DescentBB

Building a system for a friend - he does not play PC Games, but wants to do HD Video Editing.
Any idea what a good Budget card is for video editing? Maybe some HD Video software to boot?

what video equipment does he have?

Just an HD Camcorder. Nothing serious, just wants to edit home movies.

A video card has next to nothing to do with editing video. Perhaps what you mean is he needs some method of getting the video from the camera transferred on to the PC?

What type of medium does his camera record on to? Tapes? DVDs? SD cards?

I will have to double check, but i think the media is a Hard Drive built into the camcorder, with HDMI out for playback, or USB for off-loading the files.

it should have either a firewire or a usb port, you can use that to transfer the video off the camera easily enough.

Yeah, sounds like all he needs is software to edit the videos that he copies to his machine via USB.

In terms of software: I think the one that comes with windows is workable for really basic editing. I've tried a number of freeware ones, and haven't been overly impressed by any of them. I think Adobe has a good one, albeit at a high price tag.

I've done some basic desktop video editing for our workplace. At work they have nero 9.0 - which is useable, but far from perfect.

At home I have used AVS Video Editor from AVS 4 U. Again, it's built for home users and not very advanced, but is cheap at less that $100 and very instinctive to use. Got my best results from this software by exporting to QT format. Other formats leave compression artefacts in the resulting video - even at high res / hi bitrate encoding.

One piece of great software is TMPGE 4.0 Express (now up to version 5+ and called something else). Brilliant for format conversion and simple PAL / NTSC conversion on the cheap.

Definite x 2 on Adobe being good quality. Premiere Elements 7.0 is less instinctive to use but far more powerful - aimed at the pro-sumer.

If you want something even better, look at the Adobe CS 5.5 suite for Video and Multimedia, which is pro level software but very expensive.