If you want to edit full HD 1080p video you want the most powerful system you can afford. You may get away with a less powerful system if all you want to do to your video is just join clips and produce. As you get more adventurous in your editing you will be grateful for the extra grunt.

Having said that your graphics card will also be an important part in producing your videos as PD has the option of using the power of your graphics card to speed up rendering/producing.

Now to completely confuse you I have made the decision to shoot and edit my videos in 1280X720 as the difference between 720 and 1080 is not enough to warrant the extra hassles and disc space. Maybe when I upgrade to Win7 64 bit I may go back to 1080 but not on my 32 bit system. Your requirements may vary.

Welcome to the exciting and frustrating world of video editing.

Cheers

Robert S My youtube channel====> http://www.youtube.com/user/relate2?feature=mhsn

lol you gave me a good laugh just now. well i have a radeon HD4650 graphics card so actually compiling the video together will be ok. i don't really care b/c i usually let it compile overnight.

my only issue is the fact that when i play the video in the preview panel, it lags on me. do you think that with the quad core it will stop lagging?

The lagging you have in the preview screen would be more down to your graphics card than your cpu. There is an option to have either low, normal or high quality with the preview screen. Maybe check to see what you have selected. The setting is under the snapshot icon at the bottom of the preview screen. My youtube channel====> http://www.youtube.com/user/relate2?feature=mhsn

that's the sad thing....even on low preview quality, it's still lags....when playing 1080p (60fps) videos, it can't even play low resolution. but with 1080i(30fps) on low resolution it can play ok....it's quite strange really. but it makes sense that it would be the video card. it's not all that great on the laptop really...

Your only other option would be to make your preview window smaller until it plays smoothly, although with 1080 at 60 frames/sec you are asking an awful lot from a low powered computer. My youtube channel====> http://www.youtube.com/user/relate2?feature=mhsn

it's ok i'm building a new desktop tomorrow at the cost of around $300 USD. it's going to be a quad core 2.33ghz with a radeon hd 4560 512mb gpu and 4gb ram. hopefully that'll be enough to do the job! =)

i hope that'll be enough. if not i can always swap out the processor...

I would install ffdshow on your computer. I have a dual core laptop at 2 GHz and that solved my problem. I can play back my video on high settings of my Canon 1080i video with no problems. I realize that 1080p is even more hardware intensive, but I would give it a shot anyways. Q9300 2.5 GHz
4 GB Ram
Nvidia 9800 GT

Thanks again for all the help! i tried to download ffdshow on the lappie and it still lags in the preview panel for PD8. my guess is that it really is the graphics card that's limiting my ability to watch the playback well.

oddly enough, if i play the video in windows media player, it plays just fine...truly strange.

but good news is that i'm almost done assembling my new desktop guts. i'll go ahead and upgrade my old windows xp to windows 7 64 bit and see how that goes.

I'll let you guys know!