[Shifty Geezer]

I'm considering replacing my old XP tower with a machine specifically for video editing, but having not kept up with tech at all, I've no idea what a good hardware choice would be.

So I'm open to suggestions on CPU, mobo, and GPU to chug through AVCHD/h.264. It doesn't need to be a monster - just a capable machine unlike my dual-core laptop main PC. Especially the GPU if that can do all the heavy lifting. Any recommendations?

[Davros]

Is cost a factor ?
a 2600 is a good cpu
cpu video editing benchies (a little old)
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/d...-CS5,2428.html
go to the choose benchmark option

what editing software are you going to use

found this
For Adobe Premiere CS5 Mercury Playback engine we recommend the nVidia GTX470/570+ or a Quadro 2000/4000 card.
For Avid Media Composer we recommend a minimum of a QuadroFX1800 or Quadro2000.
Sony Vegas does not benefit from GPU while editing, but Vegas 10 does offer some GPU accelerated rendering. So for Vegas 9 any good ATI or nVidia card with 768+ megs RAM will do. Vegas Pro 11 will support GPU and CUDA acceleration, so get a GTX470/570 or higher.
For consumer video editing apps like Pinnacle Studio we recommend an ATI or nVidia card with 768+ megs ram

ps: what exactly do you mean by video editing? are you talking mainly cutting bits out and joining bits then transcoding or stuff like fades/wipes, special effects, composting ect ?
some sony vegas pro 11 benchmarks
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/...puacceleration

to be honest as far as gpu's are concerned if you take the pov of whats best for gaming is best for editing you wont go far wrong (if your excluding professional cards quadro's ect)

[entity279]

Originally Posted by Davros

For consumer video editing apps like Pinnacle Studio we recommend an ATI or nVidia card with 768+ megs ram

You've been experiencing division lately?

[Shifty Geezer]

Originally Posted by Davros

Is cost a factor ?

Yeah. It's actually really important. I was just looking at how slow my laptop is and wondering what's the minimum spend for a resonable machine? Knowing GPUs can do the heavy lifting, I'm wondering if a new machine would only cost a few hundred quid.

what editing software are you going to use

I currently use Magix. I hated Vegas as buggy and the most unintuitive interface. The latest Magix reckons to have GPGPU support. I may switch to something else though. Ever few years it's good to check out the competition and see who's moved fastest.

ps: what exactly do you mean by video editing? are you talking mainly cutting bits out and joining bits then transcoding or stuff like fades/wipes, special effects, composting ect ?

Mostly cuts, but layers and masks are essential. The main requirement is realtime viewing of a video edited together to see the cuts. Home movie/sports TV wipes are no interest to me on the whole. At the moment I can convert all the h.264 content to MPEG2 for fast playback, but that adds a lot of time and faf.

Reading around some reviews, it sounds like 3 simultaneous AVCHD streams are managed on an i7. 3 streams in realtime would be fine for me. If a moderate GPU could do that paired with a cheapish CPU, I'd be a happy bunny.

Shame the PS3 transcoder idea never got anywhere.

[Davros]

I remember reading a forum post where someone said my 560ti renders at about the same speed as my quadcore (cant remember any more details) with that in mind and your concern about cost I reckon that an i7 quad(8 threads) with Intel Quick Sync Video 2.0. (aka Intel Core i7-3770S) is going to be as quick as any mid range gpu and its going to be compatible with everything. Plus it has an on board gpu so you'll save some money there.

quicksync 2
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/...o-general.html

[Shifty Geezer]

Okay, thanks. £220 for the CPU. If the GPU's not much use, that'd be a saving. I know Joker454 uses GPU rendering with Vegas.

[Davros]

just as a little test I downloaded Magix prox4
(has a setting use gpu for fades and effects but it said "this is optimized for nv gpu's as you dont have one rendering may be slower" so I left it unchecked)

source :


Amd 6950 amd's built in transcoding 20 seconds 44.8mb


Magix pro x4 q6600 @ 2.4ghz (quadcore, no hyperthreading) 30 seconds 22.5mb


amd details


cpu details


Cpu seems to be better quality although I cant view it properly because my monitor is only 1680x1050

edit:
re did the ati this time at full quality and the cpu rendered file still has the edge (full quality file was 1mb bigger 45.8mb and still took 20 seconds)

[entity279]

AFAIK you are correct Davros, Quick Sync and GPGPU transcoding are reported to have lower quality.

[Davros]

And the gpu file being twice the size would mean a standard film would need 2 dvd's instead of 1 for the cpu version, and would also take twice as long to upload to someone.

[Shifty Geezer]

Looks like GPGPU isn't really a suitable alternative yet, except maybe preview rendering. The most economical video editing machine is looking like the best CPU+SSD you can, and ditch the GPU.

[Albuquerque]

Originally Posted by Shifty Geezer

Looks like GPGPU isn't really a suitable alternative yet, except maybe preview rendering. The most economical video editing machine is looking like the best CPU+SSD you can, and ditch the GPU.

I agree with this statement, and also suggest throwing a fat pile of ram at the problem as well. Maybe an i7-3770 non-K ($320), a basic but brand-named z77 board with four DIMM slots ($150), 32GB of ram ($150-ish), an inexpensive SATA3 120GB SSD drive ($80) plus a decent 2TB drive ($100) that are combined with the Intel RST caching toolset.

You could assemble a bitchin' fast video compressor rig for $750 after shipping if you shop for deals. It would crush pretty much everything in it's way shy of one of the SNB-E setups, and of course you could skimp on any number of things to shave some money (swap for an i5-2500 non-K to reduce by $120, cut ram in half to save $75, move to a cheap H-series chipset board without RST to shave another $50 or more, drop the SSD for another $100 savings.)

[Shifty Geezer]

The massive RAM is interesting. How much benefit would that have versus running from a fast SSD? I was thinking video data on the SSD, so latency wouldn't be an issue. More like 8 GBs RAM and SSD. I don't know which would provide the better performance advantage/economy.

[Davros]

I think the extra ram would be a better way to go
rendering speed for magix was about 45mb a minute (18 second clip took 30 secs and was 22.5mb) (6gb for a 90 minute film if my maths is right)
I cant see that bottlenecking a standard hdd (about 100mb/sec) unless your going to try doing multiple films at once
plus if you dont have much ram and you start hitting the swap file everyone moves the swap off the ssd so the hdd will still be your bottleneck.
Although very roughly a i7-3770S would be about 40% faster (if it was @ the same 2.4 clock) then another 25% because of the increased clock, then another 75% faster because it can run 8 threads

Edit: that would take it to about 120mb minute still within the transfer rate of a hdd plus you could raid to get more speed and shortstroke (make a partition that uses the outside edge of the hdd)

[Albuquerque]

My fat-pile-o-ram suggestion was aimed at temporary data sets that "thrash" a lot during encoding (painful for an SSD, and still more latent over SATA than directly to main ram) and 64-bit encoding apps that use the pool for live previews of effects like stitching or fades or multiple streams into a single split frame or the like.

Thinking about it more, the SSD is a bit useless in this sort of rig; you could certainly use it to speed your boot or launching of the app, but I wouldn't use it for video input / output nor would I use it for swap lest it die a premature death. I am more in alignment with Davros: throw a couple of spindles together in RAID if you need the extra throughput and the money would be pretty close to the same.

[Davros]

Ive heard a lot of people recommend read from ssd write to hdd
but then again if you do have a lot of ram and my maths is right about a movie being 6gb you could have a 6gb ramdrive

[Albuquerque]

Reading from SSD would insinuate that you wrote it all to the SSD to start, which (depending on the video content and how many you're gonna do) could get a bit expensive for the lifespan of the unit.

[Shifty Geezer]

Originally Posted by Davros

I think the extra ram would be a better way to go
rendering speed for magix was about 45mb a minute (18 second clip took 30 secs and was 22.5mb) (6gb for a 90 minute film if my maths is right)
I cant see that bottlenecking a standard hdd (about 100mb/sec) unless your going to try doing multiple films at once

That's what I was thinking, if streaming several HD video layers for combination. BW isn't an issue, but seek times are. I've made one 1080p project on my PC and used an external SSD on the USB port, and it speeds up preview a zillion-fold because the access times are so low. Unless the videos get cached in RAM, I'd have thought that'd remain true even with lots of RAM available.

The idea of using an SSD for reads and the HDD for writes makes some sense. Perhaps a small SSD just to store the current working masters to feed the editor, and write everything to the HDD? Unless 32 GBs RAM will get used very efficiently. In which case one can just work from RAM.

My expectations of PCs is that they sream everything all the time, even with loads of RAM availble (using the swap file in multi-gigabyte machines with RAM sitting unused). I'd hope things have moved on, but need to be convinced.

[Pressure]

I'm sorely missing any requirements in this post.

What exactly are you going to be editing and for what broadcast standards?

That will really determine the entry price.

Does it include audio correction and mastering for broadcast?

Or are we just talking about kitty cats YouTube quality video here?

[Davros]

As far as i know its AVCHD/h.264 1920x1080 and the workload is cuts layers and masks
It would be nice to know the file sizes involved as with 32gb ram a 16gb ramdrive is certainly doable. (but then again 32gb isnt cheap)
maybe 8gb ram 8gb ramdrive would be enough

ps: shifty any idea of your ram/swap file usage while doing a project ?

[Shifty Geezer]

Workload is 'enthusisast' level with AVCHD content caught on Sony cameras. These are recorded at 28 Mbps AFAIK. Duration is typically 5-10 minutes, making fun movies with some of the kids I work with or just for own amusement/artistic efforts. If I make anything that looks really good I'll see about entering it into some film-fests. I've an idea for a dance piece that'd look great with the right camerawork.

As such, the budget is pretty minimal. It's as much just me seeing what it would cost prior to deciding to invest or not. Output at quarter 1080p is fine for viewing and YouTubing, and a more readily edited resolution. However, converting to MPEG2 prior to editing introduces another lossy step, and with a third encode to the final format, that's three steps which is getting pretty rough, especially in the audio.

Incidentlally, as full quality isn't needed during editing, it strikes me as sensible for a video application to create low-res working copies for editing, and then the final render could use the HQ masters, but none of the software I've tried does that. Have yet to look at Adobe's offerings. That's where a machine that's comfortable working with 1080p50 AVCHD (why the hell do companies continue with the 50/60 fps Atlantic split in this age of digital video and TVs that can display both? ) would be a considerable boon, removing the reencoding step and giving better quality at the end. If a capable machine could be assembled for £400-500, I'll probably do it.

Oh, and I've no idea what RAM or swapfile useage is like.

[Lightman]

8GB of RAM will cover you just fine and if budget permits I would suggest getting two fast and cheap 7200RPM drives for RAID0 to use as swap during producing and at least one other drive for OS and data.

I play occasionally with PowerDirector9 to do my home videos from BluRay camera AVCHD1080 and editing of large files is much better after I moved to 8GB RAM even though app itself isn't allocating too much of it.
Editing everything from one drive was painful at times where once I moved temp. and preview files to RAID0 of 2x1TB SammysF1 while keeping original material on another single 1TB Sammy helped a lot during production process.
My rig runs OS from SSD drive which is ideal solution but if on budget skipping it shouldn't affect overlay performance too much for you.

Here is an example of PD9 at work. Whole material was over 2 hours and took me 3 hours to produce the whole thing. Mostly deciding what to cut out and adding subtitles.
Back then on Phenom X6 3.6GHz I did all of that quite comfortable without any 'waiting' for computer to perform task required. Producing final material took about the same time as resulting video on that CPU.



Good luck with your build and have fun making videos

[Arwin]

Two fast harddrives on independent busses are probably some of the best performance improvements you can get for video editing, is the impression I'm getting of where most of the (initial) bottlenecks are.

[Pressure]

Originally Posted by Shifty Geezer

Incidentlally, as full quality isn't needed during editing, it strikes me as sensible for a video application to create low-res working copies for editing, and then the final render could use the HQ masters, but none of the software I've tried does that. Have yet to look at Adobe's offerings. That's where a machine that's comfortable working with 1080p50 AVCHD (why the hell do companies continue with the 50/60 fps Atlantic split in this age of digital video and TVs that can display both? ) would be a considerable boon, removing the reencoding step and giving better quality at the end. If a capable machine could be assembled for £400-500, I'll probably do it.

Most suites I have worked with support proxy files, which is what you are describing. Just use lower resolution video until you need to output (although having a fast enough computer removes the need).

The entire broadcast system is to be taken into consideration. Europe uses PAL (25p) and you have to look at shutter speeds. 1/50th matches up nicely with that and the 50hz utility frequency so artificial light doesn't create flicker when shooting in Europe. The same can be said about USA and 1/60th (nice pulldown to 29.97p and 24p) and 60Hz utility frequency.

Any new computer (Core 2 Duo+) is capable of 1080p video editing. Remember to have a nice scatch drive for faster playback (any RAID-0 with 2 drives should be plenty).

Depending on which editing suite (and since RAM is dirt cheap) I would recommend at least 8GB of RAM.

I would also recommend transcoding the AVHCD to something like Cineform or ProRes for faster playback and editing. They are far superior codecs for editing and grading.

Sound is treated as a separate entity for most suites until you need to output it.

[karlotta]

On that fat/big pile of RAM, no ECC with Intel consumer...