Building the Right PC Editing Machine?

M

moviemaykr

Active member
Hi guys I need some solid advice from practical editors and not Fanboys. LOL
I'm thinking of building a really good PC with my brother in-law who does this professionally for a living. I'm a film maker and have already done one indie feature film and we shot it on the Canon 5D Mark II a few years ago. We edited the film on FCP with my 2010 27 inch iMac with 2.66 GHz Intel Core i5, 16 GB 1067 MHz DDR3 and ATI Radeon HD 4850 512 MB.
I'm seriously thinking that a DYI PC would be best for me since I'm switching to Adobe Premiere and I also want the ability to upgrade certain things as the years go on. Also I always have free tech support from my brother in-law. LOL
With the new Mac Pro towers out but extremely expensive, I wanted to know if I will be fine building a nice edit machine that is way better than what I have now while still being smart with my money. I want to spend about $1300.
I'm kinda tired of getting a MAC and not being able to upgrade it. Also all the programs I want to use, run just fine on a PC. I have a subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud. I just want advice on build a much better machine than the iMac I currently have but will also last me a few years.
I'm think of getting one of the new AMD processors with 8 cores and a 2GB video card from EVGA series which I heard is the best. Maybe an ASUS Sabertooth motherboard, 250 gb solid state drive, 16gb of ram at first, mid-tower case and a 750 watt power supply and thr rest of the parts needed.
I don't need the latest and greatest but I don't want the cheapest parts either and have to replace them later. What do you guys suggest that will be perfect just for video editing and Photoshop.
 
Plenty of editors build their own machines. If you do it correctly, it's the most cost-effective way to go.

I'd check the requirements for Premiere and solid state drives; there was a time when it wouldn't work.

If that's not an obstacle, you're better off with a smaller SSD for Windows and software, and larger drives to hold your data, instead of one big drive. You don't want everything coming through the same pipe.

While ASUS is a fine choice, at your budget, the Sabertooth (or Rampage) boards are overkill. You are better off putting that money into your CPU.

Premiere benefits from a powerful CUDA graphics card.

Intel has always performed better than AMD for me.
 
Yeah thanks for the advice, I was planning on using G-Raid Drives or just buy a internal 4tb western Digital. I'm wondering if I could buy a internal drive that spins at 10,000 rpm. Also should I buy a Creative Soundblaster card for audio?
 
Yes, there are 10,000 RPM drives. The main thing is that you don't want your video and your software on the same drive.

Gaming sound cards are not what you want for editing. They enhance and clean up sound. You don't want that. You want to hear sound as-is and do all the enhancing and cleaning yourself. You want a professional sound card, and professional, flat sound monitors, not "computer speakers."
 
I err toward Nvidia and EVGA or XFX. CUDA is good thing. I don't think SLi does anything for you for editing.

For good, low-cost sound monitors, try looking at M-Audio.
 
If there was a small probability of using DaVinci Resolve, be sure to look at their recommendations. Might be a good thing to do in any case.
 
If you do build your own machine and use an SSD - make sure you pick a VERY big one because even if you try to install all your programmes on a different drive, some (like a few of the Adobe CC) ones still insist on using the C: drive. My 60GB SSD had 25GB spare after I installed windows 8, and now, without doing very much, I'm down to 5GB. I'm going to have to swap the C: drive to something much bigger - because System restore appears to not be able to shift to a different drive on W8, so I'm on borrowed time until I spend another pile of dose. My first i7 fast system is proving VERY expensive.
 
Thanks Paulears, I was thinking the exact same thing and is why I'm thinking a 250 gb solid state drive will allow for windows 8, Adobe CC and a couple other video programs as well as some room to spare. I will also either edit my projects on external ESata G-Drives or just get an internal 10,000 speed drive. I have seen newer boards with Thunderbolt but not sure how well that works with PCs. I will be excited with the solid state 1tb drives come down in price. I can edit most my projects on one of those then when I'm done transfer them to a storage drive. I'm moving into shooting with the Red Epic so Im sure 4k is what I want to plan for. I wouldlike a motherboard that can get me through at least 2 processors and maybe 4 years of use.
 
Doesn't have to be HUGE; my main system drive is 320 GB (298 effective), and I have Windows 7, the Adobe Creative Suite Production Premium, several versions of Sony Vegas, and a ton of other stuff on it, and it's far from full. But I don't keep any data or working files on it.
 
moviemaykr said:
I wouldlike a motherboard that can get me through at least 2 processors and maybe 4 years of use.
Click to expand...

The problem with that is processor sockets change very, very quickly. Whatever you get today may not be able to accept a new processor from even a year later, and almost certainly not by two years.
 
A note on cases -- there's something where making a good investment early will last you for years and make your life much easier.

The case I've used for over 10 years now is all-aluminum (lightweight, good heat-handling), sturdy, and has a slide-out motherboard tray, as well as the ability to take both sides off. Everything is attached with good, sturdy thumbscrews -- all the of the access panels, trays (including a removable hard disk drive tray), the power supply, the mounting of all PC cards -- and unused PC card slots have their own slide-out covers, instead of break-away panels. It was a CompUSA-branded Lian Li. Lian Li cases aren't cheap, but they ARE worth it if you're planning to do continual upgrades. I thank the stars for it every single time I do any work inside the machine. It's the most worthwhile and long-lasting computer purchase I've ever made. You might want to look for something with those features, as well as tool-less drive mounting.
 
This is all great advice and i will look into a nice sturdy case, as well as the right size solid state drive. I'm curious if any of you think that there is a huge difference in performance between Intel and AMD? Is an Intel i7 chip is four cores faster than an AMD 8-core chip like the newer Vishera series? Once I build my computer Id like to get a good 3-4 years out of it since I have done that with my iMac and it wasnt even the very best 27 inch model. I'm still editing off firewire 800 drives.
 
If you look at something like the $1500 target system at the Tom's Hardware link above, that'll last you 3-4 years, no sweat. I'm not necessarily recommending that system specifically, but something comparable will go strong for quite a while. Software doesn't change so radically so quickly that you'll be obsoleted any time soon.

My current system is in that age range and I've never thrown anything at it it couldn't handle.
 
ADOBE WORKFLOW COMPUTER REQUIREMENTS/SUGGESTIONS: I am gonna get a little technical on this but the info will definitely help you out if you take the time to read it. There is alot of bad advice/misinformation out there on building machines (not really saying on this forum, but other places I read) for video production so Ill give you the perspective of someone who used to build computers for a living and worked in tech support for 10 years who now does video production. This info also takes into account a white paper that Adobe released (can be found in their forums) explaining how Premiere/After Effects uses computer hardware. Also, all hardware is NOT created equal (AMD CPUs vs Intel CPUs and so forth). These decisions will make huge impacts on the overall performance of your machine.

Processor: DONT buy an AMD processor for video production. A 4 core i7 intel processor will far outperform an AMD 8 core processor in every aspect of video production, especially in regards to rendering video. Also, you want as many INTEL cores as you can get, again this makes a MAJOR difference in rendering times. EXAMPLE: I had a dell M4100 mobile workstation with an intel i7 4core processor (i7 4 core processors have hyper-threading which doubles the cores from Adobe's software and the computer's perspective really giving you 8 processing cores). I rendered a job consisting of 25 videos and it took 9 hours on the dell laptop. On my new desktop machine with a i7 6 core processor (12 cores) that same job only took 1.5 hours. That's a HUGE difference. There are other factors involved such as the dell, being a laptop, kept hitting its thermal limit so the processor would throttle down then slowly back up till it hit the limit then throttle down again giving sort of a pulsing rendering action goin on. My new machine has i7 6 core processor (12 cores) overclocked to 4.5GHz with water cooling and can render for hours full speed with no heat issues. Back to the AMD processors, they just dont have near the power that the Intel processors have and in my oppinion are a waste of money.

Video Card: You already seem to know that you want a nvidia video card. but DONT BUY QUADRO. Quadro are underpowered and overpriced. Purchase a consumer level card, the fastest one you can afford. At the time I am writing this, the fastest video card on the market is a Nvidia EVGA GTX 780 Ti SC. the "Ti" designation makes a big difference (all cuda cores on the chip are unlocked) so make sure that's the one you get. "SC" means "SuperClocked". This card performs better than even the more expensive Titan video card. Also, Adobe software currently doesnt recognize SLI configurations, so dont waste money on that.

RAM: You will want as much as you can afford. I have 32GB, but 64GB would be even better. If you open up Adobe After Effects then go to Edit>Preferences>Memory&Multiprocessing, the bottom section on the right is called "After Effects Multiprocessing". check the box that says "Render Multiple frames simultaneously" and some numbers below become available to play with. there is a drop down box next to "RAM allocation per background CPU". Notice how when you go UP in ram here, the "Actual CPUs that will be used" listed below will drop down drastically. This is because you need a certain amount of ram per CPU core for After Effects(and premiere) to utilize this properly. The more ram you have, the more ram can be used per core and more cores will be available for use. So in short, get a minimum of 32GB ram and set this to 2GB, which will give you 10 processing cores that will be used. If you get 64GB ram on your system, then you can set it to 4GB and still have 10 processors usable.

HARD DRIVE: What makes a hard drive perform is not the RPM of the drive, its the READ and WRITE speed of the drive. As of right now, the fastest hard drive you can buy is a Samsung 840 PRO SSD. I have the 512GB version. My read/write speeds blow away any raid setup Ive seen. Im getting 486.8MB/s write, 513.2MB/s read. Drive read/write speed will HUGELY affect scrubbing and every aspect of post production. My suggestion: use the SSD to work a project. when the project is completed, move it off of the SSD onto your backup RAID system (I used a 5 disk Drobo for backup) for storage. That way you keep all the room you need on the SSD drive for working on a project and storing is done elsewhere. If you really want super performance and higher capacity, you can purchase 2 of these Samsung 840 PRO 512GB SSDs and set them to a Raid 0 giving you about 1 TB.

These are the simplified basics, I could write a book on it but nobody would read it lol. Hope all this helps.
 
The Intel Ivy Bridge-based CPUs are much faster at rendering than their Sandy Bridge counterparts. Tom's Hardware does regular tests, and the new Intel i5 Ivy Bridge CPUs outperform the i7 Sandy Bridge CPUs, when it comes to video rendering. If you can't afford an Intel Xeon, your next best bet is an Intel i7 Ivy Bridge.

DO NOT buy an AMD CPU for a video editing workstation. It will work but your render times will be horrible, compared to the latest Intel Ivy Bridge CPUs.

Dave
 
My new, bigger SSD works fine, but the cost v performance increase is, for me, difficult to justify - but I'd decided that SSD was the best thing to go with, so I swallowed the cost. With brand new drives, and new everything else, I'm finding it impossible to determine where the speed increase and lack of so many pauses I suffered in the past have come from. One feature I paid less attention to was the motherboard. I have lots of USB sockets, but only some are USB3, and the headers on the board are also 2 and 3. At the moment this is fine - BUT - with more and more USB3 devices on the way, more 3's and less 2's would have been better. I still need firewire for my cameras, and did it with a board. One other miscalculation is not enough SATA sockets.

Case wise, a few years ago I decided to standardise all my computers into 19" rack mounts. Quite a few live in flight cases, and I don't regret this. These all have either a USB or firewire fitted to the front panel - depending on what the computer is for. I agree with having a decent external audio interface - and there are lots of high quality ones around, with all sorts of input and output arrangements.

Loudspeaker wise, I've tried all sorts of systems, and really it depends on what kinds of work you do. If your products will be played back on big screens, then we're used to making sure our video quality is equal to them, monitoring wise - but big screens often have big loudspeakers too, and if this is the case, then your studio monitoring needs to be high quality, but also have an extended bass response. I have a music studio here that uses my one year old ex-edit machine now, and I kept the software on it, and just move a project from the edit suite into the music studio. It's amazing what smaller speakers do not let you hear! For smaller speakers, I rather like the near field monitors sold by Edirol (Roland) powered and nice sounding, and very truthful!
 
I'll share the workstation components I just built up last weekend. Quite pleased with it so far.
Intel i7-770K Haswell proc mildly overclocked to 4GHZ
Asrock Extreme4/TB4 mid range priced mobo. (Thunderbolt 2 ports)
Seagate 2TB/8GBSSD hybrid system drive, Seagate 2TB NAS media drive, suitable for raid expansion
GTX760 GPU 2GB ram
16GB Gskill 1866 certified ram
Cooler Master Elite 431plus case. Cheap, good ventilation, but not the easiest to work with. Comes with a hot swap E-sata 3.5" drive bay though. That's where the 2TB NAS drive sits at the moment. Makes for easy backup and dedicated project drives if you work with a lot of data. I will be mostly doing 2k raw, DPX and uncompressed broadcast 1080p file formats for max finish quality masters.
700 watt 80+ generic power supply, probably the first upgrade to come.
LG Blu-ray burner
Win7 64 bit Pro
Compared to my 5 year old Core2 duo laptop it dropped a 240 frame sample dng transcode in Capture one pro from over 40 minutes to under 3.
Loaded Resolve 10 lite yesterday while off for the snow storm. Haven't learned enough about it yet to run it.
Runs 300Mbps uncompressed 10 bit 4:2:2 HD broadcast AVI's or 10 bit 2k 4:4:4 DPX files in Lightworks without any issues at all off of the single drive.
Love the motherboard. Not my first system build by any means, but definitely one of the easiest.
Total price from New Egg taking advantage of some sales discounts was a bit over $1500. Without the discounts it would have been around $1800.
 
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