Video editing rig advice?

[PaulC]

Hey guys,

Basically I'm looking to get a new PC for video editing. I'll mainly be editing 1080p footage from my 60D, with a view to editing higher resolutions in the future (not necessary at this point in time, though).

I'm looking for something around £1000-1200 ($1500-1800). Either buying a ready-made system or building my own.

What advice would you give in terms of CPU, GPU, RAM, hard drives etc?

Cheers!

Paul.

[reddeercity]

1) SSD-M500 Crucial are very fast
2) Fast dual channel ram and as much as you can install (32GB) DDR 3
3) The biggest GPU you can afford ,NVidia with cuda(adobe products) 7xx or 8xx series lots of VRAM
4) i7 intel 4770K or 3770k (unlocked) for over clocking
5) At least a 1200 watt power supply
6) Fast storage, raid 0 or raid 5 (most mother board support this)
     or look in to a raid box setup with host adapter
7) CPU Water Cooler
Below is my setup for PC.
i7-3770k overclock to 4.7 Ghz
Corsair H60 water cool
16 GB duel channel ram
SSD 256 GB M500 Crucial OS drive
Gigabyte Mother Board - Z77X-UD5H
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 760 2GB VRam
ATTO R380 Raid Card with 8TB Raid 5 box

[ItsMeLenny]

This question I always find pretty useless because you basically get what you pay for.
You're saying what you want to do with it and also specifying a price.
But it's always one or the other, unless you say "I need a computer for word processing and don't want to pay more than $1000",
then that's a reasonable request, also a stupid request as every computer does word processing.
Just buy the fastest pieces you can afford because if someone says for a Raw video editing rig you need to pay $9000,
would you pay that much? And/or try to buy second hand.

[budafilms]

Get a Mac.

[ItsMeLenny]

Get a Mac.

So he can pay twice as much for something with half the power. (fact).

In fact, for $1000 from apple he could buy a keyboard. (obvious joke).


Also. Macs aren't even macs anymore, a lot of people switched back to "PC" for video editing because mac replaced their powerpc processors with intel.
So really, a mac is nowadays just an over priced PC, not opinion, fact.

[PaulC]

Cheers for the advice guys!

I definitely can't afford a Mac (I'm a final year student with a serious lack of money!)

This question I always find pretty useless because you basically get what you pay for.
You're saying what you want to do with it and also specifying a price.
But it's always one or the other, unless you say "I need a computer for word processing and don't want to pay more than $1000",
then that's a reasonable request, also a stupid request as every computer does word processing.
Just buy the fastest pieces you can afford because if someone says for a Raw video editing rig you need to pay $9000,
would you pay that much? And/or try to buy second hand.

Not really a useless question. I have a certain budget and I'm looking for advice on what I can get within that budget.

[dubzeebass]

Goto a store :-)

[ItsMeLenny]

Not really a useless question. I have a certain budget and I'm looking for advice on what I can get within that budget.

But you are setting a budget, so you already know what you can get.
For somebody else to suggest what you should get for those prices they would have to go and search what all the prices of parts are at this current moment.
The computer market changes daily. I remember I think back around in 07 when ram suddenly jumped in price because chip manufacturers started focusing on SD cards.
So the price of ram doubled if not tripled because there was high demand and little quantity.
I then watched the price fall back down. I bought something like 4gb of ram and 2 months later it had halved in price.
You have to find a good and cheap supplier, then look at their list and see what you can afford.
Motherboard, Power Supply, CPU, Solid State Hard Drive, RAM, Graphics Card.
They all fluctuate in price, and depending if you want a power hungry PC or not. Power Supply is incredibly important, people buy cheap things which make their whole computer unsteady, cheap ones fluctuate in voltage output. Plus you need to make sure your power supply is a high enough wattage for your graphics card.
RAM you want probably a minimum of 8GB DDR3, but ram is pretty cheap nowadays afaik (don't really check the market anymore), if you can afford more, double it, quadruple it. But then you need to make sure you're installing a 64bit operating system, because 32bit only takes a max amount of ram of ~4GB.
Decent Motherboard is important because of so many bad caps, you want to make sure the motherboard is a reliable brand with good japanese capacitors which won't blow up over time. The motherboard also has to be fast enough for your CPU and ram.
Also if you want a motherboard that can take 2 graphics cards so you can link them. I always go for Nvidia graphics cards.
Brands I usually go for is:
- Antec power supply
- Gigabyte motherboard
- Gigabyte Nvideo graphics card (passive cooling, although I'm going to get a fan one next time, as the heat sink on my current one is way too big)
- Corsair ram (kingston I think is good too)
- Western Digital HDD (switched off seagate because I had multiple hard drives in a row with bad sectors, happened too many times for my liking)
- Intel CPU (just because, AMD should be fine if you're an AMD fan)
- LiteOn DVD burner (I've had many a brands, LiteOne reads and writes the steadiest)
Then all this has to go in case which allows for optimal cooling, that usually means fitted with some good quality fans, and silent fans at that because it can get noisy.

[PaulC]

That's a brilliant reply, thanks!

The only reason that I was asking is that I don't know a huge amount about computers. Hence, why I asked the question so I would know the basics of what I would need.

You've definitely given me plenty of information to give me somewhere to start learning about what I would need in my rig. Cheers.

[ReinisK]

How big is the graphic card's influence in video editing (premiere)? Does it really make sense to go with a dual gpu setup instead of one?

[reddeercity]

It all about VRam & Cuda Cores and of course Adobe loves Cuda,
My Old AMD FX 8350 8 core has (2) NVidia GTX 580 with total of 3GB Of VRam
When rendering in A.E. or Premiere Pro from dng's to prores4444 I get about 19-22 frames per second so nearly Realtime
Without Cuda its about 8-12 Frames per second. Gpu I think is the second most importance think next to CPU.

[ItsMeLenny]

How big is the graphic card's influence in video editing (premiere)? Does it really make sense to go with a dual gpu setup instead of one?

I believe premiere has GPU accelerated video playback, which is needed for 4K/8K videos. I could be wrong on that note.
Dual GPU is not essential, just a single good video card.
But anything that does hardware acceleration can benefit from a GPU (no need for two).

Also to add on.
Your price of your PC will go up ~$200 if you want a bluray burner.
Which reminds me:
- LiteOn DVD burner (I've had many a brands, LiteOn reads and writes the steadiest).

I'll add this to my list.

[ItsMeLenny]

It all about VRam & Cuda Cores and of course Adobe loves Cuda,
My Old AMD FX 8350 8 core has (2) NVidia GTX 580 with total of 3GB Of VRam
When rendering in A.E. or Premiere Pro from dng's to prores4444 I get about 19-22 frames per second so nearly Realtime
Without Cuda its about 8-12 Frames per second. Gpu I think is the second most importance think next to CPU.

I don't use Adobe products so I don't know all the details.
But as you've stated about Cuda.
There are certain things that Adobe likes to use on certain graphics cards.
So it's best to check what Adobe utilizes (probably on their website),
and buy a graphics card that has those features.


To continue on again from my post.
A fast CPU with many cores will be the most important thing. (Depending how much is GPU accelerated)
And then lots of Ram is important for large video files.
But then this brings be back to the importance of the motherboard,
it has to have a fast enough north/south bridge (whatever they are, long time since I've dabbled in hardware)
to be able to have enough bandwidth (or what not) for the CPU and RAM.
No point in having a fast CPU and fast RAM if the motherboard restricts performance,
then again, in that case the computer might not even run, motherboards have certain specified ram they support,
which is possibly blocked by the BIOS, and I know for a fact that certain CPUs are blocked from the BIOS.
Took me years to find a new motherboard that would support my 3.2Ghz P4, and that motherboard broke pretty quick.
(Bad caps, it was a Gigabyte, but it was an earlier board, before they noticed the bad cap problem I believe,
because since, all their products I buy have solid japanese capacitors.)

[pilgrim]

Hey guys,

Basically I'm looking to get a new PC for video editing. I'll mainly be editing 1080p footage from my 60D, with a view to editing higher resolutions in the future (not necessary at this point in time, though).

I'm looking for something around £1000-1200 ($1500-1800). Either buying a ready-made system or building my own.

What advice would you give in terms of CPU, GPU, RAM, hard drives etc?

Cheers!

Paul.

- If it is for me, I will buy iMac with 8GB RAM with SSD, I even can install Windows on it, but "ItsMeLenny" don't like it  , no offence  ... and it's for you... so buy a PC.
- One important thing that many forget is the monitor. How can we do colour correction on the low cost monitor ? So buy PC with good monitor.
- Apple computer have a good monitor, out from the box, except Mac Mini or Mac Pro. By the way, I use computer half day with Mac and half day with PC, like now when I write this message. Hi ItsMeLenny  ... I like PC computer also.
- If you don't know hardware, don't assembly your-self. If something going wrong it's not because the hardware, and the time being lost to fix the problem often costly. You can sell again any computer with good brand, at least at eBay, to upgrade later.
- Check on CNET or other site for the choice which you can get with your budget.
- Computer need program also. Good program cost money also. Luckily as a student you can get student price. The time to study a program also an investment. In Mac you can use Final Cut Pro X, on your budged, and not limited the function or capability because the price. In Windows or Linux you can get Lightworks for free. So many program there, just don't be fanatic. 
 

[reddeercity]

Really Mac is the Best for Monitoring , My i7 overclock 4.7 Hackintosh    I have a 32 inch Sony LCDTV
connected by HDMI (Great with FCPX) and use the mac Color Calibration software that's included in  OSX 10.9.1  .
This Comes the closes to my 10bit panasonic plasma grading monitor via AJA capture card.
If you are looking for a cheap monitoring solution Blackmagic has a Cross platform USB 3.0 (now mac supports  USB 3.0)
"Ultra Studios SDI" external mobile device, so you can now monitor with 10bit HDMI or 3G SDI & capture only with SDI.
Works with just about all NLE , just connect your HDMI LCDTV or Plasma there you go. I have one on my i7 PC Laptop Works great.
Just a thought     

[Audionut]

Whoa Lenny, you are old school. 

Even cheap motherboards these days use decent caps.  There is no more north/southbridge, everything has moved onto the CPU.

Motherboards these days are simply placeholders for components.  They don't have significant performance qualities, unless you are doing fairly extreme overclocking.  I'm pretty sure the market has been cornered by only a couple of companies.

I advise to get the cheapest motherboard you can, subject to simply, the amount peripheral components you want to use. 
Think about the future.  You might only need 2 memory slots now, but having a 4 memory slot motherboard, with 2 slots empty, will mean you can simply increase memory in the future for no added cost.



Get an SDD.

Power supply is important, but not to the point of thinking you need 1.21 gigawatts, for the flux capacitor.  Stick to a brand name.  Don't buy some extremely cheap no name POS.  Use this calculator to determine your actual power requirements.

There's no point having a Titan Z, with only 2GB of system memory for instance.
Building a computer is a fine balance of cost/performance for individual components, and the components as they work together.
If you look closely, you can often observe a price point where extra features come with significant price increases.

On the Intel side of the fence, K model CPUs are only useful for overclocking, and actually have less features that may be worthwhile.  Such as VT-d.

Now look at these CPUs.  Prices $AU.

Get an SSD.

Intel Core i5 4440.  3.1GHz (3.3GHz turbo) $215

Intel Core i5 4570.  3.2GHz (3.6GHz turbo) $229.

Intel Core i5 4670.  3.4GHz (3.8GHz turbo) $249.

All of these CPUs are going to perform almost identically.  They all contain the same base features, and are only differentiated by small changes to clock speed.  Benchmarks will show the clock difference, but benchmarks by nature, are designed to show these differences.  The only other time this may be noticeable in video encoding, is if you are encoding 200,000 frames or more.  Here, you will save a few minutes with the faster CPU, vs the slower CPU.  Whether those few minutes (in an otherwise 3 hour or more encode), are useful to you, well, only you can answer that.

However, it does show how $34 can net you a performance increase.

To go cheaper then these, you have to drop significant performance.  You will only get dual core.

Intel Core i7 4770.  3.4GHZ (3.9GHZ turbo) (8MB cache) (Hyperthreading) $355.  This is the next level up in performance.  It's expensive, but it comes with noticeable benefits, mainly the hyperthreading.  Hyperthreading will increase the performance by at least 10%.  Also, if you are using the computer for things other then video encoding, the useability of the system will be much greater.

Get an SSD.

Memory is fairly cheap, but unfortunately, not as cheap as it once was.  8GB is the bare minimum.  Here, more is always better.
The speed rating of the memory (1600MHz, 2000MHz, etc) is of little value.  Again, benchmarks will show a difference, but real world performance increases will not be noticeable, unless you are overclocking.  The amount of memory is infinitely more important then it's speed.

Again, think about the future.  Don't use 4 x 4GB memory sticks.  Use 2 x 8GB memory sticks, and leave 2 slots free for future upgrades.  Ideally, look at something like this.

Get an SDD.  Seriously!  If you can manage your file system, 120-128GB is plenty for the OS drive.  If you'd rather not have to worry about managing space, shell out for a 250-256GB SDD.  The price difference is around $50.

If you can afford another $100, get a second 120-128GB SSD for a cache drive.

I'm not overly up to speed on the cost/performance of GPUs.  But with Nvidia, you want to be looking at Compute capability and Core Config.
SLI is outside of your budget, and I'm not sure if any video encoders take advantage of it anyway.

Apple is overpriced crap.  Once upon a time Apple had the performance advantage.  These days, it's simply an adventure is spending more money then you otherwise need too.

[budafilms]

So he can pay twice as much for something with half the power. (fact).

In fact, for $1000 from apple he could buy a keyboard. (obvious joke).


Also. Macs aren't even macs anymore, a lot of people switched back to "PC" for video editing because mac replaced their powerpc processors with intel.
So really, a mac is nowadays just an over priced PC, not opinion, fact.

You can configure a PC with Intel processor, mother gigabyte, nvidia gtx card and create a Hackintosh. There a lot of forum about it like www.insanelymac.com one of the best.

The advantage of apple software, OSX, Final Cut even the Adobe and Da Vinci versions for mac are more stable, have more options and, like you say, it's a fact that real professionals use mac in video production. Google it.

This is the most expensive apple http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/ you can follow that forums and create something similar. But check the models of motherboard and use intel processors.

In my work we have PC, Mac, and Hackintosh for video production and Apple and Hackintosh are more stable, faster, than the same task and configuration with PC. For example, exporting Pro Res to H264.

Ah! Mavericks OSX it's free

[ItsMeLenny]

- If it is for me, I will buy iMac with 8GB RAM with SSD, I even can install Windows on it, but "ItsMeLenny" don't like it  , no offence  ... and it's for you... so buy a PC.

I don't use Windows either.

- Apple computer have a good monitor, out from the box, except Mac Mini or Mac Pro. By the way, I use computer half day with Mac and half day with PC, like now when I write this message. Hi ItsMeLenny  ... I like PC computer also.

Again, you can buy a better monitor for half the price if you don't buy one which has a fruit on it.
I'd rather buy from a company that specializes in monitors.

Whoa Lenny, you are old school. 
Even cheap motherboards these days use decent caps.  There is no more north/southbridge, everything has moved onto the CPU.

I haven't looked at hardware for quite a few years, however I would still think the real cheapy brands would come with bad caps no? Maybe I'm just paranoid after going through literally 10 motherboards instead of 2.
As for the no more southbridge? Poke my nipple and call me Sally.
I thought you'd gone mad for a second but I just googled it.

Due to the push for System-on-a-chip (SoC) processors, modern devices increasingly have the northbridge integrated into the CPU die itself; examples are Intel's Sandy Bridge and AMD's Fusion processors (both released in 2011). The southbridge is redundant and was replaced by the Platform Controller Hub (PCH), all southbridge features were taken over by the PCH. Intel's Haswell launched in 2013 further stripped the southbridge off, remaining I/O functions are managed by the Lynx Point chipset.

Taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southbridge_%28computing%29

I'm flabbergasted, that means I'm even more outdated than I though I was. I guess I did stop my interest in computer hardware when I recycled all my old computers. Or probably earlier, probably 07 really. Everything happens in 07 when I make recounts.

Apple is overpriced crap.  Once upon a time Apple had the performance advantage.  These days, it's simply an adventure is spending more money then you otherwise need too.

Yeah, earlier apples, when they came out to compete with PC's, they were quite an advancement, but Windows caught up and took over pretty quickly.
And sorry to say, but Gates was a lot smarter than Jobs. (Again, not that I use either.)

Hackintosh

This is the better of 2 evils

[Audionut]

I haven't looked at hardware for quite a few years, however I would still think the real cheapy brands would come with bad caps no? Maybe I'm just paranoid after going through literally 10 motherboards instead of 2.

Turns out there are more motherboard manufactures then I though there was.

All the big players should have their shit together.  Their experience with faulty caps all those years ago, should have been a nice lesson. 
After that period, there was a massive marketing push about the caps being used (in newer mobos), these days, it is expected that the caps being used are quality components.

SoC is the way of the future.  No more slow buses.

[ItsMeLenny]

All the big players should have their shit together.  Their experience with faulty caps all those years ago, should have been a nice lesson. 
After that period, there was a massive marketing push about the caps being used (in newer mobos), these days, it is expected that the caps being used are quality components.

Yeah, all the brands asus and acer whatever was manufacturing motherboards.
I used to buy "elitegroup" which were good cheap motherboards, but all their caps started failing.
The thing I found with gigabyte is even in that period of bad caps, the mbs still looked like they were made higher quality than others,
but still the higher quality didn't save the boards at all.
In fact, my monitor also had badcaps on one of the boards, can't remember now if it was the power board or the control board,
but it eventually died and my friend recapped it for me. Which 70c instead of $300 is a big saving, and big saving for the environment.

[jose_ugs]

I am not a 100% sure, but there was something somewhere written by Adobe, that AfterFX uses SLI since CS6... but i'm not sure, not that it makes sense for you when you're on a budget...

[PaulC]

Thanks again for all the replies folks. Getting closer to what I think I want.

A question about drives. Is it best to have an SSD to run the OS and programs, and HDD for general storage? Also, what exactly is RAID?

(I apologise for my relative lack of computer knowledge!)

[jose_ugs]

SSD is so much faster... OS boot time, software too, etc. etc... So, like it was mentioned before, if you can fit in 128GB for your OS/soft... go for it.
RAID is just an array of HDDs which, depending on the RAID type, work much faster, much safer/you have backup of your whole drive/, etc. etc... Just Google it... for detailed descriptions of the various types

[ItsMeLenny]

Thanks again for all the replies folks. Getting closer to what I think I want.

A question about drives. Is it best to have an SSD to run the OS and programs, and HDD for general storage? Also, what exactly is RAID?

(I apologise for my relative lack of computer knowledge!)

Reading from an SSD is faster. So if you want your computer to boot quickly, put your OS on the SSD. If you want to read data quickly, put your data on the SSD.
I don't have an SSD and I'm not too familiar with them, but just like USB sticks, writing to them repeatedly wears them out (over time).

As for RAID, there are a few different types, have a look at this table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID#Comparison
You do not want to do (under any circumstance) use RAID 0.
RAID 0 can basically combine 2 hard drives to look like 1, so 2 500GB hard drives will look like a 1TB, and writing data to them writes between them.
This means that if one of them breaks, they're both screwed, and all data is lost. (basically)
The other kinds of RAIDs are basically you get 2 or more identical hard drives, and each of the hard drive contains exactly the same thing.
It will mirror them all to look exactly the same. This means that if one breaks, you can replace it and the other one will update the new hard drive, so you reduce failure rate by a lot. If you have 2 hard drives and they both break then you are screwed, however the chances of them both breaking is far slimmer to just one breaking.
It can make reading data faster, because it can read one file from one hard drive, and another file from another. But the difference is marginal.
Once you start getting a mass amount in a RAID then I think the speed begins to increase. Also if you have 20 SSD hard drives in a raid, you can make copies of 50GB files in a split second.

[reddeercity]

There is nothing wrong with raid0 , and in fact it is one of the
Recommend setup for video editing! And you never use it for
Storage it mainly a scratch drive. For rendering to or  you need a very fast
Read on Data like to view .raw or .mlv in real time .
Raid 1 is useless for editing , slow and only go for backup data.
Raid 5 is the over all winner here it safe & very fast with
4 drive array you get around 450/450 MB/s read write.
If one drive fails just replace it and keep on going.