Tough Questions About Windows Workstations and Canon H.264 Editing Performance

[Harm Millaard]

The extra cost for a i7-2600K or even the newest i7-2700K over an i3-2120 is less than 10% of the system cost. You need the same mobo, memory, cooler, PSU, video card, case, disks, monitor, etc. But you get a system that is at least 6 times faster for less than 10% more and with the same complexity of buildiing it. I consider that extra cost a no-brainer and worth every penny.

If you have all the time in the world, never under time pressure and never use multicam, then I agree that the i3 may work, only it is so slooowww. If you can't afford that extra cost, why are people then using such an expensive software program like Premiere Pro? They would be better off with PE and save money, to be used for a better system.

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Harm Millaard

The extra cost for a i7-2600K or even the newest i7-2700K over an i3-2120 is less than 10% of the system cost. You need the same mobo, memory, cooler, PSU, video card, case, disks, monitor, etc. But you get a system that is at least 6 times faster for less than 10% more and with the same complexity of buildiing it. I consider that extra cost a no-brainer and worth every penny.

If you have all the time in the world, never under time pressure and never use multicam, then I agree that the i3 may work, only it is so slooowww. If you can't afford that extra cost, why are people then using such an expensive software program like Premiere Pro? They would be better off with PE and save money, to be used for a better system.

Very true (based on what I submitted to the PPBM5 site). An i3 is barely sufficient for single-layer AVCHD editing. In fact, an i3-2100 with 4GB of RAM is still well over two times slower than a stock-speed i7-2600K with 8GB of RAM (again, based on the systems that I submitted - and in the Relative Performance Index (RPI), not just the total benchmark time). Plus, one can overclock the i7-2600K or i7-2700K substantially (assuming that he has a CPU cooler that can handle the job) while the i3 can't be overclocked much (if at all).

As for using an i3 with just the integrated graphics and CS5.x, fuggedaboutit. That system, though far from the slowest in the world, is still significantly slower than what we'd consider a comfortable minimum (as opposed to the absolute minimum) needed to run CS5.x properly.

As such, I'd recommend buying cheap on the CPU only if one is sure that he'll never do anything heavy-duty (as far as video editing is concerned) for the foreseeable future.

[Ed Przyzycki]

You have to understand exactly what you want your entire workflow to be (i.e. Your Business Needs), and all the components in that workflow, the workstation being just one component.

You (or it seems just about anyone these days) can spend <1k on a Canon T3i, and then suffer the cost of a 4-10k on a workstation to handle editing in that format.

Or, you can spend <6k on a Sony EX1 camera (more expensive) and 2-3k on a laptop (less expensive) editing in XDCAM, for example.

For my needs, I don't have to consider supporting a multitude of acquired formats during the edit (that's not my core business- I shoot and edit my own stuff) - so I went with a workstation that doesn't require alot of horsepower on the editing side. I chose to spend more on the camera side, and adding something like a nanoFlash allows me to support a lot of compression methods if I want to "hand off" my work.

Obviously, you can spend a lot on a workstation, and a lot of threads here suggest you "need to". You might. You might not. It depends.

The benchmark site is a great place to start. But it doesn't tell the whole story of what YOUR needs are. I almost bought a 7-10k system because I thought "I HAVE to spend this to get Premiere to work right".

Premiere hasn't crashed once for me, I do multilayer, albeit in a different timeline format, and love every minute of it, and all my savings.

[Kawika Ohumukini]

I get your point but I see no downside to having a screaming computer. I've got a few and I'd rather use my fast ones. The prices are right, not sure where you got $4-10K (Macs?), so I'd rather error on the side of too fast. Cheers

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Ed Przyzycki

You have to understand exactly what you want your entire workflow to be (i.e. Your Business Needs), and all the components in that workflow, the workstation being just one component.

You (or it seems just about anyone these days) can spend <1k on a Canon T3i, and then suffer the cost of a 4-10k on a workstation to handle editing in that format.

Or, you can spend <6k on a Sony EX1 camera (more expensive) and 2-3k on a laptop (less expensive) editing in XDCAM, for example.

For my needs, I don't have to consider supporting a multitude of acquired formats during the edit (that's not my core business- I shoot and edit my own stuff) - so I went with a workstation that doesn't require alot of horsepower on the editing side. I chose to spend more on the camera side, and adding something like a nanoFlash allows me to support a lot of compression methods if I want to "hand off" my work.

Obviously, you can spend a lot on a workstation, and a lot of threads here suggest you "need to". You might. You might not. It depends.

Actually, you do need to spend (relatively speaking) a lot of money on both the system and the disks if you're going to do anything HD. There is simply no free lunch: Either you spend cheap on the CPU and RAM but an astronomical amount of money on the disk subsystem (because any format that doesn't take much CPU horsepower will require an extreme amount of disk bandwidth), or you spend a lot of money on the CPU and RAM but cheap out on the disks (because formats that doesn't require much bandwidth requires an astronomically expensive and extremely fast CPU) - and there is absolutely no happy medium in between whatsoever (or that anything that's in between often gives you the worst of both worlds). However, please note that what I stated in this paragraph assumes that the user will be working with an extremely wide array of formats that he receives to work on. If the user is going to be working primarily on compressed formats such as AVCHD, then more money should be spent on the CPU and RAM but not so much money on the disks. If on the other hand the user's workflow consists primarily of uncompressed or very high bandwidth HD videos, then more money needs to be spent on the disks but not so much on the CPU. And the only formats that are not so dependent on the total cost of a system are those that deliver relatively poor quality-to-file-size ratios, such as DV or HDV (the image quality of DV or HDV is often worse than formats with lower bandwidth, even at higher bandwidth).

And yes, I did attempt to edit using a relatively inexpensive laptop. It simply can't do anything above low-definition 320x240 videos at all because the CPU is too weak to handle compressed formats and the hard drive subsystem is way too slow to handle anything higher than extremely low-bandwidth ultra-compressed content. Worse, playback of MP3s and audio files is extremely choppy and utterly unlistenable on that laptop. In other words, I actually got the worst of both worlds with that laptop.

[James Kuhn]

Nick...I don't know what your 'pain threshold' is for cost, but here are the latest DIY system prices from VideoGuys:

Sandy Bridge - $1,485.00

DIY 8 Budget - $1,415.00

DIY 8 Hot Rod - $2,541.00

The configurations have been built and tested by VideoGuys and they work.

Videoguys.com 800 323-2325 we are the video editing and production experts

JMHO, YMMV.

J.

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by James Kuhn

Nick...I don't know what your 'pain threshold' is for cost, but here are the latest DIY system prices from VideoGuys:

Sandy Bridge - $1,485.00

DIY 8 Budget - $1,415.00

DIY 8 Hot Rod - $2,541.00

The configurations have been built and tested by VideoGuys and they work.

Videoguys.com 800 323-2325 we are the video editing and production experts

JMHO, YMMV.

J.

Keep in mind that they are only the core components of the recommended builds. Most higher-end editing packages require more disks than what's in the base configurations. As such, Videoguys recommends additional disks in RAID.

[James Kuhn]

Randall...yes, I have a 'stand alone' G-RAID, 2TB 0-RAID (~80 hrs AVCHD storage) sitting on my desk. So, you would need to increase your costs another $250.00. This is the 'cost' of working with, and storing HD video. I was having an email conversation with a working video professional, he informed me 'currently' he has 25TB of archived storage video clips on various 'disc' technology requiring he 'spin them up' once a month. This something we all need to consider in or 'work-flow' solutions. I am looking into a 'service' like Amazon Simple Storage Solutions. 'Storage', no matter what you do, unless you format your 'storage media' every time you use it.

Regards,

J.

[Kawika Ohumukini]

Good points all. Lots of experience here. I'd just say, do not skimp on RAM. I've killed HDs with swapping gone horribly bad. Get the fastest and largest amount you can afford and watch the HD light like a hawk. If it starts swapping a lot, or even a little, time to go shopping for more memory. Cheers.

[James Kuhn]

Corsair 12Gig Matched RAM.

J.

[Bart Walczak]

VideoGuys specs are very good. Only on the SandyBridge platform I would suggest using a Z68 motherboard with nForce200 chipset to overcome the problems with limited PCIe bandwidth. ASRock Z68 Extreme7 would be an interesting choice here. It's a recent product, I bet they weren't able to test it yet.

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Bart Walczak

VideoGuys specs are very good. Only on the SandyBridge platform I would suggest using a Z68 motherboard with nForce200 chipset to overcome the problems with limited PCIe bandwidth. ASRock Z68 Extreme7 would be an interesting choice here. It's a recent product, I bet they weren't able to test it yet.

Actually, I can't say that it's a good value at all: That ASRock motherboard actually costs significantly more money than the Asus X58 motherboard that's recommended by Videoguys for the other two builds. And it would not have completely solved the LGA 1155 platform's PCI-e bandwidth limitation because it actually converts 16 full-duplex PCI-e lanes into 32 half-duplex PCI-e lanes; thus, the total PCI-e bandwidth would be no higher with the NF200 chip than without.

[Bart Walczak]

Originally Posted by Randall Leong

it actually converts 16 full-duplex PCI-e lanes into 32 half-duplex PCI-e lanes; thus, the total PCI-e bandwidth would be no higher with the NF200 chip than without.

Ah, I didn't know that, and have fallen prey to the marketing machine again. Thanks for the correction, Randall.