computer upgrade-davinci

[jagnje]

Ok, so my computer at the moment is i7, 8GB, gtx 460, 1TB samsung HDD drive. I would like to move away from adobe and use just davinci. I just started on a small clip in davinci, but I`m not getting real time playback when I have plugins on the nodes(filmconvert), othervise it`s fine with 5-10 nodes. the only thing I miss is the render on timeline from ram that adobe has. I read that davinci has cache preview, but when I enable it, it only becomes worse even less fps. So something must be wrong here. Tomorow I will buy a 128SSD for OS and programs and another 8GB of ram. I don`t have enough money to buy a GPU that would be a significant upgrade.

I need some advice on how to configure the discs...what disk do I use for cache preview?  

[dahlfors]

Here's a PC hardware guide for Resolve:

http://www.districtcreate.org/assets/davinci_resolve_windows_config_guide_june_2014.pdf (check especially page 25)

Resolve relies heavily on GPU and they recommend a GPU with 3GB of RAM for HD. More RAM and SSD will always be better, but you'll be very limited with an old GTX 460 GPU.

If you have space enough for cacheing - always use the SSD for cacheing, it's much much faster for such use than a traditional spinning hard drive.

[Santiago de la Rosa]

At least 3Gb GPU, AMD (openCL) or Nvidia (CUDA)

1xSSD for System/Programs

1xSSD for clips

 

[jagnje]

Ok, thank you. How much cache space is ussualy enough? 

Why would an ssd for clips work faster? I have no problems wit realtime until I have more than my gpu can handle.

sorry for all the questions, but I'm a bit new with resolve. 

[Santiago de la Rosa]

Clips will read faster and if you render at ssd writes will be faster too.

A good SSD is near 450Mb-500Mb Write/Read

[enny]

I have gtx 780 gtx 550ti and ATI 5770 for monitor 2 1tb hd in raid 0 working on bmpcc raw with no problems 123gb memory did some 4k for test and no problems all on mac

[LimitBreak]

I'd either get the skylake i7 6700K cpu with h.265 hardware encoding support, or i7 5820K 6 cores haswell E processor for the best bang to performance.

Get 2 SSD drives (makes a huge difference) Samsung 850 pro and evo, also cheap 2 TB 7200 RPM HD for storage.

16GB ram or more is good

Open CL is bringing faster results with some people, as of now it is getting more support and I'd look into the Radeon R9 390x, or if you require Nvidia skip the latest generation, it doesn't seem to bring any faster encoding and it is still not supported natively by many NLE programs, so research it!

Get at least a 750 Watts PSU 80+ Silver, power is neglected by many and causes problems especially with power hungry GPUs while encoding !

 

If you have a microcenter near you, they usually have bundle deals on the CPU + motherboard.

 

Check Slickdeals for the cheapest prices on SSDs and GPUs

 

also research pcpartpicker

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Greg Padgett]

Hey guys a question. My current desktop is a Dell XPS, I7 3.4ghz, 32GB ram and an older Radeon graphics card. The way the computer is built, it can only hold smaller graphics cards which limits my choices to upgrade. I've been looking at this one Nvidia quadro k2200. What do you guys think? Will this run Resolve? My guess is yes but before I drop the coin I'd like a second or even third opinion. Thanks!

[agolex]

Hey guys a question. My current desktop is a Dell XPS, I7 3.4ghz, 32GB ram and an older Radeon graphics card. The way the computer is built, it can only hold smaller graphics cards which limits my choices to upgrade. I've been looking at this one Nvidia quadro k2200. What do you guys think? Will this run Resolve? My guess is yes but before I drop the coin I'd like a second or even third opinion. Thanks!

The way I understand it, it would be a great card for the UI and editing part, but you'd need a second one that drives no monitor for computing acceleration. And for that the big gaming cards are better. But as long as you're not trying to render a feature, this shouldn't matter too much. Please, anyone with more insight chime in, I've always tried to wrap my head around this as I haven't had more than a single GFX card, yet.

[Greg Padgett]

The way I understand it, it would be a great card for the UI and editing part, but you'd need a second one that drives no monitor for computing acceleration. And for that the big gaming cards are better. But as long as you're not trying to render a feature, this shouldn't matter too much. Please, anyone with more insight chime in, I've always tried to wrap my head around this as I haven't had more than a single GFX card, yet.

So the card will be good for the editing but not so much for the rendering? The rendering is my biggest concern. Not so much about speed but quality. Everything I've tried to render in 4k has turned out extremely choppy. 1080p is much better but still.... I bought the camera for the 4k!! Maybe I should look around some more before making a decision. Thank you for your thoughts agolex!

[agolex]

So the card will be good for the editing but not so much for the rendering? The rendering is my biggest concern. Not so much about speed but quality. Everything I've tried to render in 4k has turned out extremely choppy. 1080p is much better but still.... I bought the camera for the 4k!! Maybe I should look around some more before making a decision. Thank you for your thoughts agolex!

The quality of the render shouldn't be affected, I guess, that sounds more like there are issues with your PC and software. Really hard to say what, though. Bad overclocking, faulty software installs, faulty hardware, hard to say. You don't get better video quality usually, just faster editing and rendering.

[tosvus]

hmm a slow card shouldn't give you bad rendering, only slow rendering.. Maybe you mean playback on YOUR computer is choppy? With a slow videocard, and maybe some other limiting components,or bad drivers/software, it is quite possible it doesn't work smoothly on your pc, but try the footage somewhere else.

[Greg Padgett]

Thanks agolex and tosvus for the replies. I'm going to try to explain what's happening and maybe I can get this figured out.

I had a GH4 before the Rx10 2 so I'm familiar with 4k files.

I've been using Power Director to edit all of my videos up to this point and have been able to produce quality videos in 4k with it. I don't get clean playback while editing but the final product runs smoothly on this machine.

With Davinci Resolve, I not only don't get smooth playback while editing 4k, the final product is also choppy while watching on this machine directly from my hard drive. Imagine when watching a satellite television and a big storm moves in over head. The way the tv signal breaks up into blocks. Thats what I'm seeing in fully rendered files.  If I edit 1080p with Davinci, the playback whilst editing is still somewhat choppy but the final product plays smooth.

I've checked and double checked my timeline settings to make sure they match the frame rate of the footage being edited. I've rendered to Mpeg4 which is what I render to in Power Director without issue.

I just suspected that Davinci doesn't like my video card when rendering 4k for whatever reason. It is my understanding that some editors are more hardware intensive than others.

I tried to upload some clips to youtube to demonstrate but youtube is crawling this morning. like 45 minutes to upload 20 seconds at the moment. This evening, when I get back home I may try a file sharing site so that you may download and watch some 4k clips edited from this machine. If they play smoothly on your machine then I'll know the problem is on my end. I very much appreciate your time.

 

Edit... I also wanted to add that I did un install, and then re install Davinci as I thought I may have had a bad install on first try.  It did not help.

[sunyata]

always use your fastest disk for cache since most software now is using disk cache for playback, other than that it's most likely your video card for RT effects.