Video Cards For Editing

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By Video Consultant | July 3, 2007

The choice of video cards for home movie editing is not important at all. You will be able to capture movies from your camera via firewire, edit and play AVI and MPGEG movies with just a basic video card or your on board graphics.

But what if you do your editing on a machine where you play an occasional game ? Games do require a special graphics card that is more powerful. The reason is that unlike video streams games send mathematical data to the card describing how to draw items. Some games need very complex commands and huge amounts of data describing how to draw textures and shading for objects to make the games look more realistic.

Following is a list of what I recommend for video cards. Whenever I buy products I want my purchase to be future proof. I want a product with technology that will last a few years. I also stay away from bleeding edge technology. Often brand new products are have a high price/performance ratio. In the computer world prices will drop after a product has been released for a while.

Nvidia and ATI are the two primary players in the graphics card world. Vendors take the basic cards by the vendors and place them into their own packages and layer other applications into the package.

Nvidia

GEforce 6200 - This is the minimum card I would buy from Nvidia. Current prices are in the $55-$75 range. Make sure you do NOT but a 6200TC or Turbo Cache.
Although it sound it will be faster it is not. Rather than having memory on the video card it uses system memory. The need to pass information to system memory takes time and processing power, which slows things down.
GEforce 6600

- Good solid card in the $75-$100 dollar price range.