With tapeless acquisition being almost exclusively HD, having the horsepower in your computer to handle the data is a must. You can get by with older equipment for a while, but without a beefed up machine, you simply won’t get the efficiency you need to make the whole thing worthwhile.

The Specs

With computers and technology changing so quickly, I’m not going to list out every spec as a minimum system requirement. I want you to be able to make the decision on your own, so let’s get educated on what to look for.

Hard Drive Size and Speed

In terms of size, I wouldn’t recommend anything less than 500GB and would point you more toward a 1TB or 1.5TB. They’re cheap and easy to come by.

Speed/Cache size is a major factor to consider when talking about encoding your depos. Your software needs to pull every frame off of your hard drive, encode it and then save it somewhere. If you can, have separate drives for your operating system, your source material and the output location. This won’t make an astounding difference, but it will make things a little bit faster.

Processor Speed

This is the single, most important factor in the speed of your encoding. If you are custom building a computer, spend your money here.

Processor speed and the number of cores directly impact your encoding speed.

RAM

This is not nearly as important as you think when it comes to encoding. RAM is beneficial for running multiple programs at the same time, and it does impact your encoding speed some, but this isn’t where to focus your resources when it comes to encoding. 4GB is awesome and I wouldn’t recommend any less for a new computer.

Burners

Pick whatever you want here as it doesn’t affect your encoding speed, just the amount of time it takes to burn discs. Blu-Ray looks like it is here to stay, so you might look at picking up a burner that can handle those discs. At this point in time, you won’t be delivering much – if anything – on Blu Ray, but at least you will be ready for it.

Bottom Line

The bottom line is get a speedy computer with a lot of hard drive space. You don’t spend $10,000. You can find a great computer for around $1,500 that will knock out a lot of video very quickly.