Extra, Extra...
Hey Cody,
Jamall doesn't have a bad point. For one thing, once you go to two monitors, you'll never go back. I use two 19" ViewSonic VX900 LCDs on my main Dual 1.25GHz and two 19" Mitsubishi Diamond Plus 91 CRTs for my Dual 450MHz. The Viewsonics are phenomenal, as LCDs go.
You want to go for something with as high a contrast ratio as you can. They are 600:1, versus most cheapies that only go 250:1 through 400:1. Also, you have to watch resolutions. I run my 19inchers at 1280 by 1024. Although I find it still a little cramped in Final Cut, it's a whole lot better than a single 800 by 600 or 1024 by 768.
You might consider a single if it has a high enough res. I recommend the ViewSonic VX2000 and the Formac Gallery 2010. They use the exact same LCD panel. They have a res of 1600 by 1200, which is great for FCP. It allows two 100% views in standard layout and ample room for everything else, like timeline, bin, 'n' stuff. Something I don't even have with my dual monitors. My next machine with have two of the VX2000s. The drawback is that they cost around $1000 each or more plus tax and shipping, depending on how hard you search. Pricewatch is a good place for the Viewsonic. Although, a plus for the Formacs is a USB connection, just like the Apple brand displays, and I believe they offer calibration tools for the most accurate colour.
Jamall's second suggestion is even better than the first. The sluggishness you're finding with the edit is not due, hardly, at all too the speed of your chip. When you have a large edit with many cuts the computer has to jump around the disk to immediately present the next clip. This is deathly difficult for a single hard drive, let alone one attached via IDE, serial, USB or Firewire.
What professional editors use are large arrays of SCSI drives. You generally need a drive set, array or RAID (Redundant Array of Independent/Inexpensive Drives) that can sustain at least a data rate of approximately twice the rate of the footage you're using. For instance, uncompressed footage at nearly 30MB/sec needs a partition capable of running at least 60MB/sec. I recently finished a music video with lots of effects in a limited time, so we had to edit at full res without smaller proxy footage. The captured clips where running off a little four IDE drive, 160GB, Medea RT RAID, a $1300 little black box. The drive set runs at around 65MB/sec, supposedly, but it was having severe playback issues when running the edit. Next time I will make sure to have storage running closer to 100MB/sec or faster, possibly four to eight 10k or 15k SCSI disks. Access time can be crucial too, but most modern drives are fairly efficient in that area. The biggest hidden expense here is a proper SCSI card. The Adaptec or Atto UW160s are upward of $300.
You may actually be able to get by, for now, with a dual IDE card (Sonnet makes a good one), and a pair of Western Digital 7200RPM IDE drives. Get the ones with an 8MB cash, it'll help with lots of media stuff and aren't much more expensive. This will be a much cheaper solution, but considering DV is 5:1 compression, or 25Mbits/sec (5MBs/sec), you should get by okay. Especially if your cuts aren't crazy short for the entire film.
I'm not sure the Aurora or Radeon are really all that necessary since you're not pushing OpenGL graphics or onlining uncompressed video. A bigger advantage, for DV, would be a nice DV bridge and a good composite monitor. The Hollywood Dazzle works acceptably for, I think, between $150 and $250, not sure. In addition, in place of an expensive broadcast monitor, a little 13" Sony Wega flat CRT TV from Best Buy, maybe $150 or so, is plenty for checking you colour for real. LCD computer monitors are crisp, bright and flicker-free, but they can be fairly inaccurate as far as hue and saturation. Even CRT computer monitors can be misleading. I've used the above setup quite successfully for some of the lower budget DV stuff and even some things higher end. Just don't think it's perfect.
Altogether, a Viewsonic VX2000 or Formac 2010, a dual IDE card and drives, and a DV bridge and TV monitor, might run you around $2000 or so. That's a guess, I didn't run the math or check all the prices, so you'll have to weight those things yourself.
I would hazard to say that all these things are equally as important to real editing as your machines clock speed, minus the rendering. Every true, high-end, editing package with include lots of screen space on one or two monitors, plenty of fast, fast storage and a monitor of some kind to see what everything is really going to look like. Not every system will have the latest, greatest processor.
Another wise fellow here said something very true, render at night or while you're eating. We will always want faster machines to see the final results, but the biggest time savers are those that deal with interface. If you can't see enough of the timeline, have to watch the clips at sub-100% resolutions and you're dropping frames, how can you accurately edit anything without going mad? These are not generally things that the processor can do anything about.
On the other hand, don't let me discourage you from getting a machine that will, of course, curb obsolescence. You can add to an existing computer, thus prolonging it's life somewhat, but eventually the software will require you to upgrade the whole bundle. In this way, a G5 is a very smart way to go. The nice part of upgrading the monitors, hard drives and getting a DV bridge is that they can be transferred to a G5 at a later date. Just attach the new monitor to the G5 you buy next year, throw in those drives with the Sonnet, so long as the cable can reach, connect the bridge and you'll be in business on the new machine.
You'll have to make your own decision, of course, and by that, you'll be weighing what YOU find important to the way you work, but at least, I hope I gave you something to think about. I hate working on a slow computer when a faster one is available, but I couldn't work effectively without the "extras". If you had $5000 it wouldn't be an issue, right? Of course, you could always get the G5 now, and a big screen, and when a feature is in the sights, then you can get everything else.