I am getting heavily into video editing and production and have quickly learned that the rendering process of a video file is extremely taxing on a single processor, which of course means...IT TAKES FOREVER!

It's been mentioned to me that a dual core processor would make the rendering process much, much faster. If I recall correctly, using the task manager, you can set the affinity of both processors to the single application that is doing the rendering. I guess that means it would be like having two processors performing the task at once. Speaking of which, the other thing brought to my attention was having a motherboard with 2 processors on it. This is unfamiliar territory for me, so if you know about this, let me know.

Due to my schedule, I don't have a lot of time to research all the details needed. All I need to know is what I need to get my video rendering done in a FAST and efficient way. I mean having to leave my computer on overnight to render a 1 hour 40 minute video is not acceptable to me.

If you have the answers, please let me know. I would greatly appreciate it.

Dual cores can help, if your apps support SMP or multi-core processing. Sony Vegas and Movie Studio does work on many cores. I have a pair of dual core 280 Opterons for four 2.4GHz cores. It also helps to add RAM. Video processing can use alot of RAM. Disable the process in your anti-virus software to improve performance. Real fast RAID array is also important. I use PCI-X cached SCSI RAID controller to all faster reads and writes. A single drive can be a bottleneck.

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Tyan Thunder K8WE
Dual AMD 280 Opterons
8GB NUMA enabled DDR333 2.5-3-3-7 RAM
PCI-X SCSI RAID
http://69.14.190.80

mckennma is right. I'd suggest something like the following:

1. Two Opteron 2200 series CPUs (e.g. 2210, 2212, 2214, 2216, 2218, 2220, 2222)
2. Dual socket F motherboard with at least 1 PCIe x16 and 1 PCIe x4/x8 or PCI-X 133 slot
2. Heatsinks for the two Opterons
3. 4 1GB or 2 GB sticks of ECC registered DDR2-667
4. WD Raptor 74 GB (740ADFD, 16 MB cache) for the OS
5. 2x WD Raptor 74 GB in RAID 0 for a temp/scratch file (you can also use 150 GB ones or more than two if you need more space.)
6. 4 or some even number greater than 4 7200 rpm SATA HDDs in RAID 10 to serve as the data disks. Remember that RAID 10 halves the data storage capacity of the drives- four 500 GB drives in RAID 10 give you 1000 GB storage space.
7. A PCIe x4/x8 or PCI-X 133 MHz RAID controller card with at least 8 SATA ports. Since you'll probably run Windows, get a hardware one made by 3ware, Areca, or Intel instead of a Promise or HighPoint software unit.
8. Enough of a case to hold the HDDs and the motherboard- this means a big server case.
9. A good power supply of at least 600 watts. If you use a high-end GPU, then add 100 watts.
10. Some sort of PCIe x16 graphics card. You can get a basic one for $50 or so or buy a really nice one for hundreds of dollars. Integrated graphics can't drive a large monitor very well and most won't do DVI, so you will want a GPU.
11. You may want a UPS and line conditioner also.
12. Keyboard, mouse, DVD burners, etc. Add as needed.

That should give you a start.

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