4K video editing machine (on a budget)

[sleepyhead]

TL;DR: Need help building a video editing machine on a budget

Been a long time since I frequented this place. I have been away from PCs for a long time, and spent a lot of my time on photography.

With the imminent release of the Sony a6300 this has 3840x2160 24/30fps video recording capability, and I'm looking towards being able to edit this video footage. My current solution is a Sony VAIO Z23, and this is fine for 1920x1080 60fps video (just about), but will not be able to do anything with 4K content. I don't know what's best for a machine to process 4K, so I'd like to get some advice on what parts I should look for.

Right now, I have the following items on my shopping list:

• i7 6700 (k or non-k version, it's not a big issue for me), with a Corsair H100i cooler
• Asus Z170 (not sure which specific model)
• 32GB Corsair Vengeance (CMK32GX4M2A2666C16)
• Elsa GTX 980 ti
• Seasonic 650 watt PSU (SS-650KM3S)

The difficult part comes with storage and storage setup. I'm not sure what is the most appropriate. I've been looking at the Intel 730 SSD as well as the 750, but the 750 is beyond my budget.

Now, I know most of you will want to know my budget, however I live and work in Japan, so price conversion and product availability is a little different. Hopefully, I'd like to spend around ¥200,000 to ¥250,000 or less!

Any advice would be highly welcome. There is no time frame for this, as I'll be getting the camera first and using my friend's machine to process and render videos for the time being.

[kompukare]

Quick though: seems to me that your budget is spending far to much on the GPU and getting poor value on the Skylake CPU. Seems a more modest video card and a 6 or 8 core Haswell-E (or wait for Broadwell-E) would make far more sense, unless...

- Not sure if Skylake has any dedicated encoding hardware for 4K (h265 etc.). And if it does, would the encoding be good enough for you? Because if not, Haswell-E's CPU performance would be a major advantage for encoding.
- Unsure if your work is GPU accelerated and even if it, does a 980Ti make sense?

Storage should probably be a major part of your budget: a work SSD and for video work a PCIe / NVME one could be justified, plus one or more HDD for storage.

[scaryjim]

Key questions are probably what software you'll be using for the edit and what types of edits you'll be making. That'll determine where you'll need most oomph in a new machine to best accelerate your workload, and also whether one GPU vendor or the other has better support for your software.

Secondly, is this purely a video editing machine or will it be used for gaming/general computing as well? What's the most important factor in that decision?

Thirdly, who are your preferred suppliers for hardware in Japan? Or will you plan to order from outside Japan and have stuff shipped in (in which case taxes and import duty are a factor)?

[sleepyhead]

Quick though: seems to me that your budget is spending far to much on the GPU and getting poor value on the Skylake CPU. Seems a more modest video card and a 6 or 8 core Haswell-E (or wait for Broadwell-E) would make far more sense, unless...

- Not sure if Skylake has any dedicated encoding hardware for 4K (h265 etc.). And if it does, would the encoding be good enough for you? Because if not, Haswell-E's CPU performance would be a major advantage for encoding.
- Unsure if your work is GPU accelerated and even if it, does a 980Ti make sense?

Storage should probably be a major part of your budget: a work SSD and for video work a PCIe / NVME one could be justified, plus one or more HDD for storage.

I'm pretty sure XAVC-S uses the h.264 codec, so having more than 4 cores is not beneficial. At least that I seemed to understand from what I read. Also, the GPU should have a large influence in terms of effects and playback, but rendering is more CPU based, hence my initial selection. I am unfamiliar with modern CPUs and GPUs, so any input is greatly appreciated.

Also, suggestions for storage size, make/model would be fantastic.

As of now, I'm thinking of a 240gb Intel 730 for OS, 400gb Intel 750 for the editing software to use and a 3TB WD.

Key questions are probably what software you'll be using for the edit and what types of edits you'll be making. That'll determine where you'll need most oomph in a new machine to best accelerate your workload, and also whether one GPU vendor or the other has better support for your software.

Secondly, is this purely a video editing machine or will it be used for gaming/general computing as well? What's the most important factor in that decision?

Thirdly, who are your preferred suppliers for hardware in Japan? Or will you plan to order from outside Japan and have stuff shipped in (in which case taxes and import duty are a factor)?

Software wise, I'll most likely get Adobe Premiere CC, and I think I read somewhere that Adobe doesn't take advantage of "Quick Sync Video", a feature on Skylake CPUs. Of course I could have things muddled due to the sheer volume of reading I've done the past few days.
The machine will primarily be for editing and, if I can make it, a simple media machine outputting to a TV.
Supplier wise, it's mostly Sofmap and Yodobashi Camera, with smaller shops in Den-Den Town (kind of like Akihabara) for any specialist parts.

P.S. posting from my phone, so apologies for formatting.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Dude think you are massively overdoing things - this is not 4K to the level of really high end systems.

Anyway the i7 5820 is faster:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/skylak...w-33276-7.html

I would also be not assuming an Nvidia card is the best option - if any of the software uses OpenCL Nvidia is relatively slow compared to AMD.

Edit!!

Not sure if serious - I said you had a £20000+ budget!

[kalniel]

Not sure if serious - I said you had a £20000+ budget!

Nope, more like £1240 to £1550.

[sleepyhead]

Dude think you are massively overdoing things - this is not 4K to the level of really high end systems.

Anyway the i7 5820 is faster:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/skylak...w-33276-7.html

I would also be not assuming an Nvidia card is the best option - if any of the software uses OpenCL Nvidia is relatively slow compared to AMD.

Edit!!

Not sure if serious - I said you had a £20000+ budget!

How do you think I am massively overdoing things? Not being facetious here, but explain it like you would a child. The last time I dipped my toes into computing was over 7 years ago, and that was for gaming. Video editing and rendering is a whole new ball park to me.

I do see that the i5820 is faster for multi-threaded applications, but slower for single threaded performance. As I mentioned before, the XAVC-S format uses h.264, which is linear. Again, what impact CPU choice (i6700 vs i5820) has when using Adobe Premiere handling XAVC-S I have no idea.

As a side note, the i5820 costs an additional 33% over the 6700K here.

[Kumagoro]

I use Kakaku to find a cheap supplier online http://s.kakaku.com/

[peterb]

Been a long time since I frequented this place. I have been away from PCs for a long time, and spent a lot of my time on photography.

Too long . Welcome back!

Have you looked at the Adobe site for their recommendations? It's a bit out of date as they don't mention Windows 10 as the core operating system, but it does give you an idea of the sort of level you should be looking at.

If you have the budget, you might want to look at some of the Mac products, Final Cut Pro is a good video editor, and buying a Mac takes all the work out of wondering what will work best with what as a lot of that optimisation work has been done for you.

You may not get the absolute best performance, and it may cost a bit more in terms of yen, but it will save you a lot of time and hassle and allow you to concentrate on your artwork rather than on the computer, which is just a tool, or a means to an end.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

How do you think I am massively overdoing things? Not being facetious here, but explain it like you would a child. The last time I dipped my toes into computing was over 7 years ago, and that was for gaming. Video editing and rendering is a whole new ball park to me.

I do see that the i5820 is faster for multi-threaded applications, but slower for single threaded performance. As I mentioned before, the XAVC-S format uses h.264, which is linear. Again, what impact CPU choice (i6700 vs i5820) has when using Adobe Premiere handling XAVC-S I have no idea.

As a side note, the i5820 costs an additional 33% over the 6700K here.

Because single threaded performance has never been the most important aspect for video encoding - it's one of the tasks which tends to be easily parallelisable and you need to plan a bit ahead in case there are changes to the codecs used.

Even then you need to ask yourself how much video stuff will you be doing and what type of file sizes will you be working with?


How much is your time pressure to do stuff?

Will you be happy to leave stuff going on overnight or need stuff as quick as possible?

You might even find slightly older gear might do the job fine but at a lower outlay,or even a "only" a Core i5.