Advice on build for editing HD film

shnaek

I've been looking around at machines -new and second hand-which would suit me for editing HD movies. One of the guys here in work suggested that I build a machine myself. I've been looking at komplett, but before I do anything I thought I might ask on here for advice.
I have been editing HD movies on Premiere Pro on an xps1710, but I think it's time now to move to a desktop for this purpose.
Cheers for the help!:pac:

youcancallmeal

First question is how much are you willing to spend? Second question is have you got anything already like monitors, mouse, keyboard etc?

Just out of interest how big on average(Say 30mins) is a HD movie file? Also how long does it take to carry out tasks on these files at the moment?

Komplett-Tech: Ryan

This thread may be of some use to you in regards to building your own pc, especially if you have never done it before:

http://boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055842105

From my own experience Editing HD movies really is a CPU intensive task. And from what i remember Prem Pro is one of the few programs (in its latest incarnation) to support 8 physical or hyperthreaded cores. So for this i would reccomend building the machine around a Core i7-860 cpu. 4-8GB of memory, you could use a Nvidia card with cuda support to help speeds things up that little bit more! But as said from Al above, whats your budget, and what hardware do you currently have that you can salvage to keep the price nice and low?

shnaek

Thanks guys - I don't need a monitor, keyboard, mouse etc. I'm hoping to keep the cost around 700 if I can. I doubt I can salvage much out of my old PC - I might just send it home to the folks!
30 mins of HD would be large - you'd be talking around 10gigs I guess. Editing is pretty quick - but rendering can take a bit of time.

DECEiFER

Even when I edit 720p H.264 footage directly from my camera to the hard scratch disk in Premiere, my Core 2 Duo E8400 with 4GB of Corsair XMS2 RAM sometimes cries when moving through the timeline. I suspect the bottleneck to be RAM, as Adobe would recommend 16GB to keep out of trouble when using CS4. Though, if you use some decent DDR3 RAM, you could do fine with 8GB. As for the final rendering out, you'd definitely benefit from an i7. That's where the CPU really goes to work. It also goes without saying that you would be on the ball to go for a 64-bit OS platform, such as Windows 7 x64.

Power to the PC. Another man who would rather juice his PC up than get a Mac for this type of work.

Solitaire

Maybe this is one of those times where an i7-920 and 6GB triple-channel memory really are worth the money?

DECEiFER

Solitaire wrote: »

Maybe this is one of those times where an i7-920 and 6GB triple-channel memory really are worth the money?

Wow. You read my mind. :P

But notice that I did not inflict that advice on anybody else, as I know some would disagree with the logic behind my choice to build that? I wouldn't do that to ya, man!

ED E

With VE stuff there are two levels so to speak, what you need and what you'd like. There will be a minimum spec you'll need to edit at HD(Are we talking 720 or 1080, compression?) without crashes or delays in your controls. From there you push towards what you'd like, which ideally would be a large cluster or "render farm", but thats not really practical for most. The higher spec you go the faster the rendering, which no matter what you do will be slow. When you're rendering you will likely be using all cores so your computer is basically locked. The question is how fast is worth it?

Another thing, raw high rate 1080 or 1050 files are HUGE, you'll want large reasonably fast HDDs.

What is the source of your video?

Solitaire

Hmm... I wonder if those X58 mobos have good RAID5 support? A bunch of wee 500GB Samsung F3s working together...

DECEiFER

Solitaire wrote: »

Hmm... I wonder if those X58 mobos have good RAID5 support? A bunch of Samsung F3s together...

Lob in 6 or 8 top-of-the-line SSD's.

Komplett-Tech: Ryan

Solitaire wrote: »

Maybe this is one of those times where an i7-920 and 6GB triple-channel memory really are worth the money?

No point at all. a 860/870 will decimate it when it comes to encoding. The 920 is old hat now, but the higher echelons of that range like the 960 would be worth a look... if they wern't so expensive. Plus you have to remember the 1366 socket i7's run at such a higher TDP that you need to consider alot better cooling if you will be stressing them for hours.

DECEiFER

Komplett-Tech (Ryan) wrote: »

No point at all. a 860/870 will decimate it when it comes to encoding. The 920 is old hat now, but the higher echelons of that range like the 960 would be worth a look... if they wern't so expensive. Plus you have to remember the 1366 socket i7's run at such a higher TDP that you need to consider alot better cooling if you will be stressing them for hours.

He's taking the piss, Ryan. It's a dig of sorts at me since I'm building a machine with precisely those specifications. Solitaire would agree with you.

I'm going going for a LGA-1366 because it seems more practical in the long run. I do know that the i7 860 has some advantages over the i7 920. To hell with it, though, any of them is better than my Core 2 Duo E8400.

So as far as this thread is concerned, I agree that going the i7 860 route is best in the short-term for a dedicated media PC.

youcancallmeal

A decent I7-860 setup for 700 will be pushing it, it can be done but you would have to sacrifice a lot. Heres a quick build I threw together with no thought for money saving. The hard drive, graphics card and RAM could probably do with being changed. Also the CPU cooler may be overkill if your not planning on overlocking

Komplett-Tech: Ryan

I'd certainly change the Hard drive. The F2 eco drives from samsung are great in a NAS or a media center pc, but if there is going to be alot of writing i would suggest going for 3 x 500gb f3's and raiding them. The reason is the F3 500gb's are single platter drivers, so much lower seek, and higher sustained read/write speeds. Or cheaper, a 1TB F3 will do the job. Also the F3's have the lowest fail rate of any hard drive at the moment.

shnaek

Thanks for all the help - it's much appreciated. Ye have given me a lot to think about this evening when I get home from work.