The Three-headed Monster

Along with two monitors, they have a high quality TV attached to watch the output. This is because the colors seen on a computer screen are different from those seen on a TV monitor. And with most video still being for TV, it is essential to wire up a TV also. 

Similarly, to check sound you need high quality speakers. You can also add other sound equipment and sound-editing software.

You will need as many different tape readers as the types of tape formats you will deal with. However if you are working exclusively on DV, then you can do away with readers, as DV cameras can be directly connected to the Firewire port of the PC. There are several graphics, animation and special effects packages you could use to add pizzazz to your movie.

However, do not load all of them in the same machine. Very soon you’ll see your need for machines ballooning. If you don’t need these regularly, you could outsource work to other studios with facilities and limit yourself to basic editing only.

Coming to the innards of the workstation, you need a lot of RAM–512 MB at the minimum (preferably 1 GB) and very good video cards. Since hard-disk space gets filled fast when capturing or working with video, ensure that you have several disks (at least two) with a lot of space and a high capacity tape back up to move out projects you are not currently working with. Your hard disks need to be fast ones as well. Earlier, SCSI was the chosen disk but these days, ultra ATA disks are catching up. You will, of course, require a CD writer to write out MPEG or multimedia movies or a DVD writer if you work with

DVD.

Funnily enough, the question of which OS to use is not such a big question here. There are excellent professional quality video-editing packages for almost all popularOSs, and whether you will go for a Mac, a Windows PC, an SGI machine or a cluster running Linux, for that matter, is decided by the package you are going to use.

Krishna Kumar