9500 GT 512 MB would probably do just fine - it's the same card as in the base Mac Pro)