Ive been doing alot of video editing recently, to my frustration, all my exports/ renders are very jerking during Pan shots. This improves when the video size/ quality is reduced. But whats the point?

Ive done a quick search, and it appears i need 2 seperate, Dedicated HDD's. 1 HDD for the content and for the Editing program to read from, and another for it to write/ export the data too. (And a 3rd for General OS etc) as when exporting, the drive is reading and writing the video, whilst doesnt stuff in the background.

Now, theres alot of talk of RAID in these threads. Basically, its confused the hell out of me.

Basically, Heres what im looking at.

HDD 1 = 250GB
HDD 2 = 80GB (Video Storage and Read)
HDD 3 = 80GB (Video Export and Write)

do i "NEED" this RAID Stuff? Is it not as simple, as plug the buggers in and get editing? is RAID needed? Can i just plug 2 additional drives in without any additional work needed?

Well, RAID support in desktop versions of Windows is kinda poor and unless you have a motherboard with hardware RAID controller (which you probably don't), the benefit of a RAID array is a bit debatable.
Before you decide on anything, you should be sure what is really bottlenecking you. If you have a write performance problems, a RAID 0 setup could help, but RAID 0 has an increased risk of data loss. If one drive in a RAID 0 fails, all data in the array is gone.
If you indeed have disk throughput problems, you might be much better off with a SSD drive.

I first found that i need 2 Dedicated HDD's, Great i though, sounds simple enough.

All i need, is one to read from, and one to write too. with the OS etc, on a 3rd HDD.

Sounds simple to me. Then after some more reading, people were discussion RAID etc, this is what confused me, Do i need it? Or can i plug in 2 new drives and be fine?

You should be looking at getting a pair of SSD's (or at least one - for OS & where the video editing program reads from).

You should make sure that you really need a faster HDD.
- Are you grabbing videos from games in real time?
- Are you working with some very high bitrate video files?
- Do you need to export the processed files on the fly?

Unless you answered yes to any of those questions, you probably don't need a faster HDD. To give you an example, I can record MPEG-2 DVB-T video streams in real time on my laptop and edit them afterwards with no problems. Note that laptop HDDs are all about power efficiency, not speed.

What's the rest of your PC's specs?

I have a quad core AMD 3ghz and 4GB ram. The he'd is about 8 yes old at a guess. Only 250gb

The smaller the video. The Less jerking there is.

I'm using full 1080 HD video I take from my holidays and trackdays. Converted from ADHVC Mp4


The real time preview is jerk free. But becomes jerky on export.