Video editing build, advice/opinions welcome

Debil

Hi,

I'm hoping to do video editing as a career, and I'll be working with 4k footage and effects.

I've come up with the following which uses my budget. I've already chosen where I'm getting the parts from, and the price suits for me(not living in Ireland at the moment). It's working out around 2400 euro.

CPU : INTEL i7 5820k
Motherboard: ASUS X99-DELUXE/USB3.1
CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-D15
Memory: CORSAIR 4x8GB DDR4 2133MHz VENGEANCE LPX
Video Card: ASUS STRIX-GTX980TI
Storage: Samsung SSD 850 EVO 250GB SATAIII 2.5
Storage: Samsung SSD 850 EVO 250GB SATAIII 2.5
Storage: WD Blue 10EZEX 1TB HDD, SATA/600, 7200RPM
Storage: WD Blue 10EZEX 1TB HDD, SATA/600, 7200RPM
PSU: Corsair RM750i 750W, 80 PLUS Gold, modular, 135mm
Case Fan: Noctua NF-A14 ULN 140mm
Case: Fractal Design R5

I've done a lot of research, but I'm not so technical myself. I'd just like to hear if you would downgrade any components, and upgrade something elsewhere keeping to this budget.

I'd also like to ask if the 750W power supply is overkill? It's possible I'll add some additional storage in the future, and maybe use it in another build in the future.

I'll have two intake fans, and one outtake which I've read should be sufficient. Also, if anyone would has any comments about the storage setup, it would be appreciated too.

Thanks

frozenfrozen

Will the programs you're using benefit from the 980ti? You might be better off looking at a second hand titan with lots of vram.

2400 seems a lot for what could be done a bit cheaper.

Those two ssds won't be enough space for a big project and you'll be forever moving between your 2tb. You could look for an m.2 nvme drive instead for programs and booting, and then a faster and larger storage array

WD Blues won't be good enough, and not enough space.

750w isn't overkill at all

you seem to have a high end gaming build rather than video editing. If you won't be doing any gaming then go for a xeon processor. the 5820k is a good medium if you'll be playing games but you won't have a lot of pci lanes available if you need pci ssds & display cards & a hba for storage

don't worry about intake and outtake and fans you can finesse that down the road as long as you have some fans it'll be ok, you aren't going to be breaking overclocking records


Storage speed and io will be the biggest bottleneck for how good the computer feels while editing, as long as the cpu can handle playback, its really only when rendering out will that make much of a difference. Your effects will mostly be offloaded to the gpu, so it depends what kind of effects you plan on using but you won't need the current flasiest gaming gpu to use basic effects.

16gb ram might be a bit tight.

that board has a lot of useless stuff on it like wifi that you'll be paying dearly for. look at the X99 workstation boards. then at least you'll get 10gb ethernet so you won't be using up physical pcie slots with nics if you ever need it for having storage over your network.

You could do the whole thing a lot cheaper if you're just starting off editing and messing around.

Debil

Thanks for the response,

As I said, I'm hoping to make a career out of it . I just haven't been editing for a few years. I will be using adobe products starting out, and possibly the avid later as that's what I started out on years ago. The 980ti handles 4k quite well in Premiere from what I can see on the net. There's almost a 50% increase in rendering times in some systems when comparing to the 970 for example, and a lot less dropped frames. I'll have a look into the titan, and see what I can find.

Thanks for the advice, I guess I was underestimating the size of the files quite a bit.What do you think about this storage setup for a start with the components I already chose (Maybe with the asus x99 ws instead)? It's 32gb ddr4 too.

Samsung SSD NVMe SM951 256GB M.2 PCIe 3.0 (boot/scratch drive)
Samsung SSD 850 EVO 2TB SATAIII 2.5 (media drive)
Kingston SSD disk 480GB SSDNow V300 SATA3, 2.5 (export drive)
WD CAVIAR BLACK 6TB SATAIII/600 (back up drive)

Is there that much of a difference between a single xeon and i7 when it comes to video editing? From what I can see on the net performances are similar when they have the same architecture.

frozenfrozen

That storage looks good now although you may be going a bit over with the 2tb ssd. What I mean with how you would be limited with your original 250 ssds is that once those are full you would have to be freeing up space from them onto the much slower mechanical drives. I'm not sure what the sweet spot would be as it'll depend on the size of the footage you're working with and what type of projects (short shorts or broadcast hours or a feature) if you had a couple of projects on the go it would be awful having to move back and forth from mechanical drives (not in a raid array).

You also wouldn't want to be in a bad way if that 2tb ssd was to break, so the answer could be two 512gb ssds for media & use one of them for export too, or something like that.

WD blacks are great but I wouldn't ever trust a single drive with 6tb, that's a lot of footage to lose at once if it ever died. You might look into windows storage spaces and doing some kind of software raid with mirrored disks, that way you could lose a drive and not be out 6tb of content.


if you are looking to go with media composer I'd definitely check to make sure it won't complain if you haven't got an 'avid certified' machine, all of which would have a xeon and ecc memory and whatever else. I have only ever used avid on certified machines and even then it can be finicky about even little things like usb devices being plugged in.

Unfortunately you'll have to deal with bt.2020 so that's why I would be hesitant for any of the gaming graphics cards. deep colour being the biggest deal (nvidia consumer cards are limited to 8bit colour output)

If I had a bit of money at the moment I would personally go with an nvme boot / scratch / programs drive, and just go with a huge multi multi multi mechanical disk array that can do high enough sustained read/write and iops for editing, for half the price per gb of ssds, and there would be no fear of having a single drive bring editing to a stop, which would happen with just having one large ssd

At the moment I've got two ssds and 4 mechanical drives and its O.K. but I find I'm constantly moving projects from the ssds to mechanical drives and sometimes just settle for worse editing performance and edit straight from the mechanical drives.

I have the 2011 equivalent build of what you're doing now. X79, 3930k, 32gb ram, gtx 580, almost the same price point at the time. Only difference is I did plan on playing a lot of games so the gaming stuff suited me.

Most editors I know have SHOCKING storage setups so you're already ahead of 90% of the ones I've met. Everything living on those metal gdrive external drives, loose 2.5" drives everywhere, exchanging footage on dodgy little usb sticks.. awful stuff. Really the only thing you should be worried about is either losing data, and having an enjoyable time with bad playback performance. With the ssd's you'll be golden as long as you have another copy of everything, and you just deal with having to offload everything to mechanical drives once you have more than your ssd amount of storage worth of projects on at the same time.

I've rambled and said a lot of the same thing multiple ways but:
tl;dr
get 2, smaller storage ssds, get some kind of mirror / multiple copies for your backup. Make sure avid will like your hardware. Make sure your graphics card will last you a few years (re: bt/rec 2020 over 8bit color)