Reasonable hardware for basic video editing? We have an old duo core Windows XP machine, and it seems to be the case that, when using Adobe Premiere Elements 9, we frequently have situations where the audio and video are out of sync. We will load a prores mov, or a new hi res mp4 and try to share a DVD version of the file, or do some minor trimming of a clip, and then have something that is clearly off.

So, if you have to do editing on this level (no special effects, just clips and transcoding) what is a reasonable processor, processor speed, RAM requirement? If we replace this machine, I will be looking at either Windows 7 or MacOS (long story, and I don't get to choose which), so my focus is on understanding the hardware requirements.



Hmmm. We're now using current iMacs (64-bit) and Premiere Elements 10. Being a Mac, that means saving things to .mov (the Mac's version of a "wrapper" format) instead of avi. 

Even given that, however, I am still finding that the audio and video get out of sync when writing a DVD. I also have a similar (but possibly not remotely related) problem where, when I define a clip and write the clip to a file, I lose the last ~3 seconds of the clip. In this case, no bad synccing, just that suddenly the conversation stops a few seconds before the action stops.

I really don't want to invest several hundred dollars in video editing software for the trivial editing that we do, but it drives me crazy how little control I have over settings, and how many weird glitches I am encountering.
Adobe has tech specs on all of the software they sell on their website (www.adobe.com). I found the tech specs for [premier elements] 9 that you can look at. 

(http://www.adobe.com/products/premiereel/systemreqs/)