Whether you’re a video production student, looking to start a business creating videos for companies, a content creator, or anything else that involves video editing, then getting the right PC is important. When it comes to building a video editing system, it’s important to consider which components are going to support your work more than others. Video editing can be quite resource intense and takes up a lot of power, so it’s important to spend some time thinking about the right components for the job.
CPU
As with any computer, the CPU is an important component to consider when building or buying your video editing system. It’s important to choose a PC that has enough processing power to handle the applications you are going to run. Although the GPU is going to be responsible for most of the rendering when editing videos, the CPU runs your operating system and software interface. Lots of functions when editing video will rely on the CPU a lot, such as scaling 4K source footage down.
GPU
The graphics card that you choose for your video editing PC is of utmost importance, as this will be responsible for rendering the images on the screen. Without a good graphics card, you might find that editing video is more laborious as things will be slower. There are lots of good GPU options to choose from, whether you go for Lenovo Intel Graphics or popular options from AMD and NVIDIA. Ideally your GPU should have a generous amount of VRAM and work together well with your CPU. The more powerful your CPU, the more powerful your GPU will need to be to catch up.
RAM
The amount of RAM you have in your PC will also be an important component to consider for video editing. Video editing can be quite a resource-intense task, so the more RAM, the better. While your editing software itself might never use more than around 12 or 14GB of RAM, having more is a good idea as this will cover everything else your system is running at the same time. Video editing can often involve a lot of multi-tasking; for example, you might be running editing software and other apps like After Effects or Pro Tools at the same time.
Storage
Finally, you will need to choose not only the boot drive, but additional drives for storage and backup of your projects. You can do this by either adding further internal drives or external USB 3 drives. It’s a good idea to choose an SSD rather than an HDD for video editing PC build, as they offer more benefits in terms of speed and performance. If you need more media storage for editing, then an external HDD might be an ideal option to consider if you want to save money.
Editing video is quite a graphically intense process that uses up a lot of system resources. Whether you are buying or building the best PC for you for video editing, these are the most important components to consider.
