New Computer system for Editing

[Silas Barker]

Originally Posted by Roger Gunkel

Hi Silas,

I just googled my processor and found it listed as a quad core, which is interesting as the device manager clearly shows it as 8 cores of 3.40Ghz.

So I just rang my system builder who explained that the i7-6700 is a quad core 8 string processor. Apparently this is a development that is described as 4 extra 'virtual cores', which the system sees as 8 cores enabling 8 processes to be run simultaneously. This would help with video editing particularly when rendering clips that have several effects such as stabilisation, colour balancing, leveling etc all at the same time.

So apologies for describing it as a eight core when in fact it is 4 cores and 8 strings, all very confusing to me with limited system building experience. I tend to give the work to my local trusted builder now as it works out no more expensive than doing it myself. It might be worth checking to see if the CPU you linked to is an 8 string one.

Roger

Good to know! That looks like a great processor and the price is right! Thanks again for your info!

[Silas Barker]

Originally Posted by Jeff Pulera

AMD processors are not recommended for Premiere, some instruction set is missing or something like that, which gives the Intel i7 a huge performance advantage.

A good *base* system would be the Z170-based motherboard with the Core i7-6700 that Roger mentioned. 16GB min. RAM, but prices are pretty low right now so just go for 32GB if you can - nice when you have multiple Adobe apps open at once, or doing any After Effects work. For graphics, the GTX 1060 or 1070 would be great. SSD boot drive, and internal or external RAID array for video storage.

Thanks

Jeff,
I have noticed that the Video cards (1060 specifically) and the motherboards (Z-170's) have different variations. Not knowing too much about the different specs and models, do you have any advice on what models to get?

For an example, there is a 3GB and a 6GB GTX 1060 Video card. And also differences in 192 bit, etc.

Any advice on specific models? Or links?

Thanks so much!
One thing I would like ( as a side thing) is a (Desktop) motherboard that has a wireless internet solution so that I can connect wirelessly to a hot spot. Not a must, but certainly nice to have.

Thanks!

[Mark Williams]

Not many MBs have wireless. Consider something like this http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16833320074

[Silas Barker]

Great idea! Thanks Mark!

[John Cummings]

I have an older quad core I7 4770K workstation running Adobe CC that was struggling with Sony 4K intra. As an experiment, I kept the motherboard and chip and added an nvidia 1080 video card and switched to all ssds. Now it's very snappy editing with 4K, no issues. Sadly, the hardware upgrades didn't seem to help speed up encoding at all, but since I do mostly shorter length (typically<10 min) videos downscaling to HD, my 5-10 minute encodes aren't all that big of a deal.

I guess my point is an older system with "good bones" might benefit from much faster storage and a blazing fast video card, without the cost of replacing the whole thing.

Specs:
Asus Z87 WS
Intel 4770K lightly overclocked to 4.2ghz
32G ram
MSI 1080 video card w/8g ddr5
Samsung 950 Pro SSD boot drive, project drives
Intel NVMe PCI media drive
Outboard Raid 10 for storage

[Kyle Root]

So Dell released their latest Alienware Laptops around Sept/Oct of this year. I've had my eye on getting a new laptop since I gave mine to my wife for her real estate business (XPS 15) over the summer.

I had pretty much settled on a 15R2 with a GTX980M for around $1800 in the Dell Outlet, New.

Win 10
i76820HK
32GB RAM
1 TB PCIE SSD
1 TB HD
4K screen
GTX980M

Well yesterday, I saw the Dell Outlet got in their first batch of 15R3s and they had several in the new category. I quickly compared specs with a custom one in the main store and discovered I'd be saving about $600 by getting it in the outlet. So I took the plunge last night and bought it for $2029, only a bit more than the other one I was looking at. The new design is sleeker, slimmer, lighter, and the GTX1070 was the deal maker.

Win 10
i76820HK
32GB RAM
512GB PCIE SSD
1 TB HD
4K screen
GTX1070

It will be here tomorrow and I'm pretty excited.

My desktop is 5 years old. I just got a GTX 1070 for it also, but haven't replaced my GTX 560Ti yet because I'm in the middle of a wedding. But hope to have it done this weekend and do the swap out.

[Donald McPherson]

And if it's got a DVD drive you can swap that out for a second ssd.

[Jeff Pulera]

For motherboards, we use ASUS, such as Z170-A or Z170-Pro Gaming.

The way nVidia works with display cards is they invent the new core technology, then license it out to many other vendors that come up with their own designs (cooling methods and such). The actual nVidia drivers will run on any brand of card though.

On the GTX 1060, go for the 6GB vs.3GB. We recommend PNY brand cards (GTX 1060 p/n VCGGTX10606PB). PNY is like the OEM for nVidia - their "Founder's Edition" cards are the reference models. nVidia doesn't actually sell GTX cards themselves, they just design the underlying technology.

Thanks

Jeff

[Wayne Faulkner]

Mmm...I had no problem with 1080P 50fps multi streams using an AMD FX-8320 8 core 3.5GHz, 16GB 1866, with 4x 500GB 7200rpm RAID 10 and a GT750Ti, back in November 2016 running Adobe Premiere Pro.

However, the charity I was working for wanted to continue with 1080P, and after a change of management recently, I left.

I plan a freelance cheap build, using an AMD FX-8370 8 core 4.0GHz, with 32GB 1866, and 4x 500GB SSD RAID 10, and likely a GT1060 or better, haven't decided, this will be for 4k video, not sure which NLE I'll be investing in as yet.

I considered Ryzen, but too rich for me at the moment.

Anyway, the above plan beats my current FX-4300 Quad core, 16GB 1300, single 2GB 7200, and GT710 hands down.

[David Barnett]

Anyone have recommendations on PC builds or new PC's?

My PC is from wayyy back in 2011, it was 8GB but I upgraded to 16GB back in 2014/2015. It's time tho, and upgrading cards, motherboard etc isn't an option. I'd like to have a DVD burner, but I don't know if that's an option much anymore.

Any sites or recommendations on models or custom build sites? Seems alot are geared towards gaming.

[Mark Williams]

You can configure anything you want at avadirect.com. They built 2 systems for me, the newest one for editing 4k, and for under $1,500. I now build my on PCs.

[Luke Miller]

My current PC is a three year old Puget Systems build. They design application specific configurations and mine is configured for Premiere Pro. At the moment they have 4K and 6/8K Premiere Pro editing stations. They are expensive, but the build quality and support is the best I've experienced. All of my recent projects have been 4K multi-camera timelines and, while my system is OK, it could use more processing power. When it comes to processing power and Premiere Pro - too much is almost enough.

[Wayne Faulkner]

Interestingly, I'm actually building two separate Video Editing machines into Rackmount Cases, for mounting into a 6 foot 6 inch 19" Rack Cabinet.:

One is already complete, and will be primarily editing a single video file in either 720P/1080P, after digitising 8mm / Super8 Cine Film (one scanned frame at a time) after cleaning, VHS / VHS-C & Hi8, or transferring older Digital8, miniDV / miniHDV to an NLE.

This is an AMD FX-4300 Quad Core 3.8GHz, 16MB 1600MHz ram, 2GB Nvidia GT710, Gigabyte LMT 78 USB R2 Mobo, 2TB Seagate 7200rpm SATA3, 5.25" Media Dashboard, and 3x IEE1394 to operate a couple of JVC SR VS30 Machines.

This works well, primarily input is Standard Definition unless miniHDV, and the 900 line Cine Film is brought in as an MP4 on SD-Card. Output, depending on the medium, is either 720P or 1080P.

The second machine is still under construction, but may deal with four or five 1080P recordings during an edit (although I suspect it could cope with a lot more), and will likely deal with four or five 4k recordings.

This will be an AMD FX-8370 Eight-Core 4.0GHz, 32GB 1866MHz ram, 4GB Nvidia GTX 1050ti, Gigabyte 970A-DS3P Mobo, 4x 500GB Samsung 860 EVO SATA3 in Bootable RAID 10 managed by an LS MegaRAID 9260-16i PCIE2.0x8 Card, 5.25 Media Dashboard, 2x IEE1394 (because they were lying about)

I've decided it's cheaper to invest in an APC UPS rather than buy a Cache Battery Pack for the LS MegaRAID, that way a power failure shuts down the machine in a controlled manner.

I'll have to let you all know what this is like when I edit five 1080P Video Streams of my Son's Recent Wedding, but I think I've addressed most of the issues.

Video Editing requires 32GB ram, a reasonably fast processor, and unless you're doing post production animations, a middle of the road Video Card, the main concern is data throughput from your storage during editing, and RAID 10, which is RAID 1 + 0 doubles the read and write speeds of SSDs, which in themselves are up to 20x faster than 7200rpm HDDs when used as single drives.

Considering 4k which is 150Mbps, and 1080P which is normally 35Mbps, four streams of 4k would be 600Mbps, a single channel of PCIE2.0 is running at 500MB/s, which can handle more than six 4k streams, although in normal practice throughput is less than 50% of bandwidth, so a single PCIE2.0 channel can handle 3x 4k streams with ease.

The card will have 8x 500MB/s channels, capable of running 24x 4k streams, I'd be proposing to use no more than 4x SATA3 SSDs capable of 550Mbps each, at least initially.

I'm actually considering that a RAID 0 Scratch Disk might not be necessary, and would likely use RAID 5 for Video Archive Storage, using 7200rpm HDDs

Has anyone else considered similar problems?

NB. RAID 0 is two matched disks (normally) and stores and retrieves data by writing part of the file on one disk and the other part on a second disk (or more), the read and write times are doubled, since both disks are actively reading and writing the same file (in parts) at the same time. There is no error correction, if one disk fails you lose all of your data.

RAID 1 is two matched disks (normally) and stores the same data on both disks at the same time, there is no speed advantage in read or write, but should one disk fail you still have all the data on the other disk.

RAID 5 is similar except you have at least three matched disks (or more) and data is stored in such as way, with parity checking, that read and write is improved, but also if one disk fails, although the system goes down, if a blank new matched disk is fitted, the file system can rebuild itself, so no data is lost.

RAID 10 is at least four matched disks (normally), similar to RAID 0 data is shared over two disks to double read and write times, however, each of these disks is also mirrored, so effectively you have two RAID 0's, the second being an exact replica of the other. This means that two disks can fail (one either side of RAID 0) and the system can still run normally, and if hot swapping is enabled, a blank matched disk can be fitted whilst the machine is running, and the disk image rebuilt on the new disk.

So using either RAID 0 or RAID 10 you double the drive read/write performance, and if you are already using SSDs then these will be individually up to 20x quicker than HDDs, double the performance in a RAID 0 or RAID 10 and you're looking at up to 40x faster data storage.

There are faster options, but I'm doing this on a budget.

[Chris Hurd]

What I love about threads like these is that they don't go stale. New builds are *always* a current topic of discussion.

Up until this past weekend I've been quite happy with a 27" late 2012 iMac, 3.4GHz quad-core i7, 32GB RAM + 2GB GeForce GTX 680MX as my pretty much "everything" machine. Then the GPU chipset finally gave way, which means logic board replacement, and the cost to repair is probably not practical (but I'm soooo spoiled on that beautiful IPS 1440 display).

Told myself long ago that I'd never again cobble together a PC but now I'm actually considering it.

Just gotta first figure out if it's gonna be AMD Ryzen or Intel Core. All I know for sure is that the target window is 1440p and that this is probably going to involve an 8GB GPU.

[Alan Craven]

Wayne, modern M2 or U2 NVME drives are faster than even an 8 SSD RAID 3 using a dedicated Areca RAID card - as well as being cheaper. See the two attached Crystal Disk drive speed charts.

I have just replaced my Areca RAID with a 2TB Samsung M2 NVME, and a 3.2 TB Intel U2 NVNE, and my editing with 4K material is much improved.

I accept that file security is reduced, but I have multiple off-system backups of my source files, plus an external backup of my two media drives, just in case!