hardware for video editing

[stefanocps]

Hello, may be this has been posted already many times, if so please link me some recent topic

Need to assemply a new pc to use with Premiere and the files from my Fuji xt3, 4k, 200/400 mbit...possibily h265

I wanto to but somehting that will allow me to work trying to keep the budget as low as possible.

Right now i canno even play back the files with my I7 2600 (3.4), 32gb ram and gtx760

 

The first question is INTEL or AMD cpu, then what graphic card

 

Thanks

[fuzzynormal]

Easiest solution:

Edit with proxies and you can use just about any computer. 

“Just about any computer” will allow you to keep your budget very low. 

[1Ale82]

I also built a pc for video/photo editing and this is the configurations I went with:

- i9 9900k

- 32 gb RAM

- 750 watt power unit

- ssd samsung evo for softwares

- 2T hard drives for storage

- eizo cs270 screen

 

I still need to install a video card and possibly also an active cooler for the cpu.

 

Advices.

- go large with the power unit. Go with a minimun of 600watt, the difference in cost is not so high to justify some savings here. Have some margin for possible upgrades and for overloads.

- the 10 bit issue. The XT3 can record in 10 bit. Until this summer, only NVidia Quadro card could output 10 bit with Adobe softwares. Without one of those cards, you were actually seeing on the display a 8 bit signal. Now it seems also GTX and RTX cards can with the latest drives. Personally, I am considering one among the GTX 1660, 1060, 1070 or RTX 2060 cards.

[TurboRat]

Also building a PC right now

1 hour ago, stefanocps said:

Hello, may be this has been posted already many times, if so please link me some recent topic

Need to assemply a new pc to use with Premiere and the files from my Fuji xt3, 4k, 200/400 mbit...possibily h265

I wanto to but somehting that will allow me to work trying to keep the budget as low as possible.

Right now i canno even play back the files with my I7 2600 (3.4), 32gb ram and gtx760

 

The first question is INTEL or AMD cpu, then what graphic card

 

Thanks

I think your bottleneck could be your hard drive. You should be editing on an SSD or an NVME internal drive. Anyway here's a link sent to me that helped me with my initial build: http://www.thesagery.com/builds/ what's great with PCs is that you can upgrade your parts bit by bit to see which one will improve your workflow

[joema]

2 hours ago, stefanocps said:

Need to assemply a new pc to use with Premiere and the files from my Fuji xt3, 4k, 200/400 mbit...possibily h265

I wanto to but somehting that will allow me to work trying to keep the budget as low as possible.

Right now i canno even play back the files with my I7 2600 (3.4), 32gb ram and gtx760

The first question is INTEL or AMD cpu, then what graphic card...

The XT3 can use H264 or H265 video codecs, plus it can do H264 "All Intra" (IOW no interframe compression) which might be easier to edit, but the bitrate is higher.

The key for all those except maybe All Intra is you need hardware accelerated decode/encode, plus editing software that supports that. The most common and widely-adopted version is Intel's Quick Sync. AMD CPUs do not have that. Premiere Pro started supporting Quick Sync relatively recently, so if you have an updated subscription that should help. Normal GPU acceleration doesn't help for this due to the sequential nature of the compression algorithm. It cannot be meaningfully parallelized to harness hundreds of lightweight GPU threads.

In theory both nVidia and AMD GPUs have separate fixed-function video acceleration hardware similar to Quick Sync which is bundled on the same die but functionally totally separate. However each has had many versions and require their own software frameworks for the developer to harness those. For these reasons Quick Sync is much more widely used.

The i7-2600 (Sandy Bridge) has Quick Sync but that was the first version and I'm not sure how well it worked. Starting with Kaby Lake it was greatly improved from a performance standpoint.

In general, editing a 4k H264 or H265 acquisition codec is very CPU-bound due to the compute-intensive decode/encode operations. The I/O rate is not that high, e.g, 200 mbps is only 25 megabytes per sec.

As previously stated you can transcode to proxies but that is a separate (possibly time consuming) step.

[Mako Sports]

I keep this site bookmarked for whenever I want to upgrade my PC build - http://www.logicalincrements.com/articles/videoediting 

They list different budgets which is nice also. 

[Kisaha]

9 hours ago, joema said:

The XT3 can use H264 or H265 video codecs, plus it can do H264 "All Intra" (IOW no interframe compression) which might be easier to edit, but the bitrate is higher.

The key for all those except maybe All Intra is you need hardware accelerated decode/encode, plus editing software that supports that. The most common and widely-adopted version is Intel's Quick Sync. AMD CPUs do not have that. Premiere Pro started supporting Quick Sync relatively recently, so if you have an updated subscription that should help. Normal GPU acceleration doesn't help for this due to the sequential nature of the compression algorithm. It cannot be meaningfully parallelized to harness hundreds of lightweight GPU threads.

In theory both nVidia and AMD GPUs have separate fixed-function video acceleration hardware similar to Quick Sync which is bundled on the same die but functionally totally separate. However each has had many versions and require their own software frameworks for the developer to harness those. For these reasons Quick Sync is much more widely used.

The i7-2600 (Sandy Bridge) has Quick Sync but that was the first version and I'm not sure how well it worked. Starting with Kaby Lake it was greatly improved from a performance standpoint.

In general, editing a 4k H264 or H265 acquisition codec is very CPU-bound due to the compute-intensive decode/encode operations. The I/O rate is not that high, e.g, 200 mbps is only 25 megabytes per sec.

As previously stated you can transcode to proxies but that is a separate (possibly time consuming) step.

This is true 100%.

So if anyone cares mainly for H264/H265, maybe an i9 9900K is the best solution.

If anyone cares for pure computational power (or even Red raw) then a Ryzen 3900X is maybe the best platform right now (7nm, PCIe 4.0, more cores/threads).

I am looking for such a Ryzen build, but I have one verys serious problem. Can't find the 3900X anywhere! And when it is available, is around 600€.

[stefanocps]

Ok i see lots of answer, let me gather my ideas

Yes of course i  am ready to work with proxies, and from this starting point i want to assemple the pc. An 8th generation intel will be good i suppose. What about the security lack that required the patch ?some say limit resources..

And about gpu, most says that is not really involved inediting video.Other says to invest a lot on it...what is true?

 

LAst thing, i need to understand about the 10 bit files

I'll surely worky with my 8 bit monitor and a 8 bit gpu because are much cheaper

But at this point, even if i'll not see the 10 bit on screen, will the files in color correction benefit from the 10 bit right? so it is still worthy to use 10 bit?

also seems that the amd/intel debate is unsolvable

if not clear in term of performance may be is it clearer in term of money saving?

[Yehouda]

If you use 10 bit files on 8 bit monitor the files are still 10 bit so you still have the 10 bit latitude for grading BUT you can't really see what you are doing and the image may change if you look at your final grading on 10 bit monitor. 10 bit is not as critical as HDR but you might have some surprises. In general there is no problem but for serious grading a 10 bit monitor is a must have.

[stefanocps]

4 minutes ago, Yehouda said:

If you use 10 bit files on 8 bit monitor the files are still 10 bit so you still have the 10 bit latitude for grading BUT you can't really see what you are doing and the image may change if you look at your final grading on 10 bit monitor. 10 bit is not as critical as HDR but you might have some surprises. In general there is no problem but for serious grading a 10 bit monitor is a must have.

so for me that i don t generally do serious grading, is still worthy to record in 10 bit?

 

[stefanocps]

i am reading in other forum that most of my actual configuration is considered ok for work also with 4k

i have intel i7 2600 3.4 ghz, 32 mb ram,  gtx760 and ssd as system drive. Actually what is considered ok has a ti1050 gpu. COuld be that changing gpu , for now, would make a good difference?

[TurboRat]

8 hours ago, Kisaha said:

This is true 100%.

So if anyone cares mainly for H264/H265, maybe an i9 9900K is the best solution.

If anyone cares for pure computational power (or even Red raw) then a Ryzen 3900X is maybe the best platform right now (7nm, PCIe 4.0, more cores/threads).

I am looking for such a Ryzen build, but I have one verys serious problem. Can't find the 3900X anywhere! And when it is available, is around 600€.

I think a Ryzen 3700x is already sufficient, then move budget to gpu, ram, nvme, ssd

[stefanocps]

4 minutes ago, TurboRat said:

I think a Ryzen 3700x is already sufficient, then move budget to gpu, ram, nvme, ssd

you mean is sufficient for work in video editing h264 h265 4k?

[Yannick Willox]

I just built a pc with Ryzen 3600 (not even X), and it plays those files easily. It overclocks to 4.1 GHz easy, which even gives 15% more headroom. But that is not necessary. I got a nvidea rtx2060 super 8gb graphics card, which can play 4k files with color grade without a sweat. Doing full res 4K playback with noise reduction on the fly gets on the limit with BRAW files, then you need a considerably faster gaphics card. But outputting to 2K is no problem at all, no proxies needed. I am still on a 2k monitor anyway.

32gb ram, m2 ssd drive for video files. However, compressed files and braw files edit fine from my external T5 drive.

i did the braw speed test, and this system can play 8k braw files without problem, up to 25 frames/s

i was in doubt about geting a 3700x, which costs nearly double over here, but decided to get the ryzen 3600. Makes the decision to pop in a 16 core/32 thread in a year or two much easier.

[1Ale82]

9 hours ago, stefanocps said:

if not clear in term of performance may be is it clearer in term of money saving?

When I was building my pc, I found this articles interesting:

https://www.cgdirector.com/best-computer-for-video-editing/

https://www.4kshooters.net/2019/01/16/how-to-choose-the-best-video-editing-computer/

https://www.provideocoalition.com/building-a-photo-and-video-editing-dream-machine-for-2019/

In the order of priority, you should invest in power unit, CPU, RAM, NVMe SSD, graphic card. I think your best bet in a "normal" price range (around 500 euro/usd/gbp/etc.) would be the Intel i9 9900k cpu, probably the best compromise of cost/power. It's also a processor that can be easily found in many pre-set configuration, so probably you can eat a small cake by choosing a mass produced processor compared to more specialized ones used only for niche uses. I insist on the power unit since it's something easily forgotten but it can have a huge impact on your final configuration. And the difference in cost between a low and high watt power unit is so small there is really no need to save some coins here. Have some margin and be safe.

 

8 hours ago, stefanocps said:

LAst thing, i need to understand about the 10 bit files

I'll surely worky with my 8 bit monitor and a 8 bit gpu because are much cheaper

But at this point, even if i'll not see the 10 bit on screen, will the files in color correction benefit from the 10 bit right? so it is still worthy to use 10 bit?

also seems that the amd/intel debate is unsolvable

if not clear in term of performance may be is it clearer in term of money saving?

The 10 bit issue is that in order to work properly with a 10 bit file you need a camera that can record 10 bit, a monitor that can show 10 bit, a cable that supports 10 bit, a software that can work in 10 bit and finally a graphic card that can output 10 bit. The problem with adobe is that the software cannot use the 10 bits properly with the normal "gaming" cards. Until this latest drive update of this summer (I could not find yet many info about), you had to use one of the more professional and expensive Quadro cards to output 10 bit with adobe programs. If your pc/monitor cannot show 10 bit, you will work and see your videos in 8 bits, even if your video is in 10 bit. Depending on the situation, this can or cannot make any practical difference. It's the same thing as with color spaces. If you work on a image recorded in Adobe RGB but your monitor/software can only show sRGB, you will see your image in the lesser color space, so you don't have full control of what you are doing.

https://petapixel.com/2019/07/29/nvidia-unveils-new-studio-driver-with-support-for-10-bit-color-for-creatives/

 

[Grimor]

I currently edit with a laptop. Although at home and in my work I have several monitors. So I ask if there is something like a desktop computer that can be transported as a backpack or suitcase? Is there something like that?

[Kisaha]

As I said, I can't find the Ryzen 3900X anywhere, so I am probably going for the 3700X and maybe in a year or two the 3950X will be ripe enough to fall in my hands!

This is what I am looking for, more or less, need it to be relatively quite and cool and not cost too much.

Any suggestions or questions are welcomed.

 

Fractal Design Define R6 USB-C Windowed Mid-Tower Case Tempered Glass

Asus TUF Gaming X570-Plus WiFi

AMD Ryzen 7 3700X with Wraith Pirsm Cooler

Corsair Hydro Series H115i PRO RGB Liquid CPU Cooler

HyperX 64GB Fury RGB DDR4 3200MHz Non-ECC CL 16 (Kit of 4) [HX432C16FB3AK4/64]

Asus GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER ROG Strix 8GB

Corsair HXi Series HX850i 850W

Gigabyte AORUS NVMe SSD Gen4 500GB

Intel 660p Series 2TB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD

Western Digital 4TB Red SATA III For NAS

[ntblowz]

Definitely recommend Ryzen, we just had new pc this year with i7-9700K, RTX 2070 8GB, 32GB RAM, 500GB + 2TB Samsung Evo SSD, it can handle 4K from C200 to an extent then start lagging a bit, with Ryzen should be smooth entirely..

 

Though render time is 4x faster than the old i7-4770 with gtx1070 8gb & 32gb ram we had, editing 5.7K 360 video is a lot smoother too

[stefanocps]

20 hours ago, TurboRat said:

I think a Ryzen 3700x is already sufficient, then move budget to gpu, ram, nvme, ssd

you mean is sufficient for work in video editing h264 h265 4k?

 

anyway seems like Ryzen is just the way to go, and 3700 would be fine

It s a bit strange for me go ing back to amd again after 20 years! At that time, cpu was Pentium2 or Pentum 3, my use of working with Cubase. Because of cheaper price i bought an amd cbase pc (equivalent to pentium 3), But what happened? At that time CVubase will not run on copu other than Intel! What a big choc! I had to buy another pc!. From those time i never though Amd again