The company I work for has given me the task of getting a new PC for video editing. Budget it not really an issue.

I'm not really sure where to start. I figured that it might make more sense to build a system rather than buying a package deal, but I could be wrong about this. Does anyone have any advice on where I should start? Are there companies that make PCs designed for video editing? If I were to build such a machine on my own, what kinds of things are important to have? Any opinions and suggestions are welcome. Thanks!

What editing system do you plan on running?
What other programs do you intend on running? What are their recommended specs?

Generally, a good route is to make sure the computer meets or exceeds the recommended specs. If you plan on using hardware acceleration devices (available for specific editing platforms), then you really need to pay attention to compatibility issues.

Lowering render times is probably one of your needs. Look for:
The fastest CPUs that makes sense to buy. If you have the money, the dual core dual Opterons will likely be fastest (although it may conflict with some hardware acceleration devices because of the motherboard/chipset).
Hardware acceleration
Render farm / network render (I think only Vegas does this, and there are some caveats to it.)

2- If budget is not an issue, get a Quantel iQ.
I'm guessing you don't have that kind of budget. So really, what is your budget? (Just need a vague ballpark range)

3- If you can build your own PC, the best bang/buck is likely to get a hot deal on a Dell and throw in your own upgrades.
Go to dell.com --> small business --> outrageous deals --> inspiron 9100
Upgrade to dual core
Nearly everything else you should throw in yourself because dell upgrades are usually quite overpriced.

On the high end, it may be cheaper to build your computer yourself. Although you can try calling up Dell/HP and see if you can find an aggressive sales rep... that may be cheaper than newegg.com and building it yourself. (Never tried that.)

Thanks for the reply Glenn. I'm planning on Using Adobe Premiere Pro, Photoshop, and Encord DVD. I might also be using After Effects and possibly some 3ds Max. All of these programs are very demanding on a computer's resources and hardware. I was looking at the dual-core processors, and they look pretty good? Is it better than have true dual-processors though?

Ok, you're right, there is somewhat of a budget. I was thinking around the $4000-5000 range, with a ceiling of $10,000. My boss wants to make sure whatever we get will work well and we won't be bogged down by inferior hardware. Your idea of getting a Dell and then upgrading the hell out of it is a pretty good one. I hadn't really thought of that. It's something I'll look into.

Any more suggestions now that you know more about my situation?

Premiere Pro: You might want to look into the Matrox RTX100, which provides hardware acceleration for PPro. It may be a good deal if you grab a bundle deal (card + PPro + Photoshop + AE non-production version). You do need to watch out for the chipset you use... it may be or is incompatible with all of the chipsets for AMD processors. The website will list compatibility information.

*Haven't tried the Matrox myself and I don't use Premiere Pro, but it's something to investigate.

3dsmax should benefit from a video card that's good at openGL. The system recommendations should say. You'd be looking at the quadro line from Nvidia, and the fire line from ATI. These cards are non-openGL-crippled versions of the gaming cards like the Radeons and Geforces. If you want to be adventurous, you can flash the BIOS on a particular Nvidia ~$200 Geforce card into a ~$1100 quadro card (not guaranteed, and voids the warranty).

2- If you get a basic system from Dell, you might come in a little under your budget (at the basic configuration, I believe it's cheaper than building it yourself). You could fill out your budget by:
Getting (dual) LCDs. Hot deals sites for your country would have information.
Get a broadcast monitor... possibly a small one you can use in the field too.
Audio mixer, studio monitors, jay rose's books (see dplay.com) and some acoustic treatment
other stuff that you don't know you need right now (betaSP deck and vectorscope?)
etc...

If you edit full-time, it might be worth it to get a slightly faster CPU (because a bit of your productivity is wasted when you wait for renders). You kind of jump up in price a lot for very small gains in speed though.

Is it better than have true dual-processors though?
I don't think so...?
If you have lots of money, the dual Xeon systems are clocked faster. There's also quad and 8-way Xeons systems, as well as dual core 4-way and 8-way AMD systems (although those cost $30k+ I believe; that's 16 cores...).

Some key questions: Do you intend to get into HDV and/or HD video editing during the expected life of this system? Do you need to mix formats at capture and on the timeline? Is it straightforward editing or does it involve a lot of compositing? Who are the audience/market for the finished edits, what format/method is needed for distribution?

Answers to these questions will probably influence your nle options and the pc kit you need to get. More complex and demanding requirements may benefit from a turnkey solution unless you are confident about building and troubleshooting your system.

If you can build your own PC, the best bang/buck is likely to get a hot deal on a Dell and throw in your own upgrades.

If you can build and configure your own PCs or hire someone to do that for you, buying any brand-name PC and upgrading it is a lousy idea. You can get better results for the same price with fewer hassles (if you know what you're doing) by selecting your own parts and assembling them from the ground up.

Dell does wacky things which can make upgrading a nightmare I wouldn't wish on anyone: something as simple as adding another hard drive can cause hours of frustration if you don't know that Dell expects you to put your drive jumpers on the "cable select" setting. I just finally replaced my two year old Dell with a shiny new home-built system and couldn't be happier: now when I make hardware changes they work as expected without all the hair-pulling and cursing.

Brand-name or turnkey systems are fine if you don't want to bother with hardware issues directly, but for maximum flexibility the do-it-yourself option is the way to go.

Dell does wacky things which can make upgrading a nightmare I wouldn't wish on anyone: something as simple as adding another hard drive can cause hours of frustration if you don't know that Dell expects you to put your drive jumpers on the "cable select" setting.

I don't think "cable select" is a wacky thing for Dell to do, and checking the jumper settings on your drives when you install them is a fairly basic thing.

Now there's some things about Dell I don't like:
the OS install comes with a lot of crap
on windows CD
tech support may be from India? *depends on which segment you buy from. big contracts get better North American-based support, and is good.
proprietary parts - case, motherboard, hopefully not the power supply
The computer may have limited upgradeability (i.e. limited hard drive bays)

But if you buy a base system from Dell and throw in your own upgrades, you save a lot of time as well as a little bit of money. If you price out a DIY build versus Dell + your own upgrades, the Dell is about the same price or cheaper (plus it wastes less of your time).

2- Another alternative:
If you know what parts you want, you can get someone to build the computer for you. Local computer shops and online vendors like monarchcomputers.com can do this (see their resellerratings.com rating).

Some key questions: Do you intend to get into HDV and/or HD video editing during the expected life of this system? Do you need to mix formats at capture and on the timeline? Is it straightforward editing or does it involve a lot of compositing? Who are the audience/market for the finished edits, what format/method is needed for distribution?

Answers to these questions will probably influence your nle options and the pc kit you need to get. More complex and demanding requirements may benefit from a turnkey solution unless you are confident about building and troubleshooting your system.

As of right now, I don't see HDV in our future, but I suppose that all depends on how big it really gets in the next few years. If, by some chance, SD video is completely wiped out by HD, then maybe we would be using HD. At this point, however, I'm going to say no HD. There might be some need to mix formats. We often get video from multiple different sources, most typically a combination of MiniDV tapes and DVD's. For the DVD's I've just been ripping the video off of them as AVI's and mixing them in the timeline with captured miniDV footage. Would you consider this mixing formats? Most of the editing is pretty straight forward. We typically have some titles and graphics at the beginning of each video, but there won't be anything like green screens or intense composite layers. The audience will usually be clients of my company... more specifically, automotive companies. We give the clients DVDs of the videos they want after giving them an initial web preview to evaluate. That gives you an idea of the kind of work I intend on doing on this machine.

I am fairly comfortable with computer hardware and everything, although I do have to admit that if I had all the parts in front of me right now, I would have a difficult time knowing exactly what to do. I would definitely want someone helping me who knew more about this than I do. So perhaps Kevin and Glenn's idea of going to a place that will build a custom machine for me is the best option. Any other recommendations?

This site will give you some specific ideas of what is currently available:
http://www.videoguys.com/Shootout2005.html

Scroll to the bottom of the page and you will see a d-i-y pc for under $1000.

I am only familiar with EdiusPro3 of the nles listed. Key benefits, for me, are its reliability and real time (ie render free) performance. The interface is somewhat different from other nles but once over that small hurdle it is easy and fast to use.

No doubt the other choices would also serve you well given the needs you identify.

Ok.... so I took a cruise over to http://www.pugetsystems.com where I spent about four hours creating eight different video editing machines. I whipped up a little web page that has each system's specs laid out and their prices. The systems begin at $3000 and go up from there. If you have the time (it's a long list, I know), let me know what you think of these, or if I'm going wrong somewhere.

By the way, there are no monitors with any of these computers, because my company gets a really good deal on flat-panel LCD monitors through a contact we have. :D

http://www.thecarlab.com/pccomparison.html

Look at getting lots of hard drive space. You'll know yourself how much you'll need, although it may be nice to keep projects kicking around if clients need revisions done.

Some sort of backup system would be good too, although I don't know of any particular cheap (in terms of time+money) ways to backup/archive your projects.

If you get something like a Dell, expansion is limited so get the biggest hard drives you can (500GB I think). Once you run out of internal space, that's it. The configuration page will show you the maximum number of drives (look at how many drives you can upgrade to).
You can install these yourself. I'm not sure if it's easy to upgrade the drive the OS is on.

2- RAM: Don't bother with the overclocking or low latency RAM, it doesn't make any difference at all for video editing. The cheapest generic RAM available may be slightly more prone to be dead on arrival though.

3- Video card: I would avoid the mid-high end of the gaming line cards (the geforces and radeons), you are probably better off with a cheap video card of a workstation card (fire, quadro lines).

4- Sound card: There are better choices than an Audigy2 in my opinion. Look at cards like the M-audio revolution or better (more inputs, slightly better technical specs, usb/firewire interface so you can put it on a laptop too).

5- Matrox RTX100: There are some good bundle deals on them... computer vendors may not sell those bundle deals. For $1100, you can get the card plus Premiere Pro, AE 6.5 standard (not pro), encore, audition. There's another bundle which gives AE6.5 pro and Photoshop too, about $2000.

Also really check the compatibility of the Matrox with your motherboard and its chipset. I don't think any of the AMD motherboards are compatible, so you can't go AMD.

6- Stock cooling is fine, unless you want to overclocking (which is involved, and you risk instability).

Thanks for the tips, Glenn.

I went light on hard drive space because we currently own two 400GB Seagate External Hard Drives. When that 200GB drive I put on my systems gets added in, that's a full Terabyte of hard drive space. That seems like more than enough.

What's the deal with the video cards? Why would a more powerful graphics card be worse? The other problem I am seeing is that the lower-end graphics cards don't have dual-DVI outputs for two monitors. Can you recommend me another one?

The Matrox RT.X100 in those packages include the software bundle as well, that's why it's so much. The card alone is about $700 or so. You could also be right about AMD compatibility. However, as I chose parts for my computer on the site, it took away incompatible hardware options. Maybe the software doesn't take the matrox cards into account.

If you want a custom computer from guys that build such, try http://www.monarchcomputer.com Their prices are good for workstation class machines.

Another option in audio is the Audigy 4. It has a better S/N ratio than the 2 and close to the M-Audios.

A bit of a biased but worthwhile consideration when considering ANY computer for a professional video editing workstation is to buy from an authorized, certified integrator (Puget and Monarch are not). The reason being the most important thing this computer will be doing is Post Production, and if your integrator doesn't know what they are talking about for that specific purpose, your most important support aspect is lost.

I invite you to take a look at our systems.

The Matrox hardware is NOT NOT NOT compatible with AMD. Glenn and eeryone else, just so you know the AE Pro + Photoshop bundle is not available anymore.

As far as your questions about the video cards, my suggestion always is to match it with your software's recommendations. In this case, all Adobe software is just fine with or without a Quadro or FireGL card. Workstation class cards, however, can sometimes give you some useful features, like triple-head parhelia, or HD-output Quadro 540 Pro.

What's the deal with the video cards? Why would a more powerful graphics card be worse? The other problem I am seeing is that the lower-end graphics cards don't have dual-DVI outputs for two monitors. Can you recommend me another one?
If your video card performance matters (I don't think it does for Premiere Pro), then it's probably going to be a program that uses openGL acceleration. I would check the recommended specs for the program in question... 3dxmax and After Effects presumably benefit from openGL acceleration, which will speed up the previews a bit (but not the renders??). I don't use either program so I can't help you much there.

A bit of a biased but worthwhile consideration when considering ANY computer for a professional video editing workstation is to buy from an authorized, certified integrator (Puget and Monarch are not). The reason being the most important thing this computer will be doing is Post Production, and if your integrator doesn't know what they are talking about for that specific purpose, your most important support aspect is lost.

I invite you to take a look at our systems.

The Matrox hardware is NOT NOT NOT compatible with AMD. Glenn and eeryone else, just so you know the AE Pro + Photoshop bundle is not available anymore.

As far as your questions about the video cards, my suggestion always is to match it with your software's recommendations. In this case, all Adobe software is just fine with or without a Quadro or FireGL card. Workstation class cards, however, can sometimes give you some useful features, like triple-head parhelia, or HD-output Quadro 540 Pro.

Thanks Edward. I took a look at your site, but I just felt that I couldn't customize things as much as I'd like to. I'm also not sure what you mean about Puget and Monarch not being "authorized, certified integrators." I have a feeling at least Puget has some knowledge about video editing systems, considering there is a "Video Editing Workstation" category in the custom build section. Either way, customer support is not really a big thing for me. I consider myself a serious power user, and I've rarely ever needed to call customer support for any computer I've owned.

Thanks for the solid statement on AMD and Matrox compatibility. Point taken. Guess I'm going Intel, because I really like the features of the Matrox cards.

If your video card performance matters (I don't think it does for Premiere Pro), then it's probably going to be a program that uses openGL acceleration. I would check the recommended specs for the program in question... 3dxmax and After Effects presumably benefit from openGL acceleration, which will speed up the previews a bit (but not the renders??). I don't use either program so I can't help you much there.

I think I will need to use a good amount of openGL acceleration. 3Dsmax and AE both use this, as you mentioned, and I will definitely be using both. Probably not as much as I use Premiere or Photoshop, but they are still important considerations for the system.

Either way, customer support is not really a big thing for me.

That's something I don't think I've ever heard before! First time for everything I guess.

A word about the video cards - Non-workstation cards do have OpenGL acceleration. You'll need to look at specific, newer video cards, mind you, but the days are gone where workstation cards were necessary for OpenGL work. Again, look specifically at what software you are going to use, and the recommendations for that software. It will tell you.

Your best bet is to always follow, as closely as you can, the hardware recommendations by the manufacturer of the software you are likely to use. If you want to cover yourself really well, look at Avid, Premiere Pro and Vegas and their hardware recommendations. Try to find where they overlap and stick with those parts.

I worked for 3 years for one of the bigger midwest "Integrators" of Avid, FCP and now Matrox Axio lines. They stick with certified boxes from HP for Avid, G5 recommendations from Apple for FCP and the Axio is a prebuilt setup.

Personally, I have been a certified Avid editor and a Premiere editor since the analog days with a FAST Multimedia card and version 4.2 of Premiere. I can tell you this, while Intel is more compatible, I have never had a CPU related issue and I have always run AMD when I can.

My current laptop is an HP Pavillion with AMD 64 bit 3.4GHz CPU, 768Meg of RAM, 80GB HD AND - the biggest helper, an nVidia card. Always always always go with nVidia for Open GL if you are going Avid. ATI had a few cards that used to be good but Avid is recommending nVidia these days.

My home built system, showing it's age now, is a Shuttle SN41G (mini) style case with an AMD XP 2500+ , 1GB RAM and onboard dual VGA output nVidia card. Still running Xpress Pro 4.6 on that one but the laptop is working well with Xpress Pro HD.

I have cut docs over an hour long, commercials, politicals, internal communications pieces and industrials on these and they have always done well.

HP and Avid will soon (if the scuttlebut is accurate) confirm the new xw9300 dual AMD for Avid soon.

3Ds runs well on the laptop here as well. I was big into 3Ds a few years back and even bought a Diamond FireGl for the OGL accelleration. Times have changed a bit. If you want to be out in the front trenches, look at the new PCI Express stuff from nVidia. There is a system now where you can double up the cards and get extra acceleration by slaving them together. One card then uses both GPUs. Interesting stuff. PCI Express is on the way in and will be the next big thing since AGP.

Glen, drop me a line sometime. I'm interested in the BIOS flashing for the nVidia card trick. Which cards go with what BIOS, etc. I hadn't heard this one before.

My 2 cents.

Sean McHenry

Alright, so I've taken into account the comments everyone has offered (much appreciated), and I've revised my list of potential systems. There are still eight options covering many different prices. The first six are machine built on intervals of $500 starting with $3000 and going to $5500. One of these is most likely the one I will end up with. The last two are ideal systems. The "Dream System" is my ideal system while trying to still be as reasonable as possible. The "Obscenely Ridiculous System" is exactly how it sounds.... no consideration of price, just pure performance and power. Let me know what you think.

http://www.thecarlab.com/pccomparison.html

The gaming line cards are watered down in terms of openGL acceleration, from what I've heard. That's what workstation cards are for.

I don't have one of those cards so I can't say what the speed improvement is.

2- Sean: There's another fellow on this board who was the one who flashed his card into a Quadro card. I'll see if I can dig up the threads on that.

Is there any way to get an nVidia Quadro card for less than an arm and two legs?

[QUOTE=Glenn Chan]I don't think "cable select" is a wacky thing for Dell to do, and checking the jumper settings on your drives when you install them is a fairly basic thing.[QUOTE]

In case it wasn't clear in my earlier post, my Dell will *only* reliably recognize new internal drives when the jumpers are on Cable Select, rather than on "master" or "slave." That's just silly, and it took me quite a while to figure that out. (Turns out my brother had the same problem and clued me in.) Computers I've built myself work the way I expect them to because they don't have proprietary parts or funky bioses, and if you research Dell's history you'll find they've done some pretty strange stuff. I like my Dell okay when I don't have to fuss with it, but I won't buy from them again for anything other than laptop computers (which I wouldn't fuss with anyway).

Dell tech support is indeed from India and is rather useless unless you have simple, easily defined problems, because all they do is read from their trouble-shooting scripts. It's like calling a med school for help with a health problem and all they do is look up your symptoms in a textbook. And don't ask for help with anything involving parts you didn't buy from Dell, even if the issue is potentially related to something that's their responsibility. They can't offer any real assistance, just textbook stuff.

Dell, phooey. That's all I can say.

Brent: the "obscene" system is pretty far out all right. For that price you could buy two Sony HDV cameras and a Canopus real-time HD/SD editing setup, which would knock the socks off almost anything else you can buy in terms of performance. At the low end of the scale, you can buy or build a decent dual-core computer now for well under $2000, so you don't need to spend $3K for that. But then it really all depends what exactly you want to do and what editing-specific hardware and software you might decide to buy, so you should really figure all that out before you build your computer.

My vote would be for a dual Xeon or dual Opteron system on a workstation motherboard with PCI-X slots, so you can install Canopus Edius NX if you want to do real-time HDV work. Gotta plan ahead for these sorts of things...

The gaming line cards are watered down in terms of openGL acceleration, from what I've heard. That's what workstation cards are for.

I don't have one of those cards so I can't say what the speed improvement is.

2- Sean: There's another fellow on this board who was the one who flashed his card into a Quadro card. I'll see if I can dig up the threads on that.


This is a misconception. The cards are the same hardware and the newest GeForce cards are 100% OpenGL compliant. A discussion of this nature though doesn't seem to belong right here and would be extremely extensive. Since you don't have a workstation card to compare with, and this isn't a 3D board, I won't go into it.

Also, a Geforce-Quadro conversion is done my modifying the drivers - not by doing anything with the BIOS. At least not with any current hardware. It's an extensive process.

This is a misconception. The cards are the same hardware and the newest GeForce cards are 100% OpenGL compliant.

This is good to hear, since I really hadn't planned on spending over $1000 on a Quadro video card.

In case it wasn't clear in my earlier post, my Dell will *only* reliably recognize new internal drives when the jumpers are on Cable Select, rather than on "master" or "slave." [...]
Dell tech support is indeed from India and is rather useless unless you have simple, easily defined problems, because all they do is read from their trouble-shooting scripts.
Kevin, that is indeed wacky.
As far as tech support goes, not all of Dell's support is in India. Their business customers, especially ones with big contracts, will get North American-based support. I'm not sure where Dell small business goes. Dell Home is probably all India.

My annecdotal evidence: My high school fell under a university contract with Dell, and the IT manager/guy for my high school was very satisfied with their support (they send on-site techs for repairs after phone troubleshooting [you may be able to go through their script really quickly]).

I don't like Dell too much personally but they can be cheaper than a do-it-yourself machine, and that's not counting your time spending building + researching your computer. To me it's tempting...

This is a misconception. The cards are the same hardware and the newest GeForce cards are 100% OpenGL compliant.
I never said they weren't OpenGL compliant. I said that the gaming cards are crippled at openGL performance.

Some programs have recommended specs that recommend quadro/fire cards over geforce/quadros... if you fall under that category, it may be better to buy a quadro/fire card than the equivalently-priced geforce/radeon. Or it may be that some of the geforces/radeons are faster, I don't know.

Well none of the programs I need to run mention one type of card over another, so I guess it really won't matter all that much.

The "supported openGL cards" section of the Adobe After Effects system requirements even bundles GeForce and Quadro into the same group. Go figure.

http://www.adobe.com/products/aftereffects/opengl.html

gaming cards are crippled at openGL performance.


There was a legitimate question in the post concerning Quadro vs. Geforce and OpenGL performance. Your blanket statement is simply not true - maybe you can clarify so that the information can be more specifically applied to a certain situation.

In the case of modern video cards, the difference between workstation and mainstream cards lies in the software/driver R&D. For example, in 3ds Max, certain functions cannot be offloaded onto the GPU unless you have a workstation-class card. Not because of any performance or crippling to OpenGL, but simply because that function is omitted in the driver set of a mainstream card so that only workstation customers will pay for and benefit from that functionality.

A blanket statement I CAN MAKE is that consulting a software developer's recommendations will let you know exactly what you'll need to look for. Those people have already done the work developing compatibility with hardware. All you have to do is look.

Sean: http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=46087 is one thread that talks about modding the 6600 into the quadro version of the card. There's a risk the mod won't work (it's not supposed to).