Building a PC for Editing

gaza4

hey guys thinking of going down the PC/Premiere Pro route instead of Mac and Final Cut. i'm starting to think the cost of buying a new mac thats not all that upgradable is really outweighed by building my own infinitely upgradable pc.

Plan so far is to run Premiere Pro on a Windows 7 64 bit system. what i need to know are what are the key parts that will make my pc suitable for editing. i know plenty of RAM is necessary but how much? also what graphics cards and processors should i be looking at? once i have a better idea about these i can start looking into motherboards, cases and hard drives....lots of hard drives!!! lol

so what would you guys recommend???

Owl Tickler

Ignoring the useless post above, give Stephen at Marx Computers a call - he has experience building suites for editing on Premiere Pro CS5.5. Marx Computers build custom PCs and have amazing tech knowledge & support.

http://www.marxcomputers.ie/

I'd spec it as follows:
64-bit Windows 7 OS
Hard Drives: 64GB SSD for your OS, and 3 x 1TB SATA drives for media.
6GB RAM - 8GB if you can afford it.
Graphics Card: minimum 1GB memory
Sound card - onboard is fine & usually decent.
Processor & motherboard come down to what you can afford, that'll support the above components - so best to ask Marx what they'd recommend.
Decent set of speakers/monitors - for editing, I use a set of Edirol MA-15Ds (Marx don't stock these - try eBay or Adverts.ie for a 2nd hand pair).

The above should run just over €1k depending on what you go for.

In addition, buy 2 x 22" widescreen Full HD monitors on Amazon UK - I use Samsung. You can use one as a preview monitor in Premiere.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-S22A350H-inch-Widescreen-monitor/dp/B004O6ADGW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1326789547&sr=8-1

Kenny Logins

Komplett have great prices and free delivery on all the components to build a solid and very fast Hackintosh. I'm just beginning to collect parts for mine. If you choose parts carefully installation should be a breeze with the help from tonymacx86.blogspot.com


This might help -

http://nofilmschool.com/build-a-hackintosh/

and

http://tonymacx86.blogspot.com/search/label/CustoMac

Oh, and you can install Windows 7 as normal on a second drive and just choose which to boot from in the Bios.

mp22

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?f=842

Have a look here

Fionn

gaza4 wrote: »

i know plenty of RAM is necessary but how much? also what graphics cards and processors should i be looking at?

i have a Dell XPS which had 8 Gigs and I upgraded to 12 - makes a difference ok.

Processor should be Intel i7 if possible, mines a 2.80 GHz but theres a 3.40GHz available now.

video card should be nVidia have 96 CUDA cores or more and be at least 1 Gig or higher of DDR5 video memory (to take full advantage of the Mercury playback engine)

ScumLord

The adobe products make use of the CUDA feature of Nvidia cards to render out effects on the fly.

i7 processors come into their own for video editing too so they should be seriously considered. I haven't seen mine maxed out yet though 2600K.

Get as much ram as you can afford, I have 16gb and it get's used up.

You'll want fast hard drives set up in raid so that means you'll need at least two which isn't cheap these days.

gaza4

Owl Tickler wrote: »

I'd spec it as follows:
64-bit Windows 7 OS
Hard Drives: 64GB SSD for your OS, and 3 x 1TB SATA drives for media.
6GB RAM - 8GB if you can afford it.
Graphics Card: minimum 1GB memory
Sound card - onboard is fine & usually decent.
Processor & motherboard come down to what you can afford, that'll support the above components - so best to ask Marx what they'd recommend.
Decent set of speakers/monitors - for editing, I use a set of Edirol MA-15Ds (Marx don't stock these - try eBay or Adverts.ie for a 2nd hand pair).

The above should run just over €1k depending on what you go for.

thats the kinda set up i was thinking off. already have good speakers and external sound card so that should be fine. was thinking bout using my Samsung HD tv as the moniter (no room for 1 new one let alone 2 lol). would this be suitable???

ScumLord wrote: »

You'll want fast hard drives set up in raid so that means you'll need at least two which isn't cheap these days.

can you explain a bit more about this???

thanks for all the replies so far guys!!! been a great help!!!

Owl Tickler

gaza4 wrote: »

thats the kinda set up i was thinking off. already have good speakers and external sound card so that should be fine. was thinking bout using my Samsung HD tv as the moniter (no room for 1 new one let alone 2 lol). would this be suitable???

Yeah, that would be fine if it's Full HD. If you're editing in Full HD, it's good to be able to see it fullscreen when previewing.

can you explain a bit more about this???

Marx can set this up for you if you want it. It just means that multiple hard drives are set up to be read as one large drive; parts of the data is read off each one simultaneously, therefore giving much faster read/write speeds.
That's all I know...

thanks for all the replies so far guys!!! been a great help!!!

No probs. PM me if you have more questions. I use Premiere Pro CS5.5 all the time, with full HD footage from a Canon 7D and also full HD AVCHD files from a Panasonic; so I'm very familiar with Premiere's performance with HD files, and what PC spec works well, etc.

I'd also agree with the posters above - some good advice there. Processor needs to be quad core. But Marx would have advised that. They've built 3 edit suites for me in the last year. They run Avid MC5 too without issues.

gaza4

Owl Tickler wrote: »

No probs. PM me if you have more questions. I use Premiere Pro CS5.5 all the time, with full HD footage from a Canon 7D and also full HD AVCHD files from a Panasonic; so I'm very familiar with Premiere's performance with HD files, and what PC spec works well, etc.

i have a 550d and a Sony PD150 myself. took me a while to figure out how to get the 550d files to work in Final Cut. realised i had to change the pixel aspect ratio in the sequence settings. is it handy enough with Premiere Pro???

reece

Here's my experience - I recently built my machine around the premiere pro CS5 and AE CS5. CS5 uses gpu acceleration on certain cards - my gc is nvidia 285 gtx - I'm going to upgrade to gtx570 when I have dosh (check adobe for full list of cards ). I went for 64 bit windows 7 and an iCore 7 processor (mine is i7 960) - editing suite optimised for 64 bit.

Here's what I went for :

SSD drive for OS/ software installation
separate drive x 2 raid 0 for video
separate drive for audio.

Ram was cheap so went for 12gigs but recently added another 12 gigs (over kill probably).

case was a HAF tower. Useful if you got stubby fingers like mine - plenty of room. PS was probably over kill but went for 1000 mw. went for non stock heatsink.

Mobo was asus pt delux 2 - have recently seen Sabertooth for €159. Bought most of the parts on Komplett.ie and the case on piximania (was out of stock on komplett)

Took 2 hours to build and there's plenty of helpful tutorials on youtube.
Runs like a dream, and edits like one too, especially in HD.

Owl Tickler

gaza4 wrote: »

i have a 550d and a Sony PD150 myself. took me a while to figure out how to get the 550d files to work in Final Cut. realised i had to change the pixel aspect ratio in the sequence settings. is it handy enough with Premiere Pro???

Premiere supports the Canon files natively. No need to re-encode or change anything.
PP CS5 supports pretty much every file type & codec. Yet to have an issue. I've used Panasonic P2 files as well as ProRes with it. It also supports RED.

Also - reece's spec above looks sweet - RAM is probably overboard though.

As stated, Premiere can use your graphic's cards GPU too. The i7 works amazing with PP - I got a Dell Laptop (XPS17) last year with an i7 so I could edit while on holidays or away on business, and it's amazing! My main edit suites are actually AMD chips, but I'd actually recommend the i7 over them.

So yeah; go for the spec I listed, plus a good NVidia card & an Intel i7 processor. Sorted!


Edit: you have a PD150 - so make sure to get a firewire card too - they're not as 'standard' as they used to be, so don't assume it's onboard! :-)

ScumLord

reece wrote: »

CS5 uses gpu acceleration on certain cards - my gc is nvidia 285 gtx - I'm going to upgrade to gtx570 when I have dosh (check adobe for full list of cards ).

Will basically any Nvidia card work?

Ram was cheap so went for 12gigs but recently added another 12 gigs (over kill probably).

The only reason I have 16gb is because I made a mistake when ordering the ram, I had the choice of somehow trying to gett by with a miserable 8gb :pac: leaving 4gb sitting idle or go for the extra stick (plus pay extra for that one stick ruining any value I got by buying the 3 paired sticks in a pack).

reece

ScumLord wrote: »

reece wrote: »

CS5 uses gpu acceleration on certain cards - my gc is nvidia 285 gtx - I'm going to upgrade to gtx570 when I have dosh (check adobe for full list of cards ).

Will basically any Nvidia card work?

Ram was cheap so went for 12gigs but recently added another 12 gigs (over kill probably).

The only reason I have 16gb is because I made a mistake when ordering the ram, I had the choice of somehow trying to gett by with a miserable 8gb :pac: leaving 4gb sitting idle or go for the extra stick (plus pay extra for that one stick ruining any value I got by buying the 3 paired sticks in a pack).

Officially no.  But apparently if the nvidia card is cuda enabled then theres a hack where you edit a ppro xml file and place in an element entry for your cards model. Haven't tried it though.
 

gaza4

thanks for all the advise so far. on the point of processors i've been recommended to check out AMDs as they are just as good and cheaper than Intel. whats peoples take on this???

reece

look up some bench mark tests for cpus and then make your choice - performance v price.

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/x86-core-performance-comparison/Adobe-After-Effects-CS5,2775.html

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/x86-core-performance-comparison/Adobe-Premiere-Pro-CS5,2774.html

briano.de.rhino

www.pcspecialist.co.uk

got me 16 gb ram
i7 processor
nvidia gt 580
all the trimmings
€2000

delivers to ireland for €30.

gaza4

briano.de.rhino wrote: »

www.pcspecialist.co.uk

got me 16 gb ram
i7 processor
nvidia gt 580
all the trimmings
€2000

delivers to ireland for €30.

there must have been a lot of trimmings to add up to that price!!! the shopping list i have at the moment is coming to about 1100 and is the same as yours bar the 580 gpu, i'm getting the 570...

diamondsny

HP has some amazing deals right now on powerful pcs.