best Budget Graphics Card for Pr CS6 editing

After a bit of research and combining everyones suggestions, I am going to be building a system with these major components

i7 3770

32gb ddr3 1600 ram

GTX 660 with 2gb of ram

128gb SSD

two 2tb HDD's

I will report back (probably in the next month or so) with my build and it's performance.

Are there certain things to look for in a graphics card when it comes to working with Premiere and AE?

Yes.  You want to make sure the card is using GDDR5 memory, at least 1GB, more is better.  The second thing you want is the most number of CUDA cores you can afford.  The third thing to look for is the memory bandwidth.  You'll see numbers like 192 bit, 256 bit, 320 bit etc.  Higher is generally better.

>Canon DSLR footage

1st, for that type of video, you might want to look at the i7 3770 CPU instead of an i5 - unless you like waiting for things to happen... DSLR video is very CPU intensive

2nd, For a PARTIAL comparison of nVidia cards http://www.pacifier.com/~jtsmith/GPU.HTM with prices and CUDA cores and bandwidth

ADDED

PC I built for my wife http://www.pacifier.com/~jtsmith/ADOBE.HTM would do very well for Premiere Elements, plus scroll down a page or two for 3 price/performance level computers for Premiere Pro... these are, of course, MY ideas about what to build, if I was building a new computer for myself... YOUR ideas may wind up being different

Paul,

Of the current generation GeForce GPUs, the GTX 650 Ti would be about the best that you can do unless you happen to find a GTX 660 in that range (normally, the GTX 660 is just above your price limit).