Building a New Edit Suite

Upgrades are par for the course when you work in a creative field, and true to form after three years my computer was telling me it needed to be replaced. You may think that that timing sounds oddly specific, but since I bought my first personal PC to edit after graduating high school in 2002, I upgraded my system in the fall of 2005, 2008, 2011, and now 2014. Perhaps not surprisingly, given my corporate video and photography work, it's always the video or graphics card that fail on me first - kicking off a new round of improvements.


This time I really went all out. Seeing as I'm now making a go of being a full-time freelancer, I decided to put together my dream system. This meant upgrading everything from my monitors, speakers, and computer, to my editing software and even how I laid out all of my external hard drives. The cables under my desk have never been so organized.

Many people always assume I use a Mac because it's such a standard for creatives. To be honest, while I do have quite a few Apple products, my money just goes dramatically further with a PC. That alone makes it easy to justify. And more so, I love having a system that's unique to me - and far more custom in terms of what I can control. It's just a personal choice.

In the end, the new edit suite is amazing and I can't wait to put it to use on some new projects I have lined up. When I compare this to what I was editing on back in film school it's a pretty blatant reminder of just how much I've improved, and just how affordable (relatively speaking) the equipment has become. I'm a pretty happy guy these days.

Here are some of my main edit suite upgrades:

• 22" HP monitor (vertically mounted) and a 32" 1080p LG TV as my main desktop. 
• New Intel Core i7, 12GB Ram, and additional Bluray drive for video authoring.
• 2 wood Hi-Fi speaker towers (more than enough power for my space).
• High-end Sennheiser wireless headphones. 
• Over 5TB of workable project space.