need PC specs for Premiere

N

NYBob

New member
Hello:

I am going to buy a new PC to run Adobe Premiere Pro. I want to make sure the PC has everything in it to do so. What should it have in it, in terms of video card, processor speed, etc?

I don't need the best video card, etc., as money is tight this year and price is a factor, just what is decent to run Premiere Pro.

As I'm under the gun to get some SD footage cut, what could I get by with in a PC for just editing SD with Premiere, and then what would I need for HD?

Any suggestion on PC models are also welcome, including where to buy. I'm thinking of an HP.

Thank you.
 
Any modern computer can run sd

FOR HD,
You really should get a Quad core processor and a Video card with dedicated 1 gig of ram.
And all the ram you can afford...in that order.

(You don't really need a gig of video ram, but the cards I would recomend usually come with near a gig of onboard ram, so instead of listing them, I can just say, anything with a gig of video ram should do).

I would get a 940 i7 processor as a base, and build around that.
 
Depends what exactly you mean by "run" Premier.

My current system has 3 GB of very slow RAM, an ancient Athlon X2 5600+ processor (dual core 2.8 GHz), and no RAID, and I can edit HDV footage tolerably well in Premier and After Effects.

If you want it fast and smooth, or you're gonna be editing 4K RAW, you might need a little more power.

In preperation for getting a Scarlet, I'm about to build a Core i7 920 system with 12 GB of overclocked Mushkin RAM and maybe two X25-Ms in RAID 0.
 
It's hard to say without knowing your budget and patience level. I've seen some old systems that were perfectly capable of editing HDV but the process was slow and painful. With that said the basic system I would recommend anymore is going to based around an i7. The performance is outstanding and you will not be disappointed. Premiere is built to take advantage of the additional processor horsepower. Other than that a minimum of 4gb of RAM is a safe bet.
 
Lee brought up something that should also be considered... it is always a good idea to have a 7200rpm drive for just media separate from the one the OS is on, and it's a good idea to have two striped/RAIDed together as one... especially if you're going to be working with HD. DV, HDV, and AVCHD will run fine from just a single drive, but once you add in effects, preview files, yada yada yada... a striped/RAID array will help keep things speedy.
 
Everybody suggests the i7, but how favorably do multiprocessor, multi-core Xeons fare against it? Say Dual Xeon Dual core 2.66Ghz on an Intel 5000x chipset? That's 4 cores. I believe that they can be hyperthreaded also?

Short of going all the way to a Quadro CX, is there an advantage to upgrading to a graphics card greater than a Quadro FX 1500? Say a Quadro FX 3700? Or for CS4 is an FX1500 going to do the job as well until you can afford a CX?

- CK
 
CS4 doesn't use the graphic card capabilities. A Quadro CX will do the same work that a Gf GTX260 the only thing that changes is CUDA for the H.264 export. But really it's not useful!
 
I saw the CX demoed at NAB, and I can't imagine that the CUDA isn't worth the extra $600. It rendered out H264 files for the web, etc. fast. It wouldn't take long to recover those costs in saved time alone. I plan to make Blu-Ray versions of my films and the CUDA speeds that up too. I believe the CX is worth the expense, it just takes a while to raise the money, especially for a near non-profit enterprise.
 
I have a 2.66 GHZ Quad Core with 4 GIG of RAM and an Nvidia 9400 GT graphics card. It does OK. Any Quad Core with a dedicated graphics card should work decent.
 
Premiere Functionality

Premiere Functionality

I have a pair of intel 5150 dual-core Xeons (2.66Ghz) on a 5000x chipset, 20GB DDR2 ECC FB Ram (667Mhz) an nVidia Quadro FX 1500 graphics card, and a MOTU 828MKII audio interface. I'm running Vista Business 64.
The other day, I imported the three test P2HD clips from the Adobe Premiere "Classroom in a Book" DVD they are about 10 seconds long and at 720p/30. I managed to get all three to playback on the timeline simultaneously without stuttering, or dropping frames. I PIP'ed two of them so that I could see all three in the playback monitor.

That seems pretty good, how much more challenging will 1080i/ 24p P2HD footage be?

Oh, the footage was sitting on a 4 drive RAID5 using Seagate 7200RPM 500GB 16MB cache drives.

- Collin
 
guys it is worth installing cs4 on a dual core T6400 2.00 GHz laptop for a tempt use
 
Raid 0 read-write performance is increased offering faster access times but with no redundancy. If one drive fails, they all go. Each bit of data is writen in blocks to each of the drives so they all share the data.

I had a raid 0,1(mirror) setup but have since gone to complete raid 0 with all three drives. The access time & rendering is a little faster, not much to write home about. I might throw in another 2 drives & reconfig the raid array.

C2Q 6600 2.4GHZ, Geforce 8500 1g onboard ram, 4g Ram. Might overclock it to 3.0GHZ as the Q6600 overclock very well. (that would definately increase the speed more than just a raid array).


Steve
 
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