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100 P a r t I I Producing Your YouTube Videos

Tip

You can choose from wired or wireless mics. A wired lavalier mic typically
costs $50 to $150 or so, while a wireless system costs $300 or more. For
most businesses, a wired model works just fine.

Building a Computer for Video Editing

The other essential component in creating a semi-pro video is the personal com-
puter you use to edit your videos. It’s important, then, to build a computer system
that has the horsepower necessary for this demanding task.

Video editing is the second-most demanding operation you can do on your PC.
(The most demanding activity is playing games, believe it or not.) It takes a lot of
processing power, memory, and hard disk storage to edit and process full-motion
video, and most older and lower-priced PCs simply aren’t up to the task. It might
mean, depending on your unit, that you have some upgrading to do.

So, what kind of PC do you need for video editing? If you’re an Apple user, there’s
no better computer for video editing than a Mac Pro. This machine has all the
horsepower and all the features you need to do all sorts of fancy video editing with-
out even breaking a sweat. If you’re a Windows user, you have a lot more choices. To
start with, you want to go with the fastest, most powerful processor you can afford,
with as much memory as possible. In most instances, a desktop model will provide
more horsepower than a similarly priced notebook.

You also need lots of hard disk space, with a fast hard disk. Perhaps the best way to
go is to add a dedicated external hard disk just for your video editing. Make sure
the hard drive connects via FireWire because FireWire is faster for this type of data
transfer than USB is.

How much hard disk space is enough? Well, I’m not sure you can ever have enough
storage, especially when storing digital video files. Here’s why: Video files are really,
really big.

For example, 1080p HD video takes up about 7MB for every second you shoot.
That’s almost 26GB for a full hour of video. After you have a few videos (or even a
few differently edited versions of the same video) on your hard disk, the space used
starts getting big. For this reason, consider a 1TB (terabyte) or larger drive for your
video storage. You can’t have too much hard disk space.