im pretty new but i've been involved with AMV's for YEARS (mostly watching them). I live in Australia and am owner of 'crackerville Productions' (my shitty ranma 1/2 test video can be found under my profile)
In response to your question about a system:
Last year I bought me the following system:
CPU: P4 2.5ghz
RAM: 1Gig PC2700 DDR RAM
Mobo: MSI Board with RAID/LAN
HDD's: 60Gig ATA 133/7200rpm HDD + 120 Gig ATA133/7200rpm HDD (striped)
Opticals: 16x DVDROM (for ripping vobs and watching my NTSC import anime

AGP: MSI G4 Ti4600 128MB RAM ViVo (that I USED to use for capturing...)
OS: Win2k (because XP is Shithouse)
Software: a 'borrowed' copy of Premier 6.0
monitor: 19" standard CRT.
This all cost me about $3700 AU$ in July last year.
But I could pick up roughly the same thing now for about 1/2 the price because of the PC world's famous price drops.
I can't wait to see how many people love AMD and XP. BURN YOU ALL!
basically, if you are getting errors and you have an AMD or winXP I can give you a quick fix.

PS: I hate AMD and XP if you cant tell
