Comment Re:Yes (Score 1) 372
Video editing is typically done in a nondestructive fashion, so you do a big copy to get the initial data on, but then it's comparatively small transactions. It's been almost 10 years since I did any, but I think the basic approach is still the same. You grab the data from the camera (easier now - back then FireWire was essential because you were getting DV footage from tape with no buffering in the camera, so you needed isochronous transfer. Now flash costs about as little as tapes did). DV footage was 10GB/hour, which was a bit painful to edit with 1GB of RAM, but a modern system with 32+GB of RAM it's nothing. HD footage for consumer editing is about the same data rate. For pro stuff, I believe about 40GB/hour is still common, but even that fits nicely in 64GB of RAM.
You're then going to be streaming it through some filters (typically on the GPU, but sometimes on the CPU) and writing the results out to cached render files. These are fairly small (order of 100MB or so) files containing short composited sequences. When you play, you're doing a lot of random seeks to get all of these and play them in sequence (or just cache them in RAM - with 64GB that's quite feasible, with 128GB it's easy).
Finally, you'll write out the whole rendered sequence. Your cached pre-renders might be at lower quality than this, so you might not use them for the final step, in which case you do have something like a simple copy with some processing in the middle.