If you're looking to edit video (and I don't mean Youtube clips strung together in Windows Movie Maker or Pinnacle Studio), there are graphics cards specifically built for this purpose. Additionally, most third party plugins for Premiere and Avid are GPU accelerated, so putting money into a video card designed to handle it is a worthwhile investment.
nVidia has their ecosystem using QuadroFX cards with third party certified software (http://www.nvidia.com/object/builtforadobepros_plugins.html; the site is oddly flaky). Another popular one is Matrox (http://www.matrox.com/video/en/products/rtx2/), which vertically integrates an analog capture interface, real-time effects processor, and first-party software plugins.
Both are designed to accelerate MPEG-4 compression. Depending on one's needs, the nVidia solution boasts more flexible compatibility (virtually every software plugin available supports DirectX/OpenGL acceleration) and is less expensive (well, depending on which card and how many third party plugins you get), but the Matrox offering provides a vertical solution and an analog capture card.
Yes, I am fully aware that I am splitting hairs a bit and that either solution will blow the $1,500 price tag out of the water, but it's an important consideration. Additionally, a RAID-5 array of drives could serve the purposes of a single mega-storage drive; it provides the added bonuses of fault tolerance and being able to keep up on sustained analog captures.
Joey
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