What hardware do I need for HD editing on Premiere CS6?

Natan Pakman · August 7th, 2013, 01:04 PM

Harm, just another question on RAID configurations.

If I have a PC with the specs you describe, and the 4 hard drives are as follows:
128 SSD for OS and Programs
2TB 7200 HDD
2TB 7200 HDD
2TB 7200 HDD

In your opinion, would it be better to run the 3 HDDs with media, projects, and exports separated on each one (with NO RAID), or in a RAID 5 (or even 0 if backup isn't an issue) with all media elements in the same place?

Mark Williams · August 7th, 2013, 01:04 PM

Natan, once you decide on your specs go over to avadirect.com and build the system online for pricing. I think you will be pleasantly surprised. They are top-notch builders.

Natan Pakman · August 7th, 2013, 01:06 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mark Williams

Natan, once you decide on your specs go over to avadirect.com and build the system online for pricing. I think you will be pleasantly surprised. They are top-notch builders.

Mark, thanks for that. I JUST found avadirect 10 minutes before you posted. It has rave reviews and great prices.

Harm Millaard · August 7th, 2013, 01:13 PM

Natan,

The only raid configurations I would consider without a dedicated raid controller are raid0 or raid1, never raid5, because it is way too slow. With a dedicated raid controller ($$$) I would prefer raid3 with dedicated parity over distributed parity of a raid5.

So: Without a dedicated raid controller I would use single disks, given your number of available disks.

Natan Pakman · August 7th, 2013, 01:17 PM

Harm,

And if I had a dedicated RAID controller, would the performance (playback in Premiere and render speed) of 3 2TB drives in RAID0 with all of the media elements together be better than separating the 3 drives?

Mark Williams · August 7th, 2013, 01:24 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Natan Pakman

Mark, thanks for that. I JUST found avadirect 10 minutes before you posted. It has rave reviews and great prices.

Natan, they have built 2 systems for me and I couldn't be happier. Comes with 3 years support which I used once and they were very responsive.

Harm Millaard · August 7th, 2013, 01:46 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Natan Pakman

Harm,

And if I had a dedicated RAID controller, would the performance (playback in Premiere and render speed) of 3 2TB drives in RAID0 with all of the media elements together be better than separating the 3 drives?

There is no sense in using a dedicated raid controller when you are using a striped array, raid0. That is about equal to a striped raid0 array on a controller, so why waste $ 800+ on a dedicated controller? A dedicated controller only makes sense if you move to more disks and parity level arrays like raid 3/5 or 6.

A three disk raid0 from the mobo will give you a sustained transfer rate of around 450 - 550 MB/s, depending on the fill rate. It will drop to around 300 MB/s when your fill rate exceeds 70%. It is about three times faster than a single disk, but...

yeah, there is always a but...

a three disk raid0 increases the risk of complete data loss by a factor three over a single disk. When one disk fails, all your data are lost irretrievably and that is something I think you can afford with data that can be reconstructed, like media cache or previews, but not with the original media. Those data are too valuable to lose due to disk failure.

If you read my Planning guide and all of the following pages (there are a lot of them), you have seen I have covered data loss of my media with redundancy, allowing for up to 6 disks to fail without data loss, out of 24. So I can lose up to 25% of my disks without a serious problem. It slows down a bit, but no data are lost, it can all be reconstructed from the parity disks and hot-spares.

Maybe you want to read more about raids here: Adobe Community: To RAID or not to RAID, that is the question

Natan Pakman · August 8th, 2013, 07:08 AM

Harm, the reason why think using a RAID 0 wouldn't be that risky for me is that, if one drive fails at any given time, I'll have lost at most about 2-3 hours of work (moreover, the work will have been based on notes I've written down and could easily do again). On the machine I'm describing, I'll be editing a 3-hour show down to one hour, and then exporting that hour plus several shorter clips. At the end of the day, I'll do a backup all of the exported clips. So, for me, if the performance of the 3 drives in RAID 0, even with all of the media elements in the same boat, is significantly faster than having the 3 drives separate (or even 2 drives in RAID 0 and the 3rd separate), it seems to me like it would be worth it given the type of work I'll be doing.

If I were editing short films or anything with hundreds of cuts, effects, color correction, etc. I would probably agree that this is too risky, but since I'm not doing that on this machine, it seems like the setup that improves performance outweighs a setup that improves redundancy. Any thoughts?

Mark Watson · August 8th, 2013, 12:22 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Noa Put

Do you think exporting a file would make that much difference if you have a raid setup?...

Would a very fast raid system make the exporting part even more faster? Not so sure about that, not if the end file is highly compressed.

Noa,
The OP didn't say what type of HD he was shooting, might be AVCHD, could be something else. Whether it helps with every aspect of video editing or just 80%, I can't see why anyone would not consider going with the fastest drive setup they could afford. I haven't done any benchmarks in a long time, but when I converted to a RAID on my desktop machine, I saw lots of improvement. And that was just a two-drive RAID. Besides the export process, there are lots of other file operations that move huge chunks of data on/off the hard drives, so any gain in speed in the transfer of those files is going to help.

BTW- if you go to the Adobe Community/Premier Pro/Hardware Forum/Discussions,
You'll find an article that gives some recommendations on how to distribute your files across various numbers of hard drives. For instance, if you have 5 hard drives, it's recommended to put your OS and programs on one drive and make the other 4 into a RAID for media, projects, media cache,previews, exports. It's all in the article "Generic Guideline for Disk Setup" by Harm Millard.

Noa Put · August 8th, 2013, 12:35 PM

I do have several drives with import, export, backup, video data etc separated and in my case I don't see any benefit in having a raid setup, I can't imagine that converting avchd to a h.264 format would benefit in any way from raid. Uncompressed formats, sure, moving large amounts of data between drives, also sure, but for exports of highly compressed formats your better off just with separate single drives as your cpu or gpu will be doing all the work anyway and the drive speed won't be the bottleneck.

My current workflow of mainly avchd kind of formats is very fast as edius utilizes the build in gpu on the motherboard as well for exporting, I don't even have a build in gpu and only 8gb of memory. A fast raid system and a dedicated gpu card would not make a difference in my case either. Important is that you build your system around the format you will be editing and the nle you will be using, so every system could look totally different.

Harm Millaard · August 8th, 2013, 12:45 PM

Mark,

I'm busy rewriting that Disk Setup article. I haven't finished it yet, but the footwork is here: Tweakers Page

It is more elaborate and explains more of the factors that influence disk setup, and will contain more up-to-date information.

August 7th, 2013, 01:04 PM	#16
Natan Pakman Regular Crew Join Date: Feb 2009 Location: Los Angeles, CA Posts: 196	Re: What hardware do I need for HD editing on Premiere CS6? Harm, just another question on RAID configurations. If I have a PC with the specs you describe, and the 4 hard drives are as follows: 128 SSD for OS and Programs 2TB 7200 HDD 2TB 7200 HDD 2TB 7200 HDD In your opinion, would it be better to run the 3 HDDs with media, projects, and exports separated on each one (with NO RAID), or in a RAID 5 (or even 0 if backup isn't an issue) with all media elements in the same place?

August 7th, 2013, 01:04 PM	#17
Mark Williams Trustee Join Date: Dec 2002 Location: Deep South, U.S. Posts: 1,526	Re: What hardware do I need for HD editing on Premiere CS6? Natan, once you decide on your specs go over to avadirect.com and build the system online for pricing. I think you will be pleasantly surprised. They are top-notch builders. __________________ Mark videos: http://vimeo.com/channels/3523 Stock: http://www.pond5.com/artist/mark29

August 7th, 2013, 01:13 PM	#19
Harm Millaard Trustee Join Date: Aug 2006 Location: Rotterdam, Netherlands Posts: 1,832	Re: What hardware do I need for HD editing on Premiere CS6? Natan, The only raid configurations I would consider without a dedicated raid controller are raid0 or raid1, never raid5, because it is way too slow. With a dedicated raid controller ($$$) I would prefer raid3 with dedicated parity over distributed parity of a raid5. So: Without a dedicated raid controller I would use single disks, given your number of available disks.

August 7th, 2013, 01:17 PM	#20
Natan Pakman Regular Crew Join Date: Feb 2009 Location: Los Angeles, CA Posts: 196	Re: What hardware do I need for HD editing on Premiere CS6? Harm, And if I had a dedicated RAID controller, would the performance (playback in Premiere and render speed) of 3 2TB drives in RAID0 with all of the media elements together be better than separating the 3 drives?

August 8th, 2013, 07:08 AM	#23
Natan Pakman Regular Crew Join Date: Feb 2009 Location: Los Angeles, CA Posts: 196	Re: What hardware do I need for HD editing on Premiere CS6? Harm, the reason why think using a RAID 0 wouldn't be that risky for me is that, if one drive fails at any given time, I'll have lost at most about 2-3 hours of work (moreover, the work will have been based on notes I've written down and could easily do again). On the machine I'm describing, I'll be editing a 3-hour show down to one hour, and then exporting that hour plus several shorter clips. At the end of the day, I'll do a backup all of the exported clips. So, for me, if the performance of the 3 drives in RAID 0, even with all of the media elements in the same boat, is significantly faster than having the 3 drives separate (or even 2 drives in RAID 0 and the 3rd separate), it seems to me like it would be worth it given the type of work I'll be doing. If I were editing short films or anything with hundreds of cuts, effects, color correction, etc. I would probably agree that this is too risky, but since I'm not doing that on this machine, it seems like the setup that improves performance outweighs a setup that improves redundancy. Any thoughts?

August 8th, 2013, 12:35 PM	#25
Noa Put Inner Circle Join Date: Jun 2007 Location: Belgium Posts: 9,510	Re: What hardware do I need for HD editing on Premiere CS6? I do have several drives with import, export, backup, video data etc separated and in my case I don't see any benefit in having a raid setup, I can't imagine that converting avchd to a h.264 format would benefit in any way from raid. Uncompressed formats, sure, moving large amounts of data between drives, also sure, but for exports of highly compressed formats your better off just with separate single drives as your cpu or gpu will be doing all the work anyway and the drive speed won't be the bottleneck. My current workflow of mainly avchd kind of formats is very fast as edius utilizes the build in gpu on the motherboard as well for exporting, I don't even have a build in gpu and only 8gb of memory. A fast raid system and a dedicated gpu card would not make a difference in my case either. Important is that you build your system around the format you will be editing and the nle you will be using, so every system could look totally different.

August 8th, 2013, 12:45 PM	#26
Harm Millaard Trustee Join Date: Aug 2006 Location: Rotterdam, Netherlands Posts: 1,832	Re: What hardware do I need for HD editing on Premiere CS6? Mark, I'm busy rewriting that Disk Setup article. I haven't finished it yet, but the footwork is here: Tweakers Page It is more elaborate and explains more of the factors that influence disk setup, and will contain more up-to-date information.