Video Editing Build

[manchurio]

Hi Guys,

I've seen some posts about video editing build. But would like to get some extra advice.

I use Adobe premier pro and after effects for video editing. Mainly HD DLSR videos. A lot of rendering and stuff. So I need a very solid pro-video editing PC.
Currently running on: Intel i5 2500k, Gigabyte Z68ap D3 mother board, 4g Ram, nvida geforce gtx560 ti, 250 G hard drive and another 1tb hard drive.

The system I am currently using is very slow for rendering videos:_( so please help.

Can you guys list some spec for me for a new build? I've got a budget of £1500-2000. Thanks very much!

[Biscuit]

I don't think your CPU and mobo are an issue. Perhaps look at getting more ram, a new GPU and a big SSD to use as a scratch disk.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Some graphs from TH and Xbitlabs:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/images/cpu/c...0/premiere.png
http://media.bestofmicro.com/J/8/386...emiere-pro.png




Yes there is an improvement,but even it appears even a quad core Core i7 is not much slower than a six core one,indicating that PP only really makes use of 4 to 8 threads effectively.

It appears PP does use OpenCL for certain tasks too:

http://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/...uirements.html
http://community.amd.com/community/a...tion-in-action

ATM,realworld OpenCL benchmarks seem to favour the AMD cards,although Maxwell has made improvements in this area.

Outside of that,I would try to have a decent amount of RAM in the system and also make sure you have a fast disk subsystem.

[manchurio]

I don't think your CPU and mobo are an issue. Perhaps look at getting more ram, a new GPU and a big SSD to use as a scratch disk.

Thanks so much for that. I guess that's an option. Will have to find out what GPU and SSD are compatible with the current system... daunting ;-(

[manchurio]

Thanks for that. But I don't really understand... Does this mean I should change to i7?

[Agent]

An i7 would speed things up - but you need to keep in mind that video rendering is a slow process, certainly if you want quality.

Look at the difference between the i5 and i7 - is that difference worth the cash to you? are you in a situation where you could use lower quality settings? (some changes can alter the video quality very little, but speed up things a lot!)
The first point of call for rendering speed is always your configuration. Can you batch them overnight? would that make things easier?

I do a lot of video rendering, but I just make sure my workflow means that video rendering is happening in my productive downtime (like sleeping).

[MrComputerSaint]

I'd get a large SSD (Solid State) and some more RAM. I would say go to 8GB at the least, probably 16GB would be better.

I do video editing on a AMD quad core CPU and it's OK, but I'd like some faster RAM and a large SSD like this... 1TB 840 Evo http://www.cclonline.com/product/119...afPVsBhjbRkxFg

To find out the RAM suitable for your motherboard, get onto the Gigbyte website, look up your motherboard and find the compatible RAM list, then search for some of the faster RAM on google, find out prices and then that should get you on your way.

I'd probably do those upgrades one at a time and then if the speed is good for you, save the money going to i7. If it's not good then get an i7.

Although, if your hard drives are Sata 2 or Sata 3 then make sure you have the plugged into the SATA 2 or SATA 3 ports on the motherboard, otherwise they'll be running at Sata 1.

[Agent]

I'd get a large SSD (Solid State) and some more RAM. I would say go to 8GB at the least, probably 16GB would be better.....

Although, if your hard drives are Sata 2 or Sata 3 then make sure you have the plugged into the SATA 2 or SATA 3 ports on the motherboard, otherwise they'll be running at Sata 1.

Hard disks are rarely the bottleneck. You'd need to be editing some very low quality footage for you to be bottlenecked by even a SATA1 spindle drive.
Faster ones are useful for scratching, but the OP says this is a rendering issue.

[Biscuit]

Thanks so much for that. I guess that's an option. Will have to find out what GPU and SSD are compatible with the current system... daunting ;-(

Shouldn't be too daunting at all, this is the memory list for the hardware v1.0 of that motherboard:

http://download.gigabyte.eu/FileList...a-z68ap-d3.pdf

Here is the CPU support list:

http://www.gigabyte.com/support-down....aspx?pid=3897

Any modern GPU will be compatible with the motherboard, you just need to make sure the cost per benefit to you is weighed up. You also need to do some research on enabling the acceleration in your applications, as its sometimes not supported out of the box, you need to do a little, 'hack'.

[shaithis]

TBH, I doubt any desktop CPU upgrade is going to give you any major differences worthy of the outlay.

You will probably want to look at the workstation chips (like the i7 5820K and upwards!) and X99 motherboards if you want a significant boost.

[kompukare]

While all the suggestions so far are very sensible, I would approach this differently.

Learn to use the monitoring tools (Task Manager or better yet Process Explorer , plus the similar disk usage monitoring tools also by System Internals).

That way you can get an idea where your current bottleneck is. While upgrading to a HB-E platform with lots of RAM and SSDs is nice and would probably work, it is always better to make an informed decision. So if your workset is bottlenecked by CPU or RAM only upgrade those, whereas if your bottleneck is the disk or something which uses GPU render, upgrade those.

That way you don't end up some silly mistake like this one guy making HD wedding video whose system I saw. He had a computer built for him by some gamer: expensive motherboard, separate RAID controller card, a few harddisks etc. But all the harddisks were running in normal mode without any RAID and they way he rendered his videos it did look like there was a disk bottleneck. So it looked to me like someone had looked at a shopping list of how to build a video editing system. Or (this guy was a bit tight with money), he had found a video editing build spec-list and had gotten the parts via this gamer friend who did not know what they were doing.

Point being: the one thing worse than getting the wrong parts is spending the money for the correct parts and then not utilising them.

[Barakka]

Just to check, you have got "Mercury Playback GPU Acceleration" selected as your renderer in Premiere ?

[Pob255]

Kompukare makes a very good point, looking into thing that could well be holding the current system up is the first thing to do rather than throwing money and hardware at the problem.

Although sometimes things like task manager/process explorer will not show up bottle necks, eg here at work we've had some major issues when clearing out old windows 7 user profiles, delete 10gb of data could take 30min, at the same time there's no major ram, hard drive or cpu access going on, turned out to be the anti-virus software causing the issue, it's trying to scan all the data before deletion while using minimal resources, but because of this it runs really slowly.
Giving it as an excellent example of a software bottle neck while no hardware bottleneck exists.

Unfortunately software bottlenecks can be a pain to diagnose and require a good amount of testing and troubleshooting to find out what's causing issues.
However it could also be that there's no issue, as other have said video encoding is a time consuming process, what you're encoding and how you're encoding it has a major impact on how long it will take.

Hard disks are rarely the bottleneck. You'd need to be editing some very low quality footage for you to be bottlenecked by even a SATA1 spindle drive.
Faster ones are useful for scratching, but the OP says this is a rendering issue.

Actually SATA1 can be a big bottleneck, however we're talking about far older tech here (back to first gen sata1 motherboards)
Also any sata2 device on a sata3 controller or sata3 device on a sata2 controller will run at the sata2 speed not sata1 speed, the only way way you'd drop down to sata1 speed is if the controller or device was sata1

[manchurio]

wow, thanks so much for the great advice guys! so helpful.. definitely helped me to save a lot of cash. Will go and get some testing software first then decide what to replace.

[manchurio]

Just to check, you have got "Mercury Playback GPU Acceleration" selected as your renderer in Premiere ?

Oh yes, I tried to do that by adding my video card to the sniff thing. But didn't work. :-(

[manchurio]

Great Idea, thanks I will try testing first.

While all the suggestions so far are very sensible, I would approach this differently.

Learn to use the monitoring tools (Task Manager or better yet Process Explorer , plus the similar disk usage monitoring tools also by System Internals).

That way you can get an idea where your current bottleneck is. While upgrading to a HB-E platform with lots of RAM and SSDs is nice and would probably work, it is always better to make an informed decision. So if your workset is bottlenecked by CPU or RAM only upgrade those, whereas if your bottleneck is the disk or something which uses GPU render, upgrade those.

That way you don't end up some silly mistake like this one guy making HD wedding video whose system I saw. He had a computer built for him by some gamer: expensive motherboard, separate RAID controller card, a few harddisks etc. But all the harddisks were running in normal mode without any RAID and they way he rendered his videos it did look like there was a disk bottleneck. So it looked to me like someone had looked at a shopping list of how to build a video editing system. Or (this guy was a bit tight with money), he had found a video editing build spec-list and had gotten the parts via this gamer friend who did not know what they were doing.

Point being: the one thing worse than getting the wrong parts is spending the money for the correct parts and then not utilising them.