C200: Editing system for the C200

P

peter917

Active member
So I plan to buy a C200 by the end of the year. Here are my current PC Specs, what do I need to upgrade to do 4k Rawlite editing? I would prefer to be able to edit raw 4k even if i have to do half or quarter res.

Motherboard - X99A SLI PLUS(MS-7885)
-Intel Xeon E5-1620 v3 3.50GHz 4-core
-24gb ram
-750watt power supply
-Radeon R9 390 8gb GPU

I am a Adobe and Resolve User as well.
 
ATI are not good for Adobe or Resolve! Nvidea is what u need - its a major thing u should know!!

xeons are not necessary any more, u will not get the gain unless u are going to invest HUGE FUNDS, it was discussed on Adobe forum many times. best for the money - Latest I7 or I9 with highest GHZ rate.... the higher the better . if u will have to choose between amount of cores vs Ghz - you should choose GHZ,
RAM - 32 GB - is the Starting minimum.... anything less is a NO NO!!

750W - is a joke ! power supply its something that should has lots of "extra room". 1000-1200 W is what u need!

System disk - only SSD - best are Samsung 850 pro series... no to EVA drives - cheap parts inside... cant trust it

No RAIDs - not necessary anymore, want SPEED - again SSD,
want CRAZY SPEED - M.2 SSD - Samsung 960 Pro drives!! its like 5 times faster. there are 2 TB drives our days. All files can be on 1 drive - filmed files, project files, previews, rendering.... and so on, all on 1 drive!

Win 8.1 or up

Processor should has more PCI lanes > 28

Not necessary to make SLI , Adobe not working very well with it. so if u work more in Adobe i would just buy 1 very good card. and i would wait, till adobe add a real good support and performance gain for SLI and till the price will drop for the 2nd card ...

So if u ask for example for your priorities, if money is an issue - SSDs - u need fastest drives for your projects! definitely dont go with Xeons, and u ll save a lot, to buy Good Video card and SSD.

would not go with MSI, would use ASUS
 
Thanks for the advice! Thing is I already own the stuff I listed. Id prefer to not have to buy a whlle new pc. Should I just upgrade my RAM and GPU? Also my OS is on a 128gb SSD. Samsung 850 Pro
 
peter917 said:
Thanks for the advice! Thing is I already own the stuff I listed. Id prefer to not have to buy a whlle new pc. Should I just upgrade my RAM and GPU? Also my OS is on a 128gb SSD. Samsung 850 Pro
Click to expand...

in that case yes, get new GPU and i strongly suggest to buy new Power, as modern Nvidia cards require 600 Watt or greater power supply... so 1200W would be a good choice!

Yes extra ram is necessary, the very minimum is 4 GB per Thread, 32 GB is the smallest u should have! but i would get even more, but also try to get the same kind of ram, same brand and model!!

and if u want great speed get that Samsung 960 pro ssd as your working horse drive!
 
Last edited:
There are different ways to build a computer. You can go all in and just spend all your money and buy the best of everything and then sort of assume that what you actually needed fits within that frame. You'd be correct too: the "best of everything" will likely cover your bases. There might be a cheeper solution out there though. You'll need to trade brute force against some applied knowledge.

You'll have two engines/accelerators: CPU and GPU. Those are the only two things that make your data move its fat ass. The other computer components are friction (RAM, SSD, HDD...). Removing friction does not increase speed per se. That is: a computer with no friction but a very weak engine will still be weak. But if you have a powerful engine with lots of friction from other components, then removing that friction will let your computer go faster.

Lesson: Going from 24GB to 96GB of RAM when 16GB was enough will not increase speed.

CPU and GPU both increase speed but are responsible for different things. Apart from being the general main accelerator, the CPU will decompress Long GOP codecs on the fly (some are very demanding) and the CPU is also responsible for debayering raw footage (RED for instance) if you shoot that*.

The GPU is being used more and more in professional apps to accelerate performance. In DaVinci Resolve it's doing all the computational work that makes the timeline move (after decompression/debayering above). Any transformations that you add (like contrast, saturation, image scaling and so on....) will be accelerated by the GPU. Your TIMELINE resolution will seriously impact performance and memory requirements. You can have 4k resolution ProRes footage play very smoothly on a 1080p timeline on an average machine. This is because ProRes is already broken down to individual frames of footage (no on the fly Long GOP decompression) and 1080p is no problem for today's mid range GPUs. With 4k footage on a 1080p timeline, the GPU effectively "sees" the 1080p. The computations are made over 1920x1080 pixels. Frame sizes like 4096x2160 dramatically increase (x4 pixels) the load. It's also a question of available GPU memory, depending on node structure and plugin use.

In DaVinci you can totally shoot 4k, work in 2k/1080p and then export 4k with no generational quality loss. I'd say it's the recommended way to go in most situations.

CUDA (Nvidia) has been a solid choice for DaVinci for a long time now. But for the last two years or something, OpenCL is equally good. It's just a question about finding the right card for your money, since Nvidia and AMD won't necessarily compare 1:1 in terms of price and compute for each of their tiers. It's also a question of what other things you need your GFX card for…

Today, you can pick up a Samsung 850 EVO 1TB for around $350 and 2TB for twice that. But I'd still pair that with some nice, large HDDs. There's something to be said for 12TB of internal storage when you shoot Canon Raw Light.



* = As far as I know, there is still no white paper on Canon Raw Light. It would be a misstake to simply assume that because it has 'raw' in the name it's just like every other raw format. When companies say 'chocolate', that is what you get. When they say 'chocolate spread' you get a product that might contain chocolate. I'm not knocking Canon Raw Light here — I think it's great. But it might be a solution where each of the RGB channels have been extracted/debeyerd internally and remuxed in individual 'buffers' allowing for after the fact white balancing and so on.... Not saying it is, just saying I'll personally keep an open mind until I read something official.
 
peter917 said:
What do you guys think?
Click to expand...

The GTX 1070 has better but comparable compute performance to your R9 390: 5.78 Gflops/s vs 5.12Gflops/s. You could start by keeping your 390 in your new build and see what kind of performance you get. I'd say it's OK for 1080p (timeline) performance. If you want to move to a 4k timeline, you'll want a 1080 Ti, which is the next level of performance with 11.3 Gflops/s.

In Resolve it's not a problem to have 4k source footage in a 1080 timeline and then export 4k at the end — while referring back to the original files so you get full quality. It makes it a lot easier on your machine.

I think the smartest way to go is to edit and do most color work at 1080p and then switch to a 4k timeline to verify sharpening at the intended resolution before output.
 
Remember that if you want 10bit output to your display from your gpu you'll need the cuda/power versions of the cards
The game versions only output 8bit
 
The age old question: what is your budget? All of the comments above are spot on. Do you want to shoot RAW a lot? Or just a little here and there? This will have a huge impact on what type of system you need.

I have learned, do not skimp on your editing machine if you are serious or do this as a business. Fast as you can afford and then maybe some more. It will pay off In time saved, especially with encoding.
 
Okay, well I may consider the 1080 Ti then. Only issue is I guess I like working in premiere honestly more than resolve. Would you still recommend the upgrades in cpu, motherboard and ram as listed in the link I posted? 6 core 3.6ghz with 32gb ram. I plan to do a lot of work in RAW as that was my main reason for buying the camera. I would prefer to edit the 4k native if possible. The main plan would be to open raw files in resolve to transcode them to pro res then edit them in premiere pro and save out a xml to open them back in davinci to relink with the raw files for color grading then xml back to premiere for final render as I believe davinci wont import transitions or any vfx done in premiere.
 
peter917 said:
Okay, well I may consider the 1080 Ti then. Only issue is I guess I like working in premiere honestly more than resolve. Would you still recommend the upgrades in cpu, motherboard and ram as listed in the link I posted? 6 core 3.6ghz with 32gb ram. I plan to do a lot of work in RAW as that was my main reason for buying the camera. I would prefer to edit the 4k native if possible. The main plan would be to open raw files in resolve to transcode them to pro res then edit them in premiere pro and save out a xml to open them back in davinci to relink with the raw files for color grading then xml back to premiere for final render as I believe davinci wont import transitions or any vfx done in premiere.
Click to expand...

if you want to do 4k then 64GB memory is better, and again if you gonna work with 4k 12bit/10bit files don't you want to see what you are doing???
So you'll need at least a 10bit display and 10bit gpu the 1080TI is 8 bit limited
 
10bit displays are more important if you are delivering in 10bit. If you mainly deliver in 8bit I see no problem in having an 8bit representation of your image. The software will still give you the advantage of the bits in the processing.

I do not know how much CPU it will take to edit 4k RAW files natively, but I would wager that your current CPU will not be enough! 4k RAW video (especially 60p) will need some horsepower, GPU capability and fast storage. No free lunch here...
 
AndreeOnline said:
Are you talking about RAM? If so, how do you mean it's better in relation to working with 4k?
Click to expand...

this site is a interesting read take it for what it is.
They suggest 64GB for 4k editing

https://www.pugetsystems.com/recomm...obe-Premiere-Pro-143/Hardware-Recommendations

I've read (different source) that the optimum configuration ram/cpu is 8GB/core so for his example 6core that would be 48GB.
for my next build i'm getting at least a 8core cpu which would translate to 64GB ram.
 
avian said:
this site is a interesting read take it for what it is.
Click to expand...

Mmm. But that's kind of the key take away: to "take it for what it is". Way too much information on the internet lack one of the following important pre-faces:

  • "I think that, …"
  • "It's my belief…"
  • "I've heard from someone…"
  • "A good friend of mine, who knows everything about computers…"

This list could almost be made endless, but the main point is that many hobby publishers forget these important statements that would allow the reader to disregard what's coming next. Real information is often found in white papers or benchmark tables. The latter is important, because even if something might be theoretically true, there are often a number of factors that might severely limit theoretical peak performance. Thus, it needs to be tested. There are many "moster build" PCs on YouTube that fail to deliver the expected performance because Windows 10 or what ever software they're using can't effectively use the latest and greatest components at their full capacity. Especially when you start build dual CPU (or more) systems or when you're using like 4 top of the line graphics cards.

Now, it would be unwise for me to talk about Premiere Pro since I don't use that, but Peter Chamberlain—product manager for DaVinci Resolve—says 16GB of RAM is enough. That is of course for a dedicated DaVinci workstation that doesn't do anything else. But a system's RAM needs does not increase with footage resolution or file sizes. That's just not how it works.

We understand that if you build a DaVinci workstation that also does 3D rendering with large scenes that needs to be read into RAM... well, that's different. I highly doubt that Premiere Pro, in isolation, needs more that 16GB as well. I'm not going to look for benchmarks because I don't need to convince anyone. I'm just putting it out there.

That said, depending on what RAM configuration you choose and current prices, you might very likely end up around 48-64GB. If you're building a high end computer for allround work, it makes no sense to starve it for RAM — that's not what I'm trying to say.
 
Yes, you only need big RAM for programs like After effects. Avian, we all go through this, you have to learn to not fight it. Moving up in cameras usually means moving up in computer systems. Which basically means get your wallet out. Same thing goes for CFast cards. Add a couple grand to your budget if you want to shoot a lot of RAW.

As stated, The Grand Order:

1 - CPU
2 - GPU
3 - Storage Speed

The new 6-core CPU's from Intel might be interesting with a decent overclock for $400. Think about it, we will not be going beyond 4k anytime soon from a small company point of view. So if you build this workstation right it will last for many years. But, another thing, you might want to wait until the C200 RAW files are native inside of Premiere. This might reveal more hardware specific needs for the optimal setup.
 
well Andree, did you look at what the link refers to?
the reason for "take it for what it is" was that this site sells dedicated editing workstations so they "might" have an interest to up sell stuff .
However they do give some useful information on various components in the systems including benchmarks.

Not anyone's statements or advice should be taken as gospel but give you a direction for what to look or investigate for .

My own system with an old i7 2600k 16GB ram gtx770 works fine for 1080p workflows incl multicam, however i will be getting low memory warnings after CC and effects are applied in multicam timelines
for 4k single source editing will work fine but forget about multicam.

So for me personaly i'm looking to get into the c200 rawlite fun and as a consequence a new edit system; premiere pro seems to like more cores as seen in benchmarks and each core needs his fair share of dedicated memory.
This does seem to scale the memory amounts a bit .

what is best and what is enough within a certain budget is always a balancing act.
 
Last edited:
AndreeOnline said:
Today, you can pick up a Samsung 850 EVO 1TB for around $350 and 2TB for twice that. But I'd still pair that with some nice, large HDDs. There's something to be said for 12TB of internal storage when you shoot Canon Raw Light.
Click to expand...

Amen to that! A single SSD may be much faster than a single HDD but nothing beats the reliability of a great hard drive RAID. I would never trust a single SSD unless I was continuously backing it up to a RAID. I have heard too many stories of SSDS failing mysteriously where the SSD was able to be reinitialized with a total loss of data. It doesn't hurt that 8TB hard drives can be had for as little as $250 making even manual backups are pretty cheap these days.

We are planning to test an 8 drive RAID 6 configuration with either 10 or 12 TB enterprise drives sometime next month. Each drive writes over 200MBs so we have high hopes for the RAID performance even accounting for the overhead of RAID 6.
 
avian said:
well Andree, did you look at what the link refers to?
Click to expand...

I've looked at it. They do have a lot of benchmarks, which I like (for the reasons stated above).

As a reader it's important to know that a benchmark often tests a single scenario: export, preview rendering, playback and so on... By combining many benchmarks we get a good picture of what to expect. As systems builders, the company behind your link seems better than average in explaining why a customer should buy a certain system—that's good!

As I say... I won't comment on Premiere needs/performance, but their DaVinci recommendations are generally good.

And for users who feel they aren't as knowledgeable as they'd like about how computers and software interact, I'd just say be careful not to assume that performance in one type of benchmark translates to a different scenario. By this I mean that a computer that is 3x as fast at exporting video (due to 12 cores at 3.5GHz) will actually be slower than a 4.5GHz 4 core computer at many other tasks that are more single threaded in nature.
 
I was about to add a GTX 1080 to my Mac Pro 5,1, but after reading all this I'm thinking I might want to bump the up to the 1080 TI version. Do y'all think it's worth the extra cash for 4K realtime editing?

I already have 16gb of ram, 12 cores and am adding a fast SSD, so the graphics card is the only question mark...

(Hope I'm not derailing as this thread is about editing systems)
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top