As to the H264 codec question, I'm actually quite surprised to hear your editor suggested it. H264 is a great solution, but only for the right situation. It's great for delivery, but terrible for production. It's a common question though, so I took the liberty to copy/pasting this response from David over at Vidvox:
h.264 and similar codecs are were designed and really optimized for situations where bandwidth is the major limiting factor of the system, such as streaming or downloadable video on the web.
There is a however a significant trade-off; these small files sizes come at a cost.
In order to get the data-rate of the file down, h.264 uses a technique known as "temporal compression". Simply put, the information needed to draw an individual random frame from your movie file may not all be stored in a single easy to read package.
Instead, temporal compression usually involves using key-frames (a whole frame of video used as a reference point), and in between the file only contains the information that changes from one frame to the next. This is okay for playing back video normally, but extremely costly computationally if you want to access a random frame of video from the movie- the nearest key-frame has to be found and then each 'change' in between the reference and the frame you are requesting needs to be taken into account, otherwise you'd get all kind of garbage artifacts in your video. So that pretty much rules out scrubbing video.
The bottom line is that h.264 is more computationally expensive to decompress a single frame of video than a codec like PhotoJPEG, even when playing back at 1x. While your computer is probably fine at playing back one or two h.264 files at a time, it is a lot of extra work for your computer to do so and you are likely to hit a wall sooner than with your disk access. Also, it is often cheaper to buy a fast, large capacity external drive for your clips than to purchase a faster computer.
I find that even when doing normal non-linear editing for commercial work, H264 or other Long Gop formats are just a terrible strain on the system, and I usually take the extra time to convert everything, because it will save me time and hassle in the long run. When it's time to hand off the product to the client, it's the perfect solution though.
Anyway, I hope the new build works for you. Let us know if you have any more questions.
Joris
