Video Editing PC

[RaptorMan]

I use Adobe Premiere Pro CC and have been using it on a higher end laptop but even a high end laptop chokes big time on 4K footage so I researched building a desktop workstation and just placed the order for it today. At first I was looking for an entry level editing system in the $1K-$1.5K range but there isn't much at that price point that is well suited to 4K video so I upped the budget and looked again. When all is said and done the new box I came up with is a tad under $3K so quite a bit more than my initial plans but much less than the next step up at about $5K. You can, of course, spend $20K or more on a high end rig but me no gots that kind of money...

So, what I came up with is:

1. Thermaltake V71 case
2. Thermaltake TPD-0750M power supply
3. Asus x99 Pro/USB 3.1 motherboard
4. Intel i7-5820K unlocked CPU
5. Corsair H100i GTX CPU water cooler
6. G.Skill Ripjaws DDR4 RAM at 3200 with low CAS
7. EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti water cooled GPU
8. Samsung Pro 950 512GB PCIe SSD
9. WD Black 6TB HD
10. LG 14x SATA Blu-ray writer
11. Atech Flash Technology PRO-77U USB and flash reader
12. Microsoft Sculpt Comfort Desktop keyboard and mouse
13. Microsoft Windows 10 Home USB

So, just placed the order today with most items ordered from Amazon with Prime shipping -- should have most of it Monday, but the CPU and RAM coming from Newegg will likely be a day later and the flash reader not until the end of the week. One last item ordered from Amazon is a 18"x24" anti-static mat with wrist straps and ground plug for parts assembly. I live in an apartment with nothing but carpeting and that stuff is a static generator particularly in the low humidity south west and even more so in the winter.

I haven't built a PC since 2003 but most of this is common sense and taking your time. Doing research on Youtube is very helpful as you can glean things from others and seeing with your own eyes is a great help. I figure it will take me a half day to build and then a day to install Windows and programs and get everything setup properly.

This is not the end, of course, as I anticipate adding a few things over time to further improve performance and mostly to add more storage. At present the system will have just two drives -- the 512GB SSD and a 6TB HD, but I'd really want another 950 Pro for working storage and several more HD's for bulk storage. I was tempted to order two of the 950's, but I'm hoping they release a 1TB version soon as that would actually be the better choice for working storage. The 950 set's some new performance points with reads speeds of about 2.5GB/sec and write speed of about 1.5GB/sec -- that kind of performance will be very helpful during editing and rendering.


Brian

 

[RaptorMan]

The next step up from the system I ordered would likely include an 8-core CPU with 2 GPU's and a custom water cooler for the CPU and both GPU's -- total increase would likely be close to $2K. Getting much above that and you'd want a dual CPU board with two 8-core CPU's and a couple or three higher end GPU's all cooled by water -- think more like $7K.


Brian

 

[DaBone]

I have built my own system too. Chosed these components, in order to get a smaller flexible system.

1. Corsair 350D
2. Corsair AX860
3. ASUS X99-M WS
4. Intel i7-5960X
5. Corsair H100i GTX
6. Corsair Dominator DDR4 3000MHz 16GB
7. ASUS GTX 780 (Was thinking to upgrade to Titan X)
8. Samsung SM951 M.2 SSD 512GB
9. Intel 750 PCI-E SSD 400GB
10. A lot of external HD:s and two NAS.
11. Lexar Professional Dual-slot Cardreader. USB 3.0
12. Mouse: Steelseries Sensei
13. Keyboard: Logitec G19 (Gaming-keyboard)
14. Windows 7 Ultimate (Will never get Win10, never!)

Because of how Microsoft has managed their launch of Windows 10, I will put the above PC as a HTPC with Linux in my living room.
My confidence in Microsoft can not be lower then it is right now, so planning to leave them and go over to Apple instead.
A Mac Pro is on the shopping list.. Could have been an Inspire Pro instead.

My next computer...

Mac PRO
Processor: Intel XEON E5 (6-core or 8-core)
RAM: 32GB 1866MHz DDR3 ECC
SSD: 512GB PCIe
2 x AMD FirePro D700 with 6GB GDDR5

Mac Pro - Performance - Apple

 

[RaptorMan]

Well it looks like our system are not too different. Similar Asus x99 motherboard. Similar 512GB M.2 SSD. I would have liked the 8-core 2011v3 CPU but at $600 more a bit hard to justify.

I added another 6TB WD Black to the order making two of them but will hold off on any other SSD's until Samsung has a 1TB 950 Pro.

The main reason to go with Win10 is better handling of 4K displays. I have a 4K laptop, the higher end laptop I mentioned in my prior, but it has Win7 and there's insufficient control over font and icon size to properly work with a 4K display. And, M$ has added most of the spying they baked into Win10 into older version through updates they don't make clear adds the spying. So, unless you shutoff updates altogether or know each and every update you are likely to have the spying on Win7 whether you know it or not.


Brian

 

[DaBone]

Well it looks like our system are not too different. Similar Asus x99 motherboard. Similar 512GB M.2 SSD. I would have liked the 8-core 2011v3 CPU but at $600 more a bit hard to justify.

I added another 6TB WD Black to the order making two of them but will hold off on any other SSD's until Samsung has a 1TB 950 Pro.

The main reason to go with Win10 is better handling of 4K displays. I have a 4K laptop, the higher end laptop I mentioned in my prior, but it has Win7 and there's insufficient control over font and icon size to properly work with a 4K display. And, M$ has added most of the spying they baked into Win10 into older version through updates they don't make clear adds the spying. So, unless you shutoff updates altogether or know each and every update you are likely to have the spying on Win7 whether you know it or not.


Brian

I did a clean install and shutoff the updates directly.
Most spy software is probably in service pack 1, telemetry and other things.

 

[ringolong]

I render 4k in about 45 seconds per 1 minute of video @ 422 pro res on an i7 4790k stock clocked hackintosh (cost me less than 1k to build not including the monitor)

You will have to let me know how much quicker yours is. (Wondering about the speed versus cores)

 

[RaptorMan]

I render 4k in about 45 seconds per 1 minute of video @ 422 pro res on an i7 4790k stock clocked hackintosh (cost me less than 1k to build not including the monitor)

You will have to let me know how much quicker yours is. (Wondering about the speed versus cores)

A 6-core like the 5820K or the 8-core like the 5960X will tend to be faster at the same clock as a 4-core so my system and DaBone's system should tend to be faster. When you have effects added then the GPU comes into play the GTX 980 Ti is faster than the GTX 780 DaBone has but his faster CPU might offset that.

I'm not sure I'll use pro res all that much but it will depend on how the system works with the RAW files.


Brian

 

[ringolong]

I use full res when editing too.

Will be interesting to see how yours performs.

 

[AllanM]

My system is similar.. i7-5820K (OC'd @ 4.3Ghz) and I also use PP.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti is a great bit of kit - great value for money. No regrets there at all!

 

[RaptorMan]

My system is similar.. i7-5820K (OC'd @ 4.3Ghz) and I also use PP.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti is a great bit of kit - great value for money. No regrets there at all!

Yes it is...

Got a knock on the door this morning and FedEx delivered my i7-5820K and G.Skill RAM. I should have most of the system Monday and should begin the build either late Monday or Tuesday. Should be up and running by midweek.

I added a second 6TB WD Black HD but am holding off on a working PCIe SSD. I was tempted to add a second Samsung 950 Pro but at the moment they are limited to 512GB and I think a working drive for video should probably be more like 1TB so hopefully Samsung will introduce a 1TB version of the 950 Pro soon.

The only thing that worries me a bit about the 950 Pro is that they apparently get pretty hot when being worked hard. I'll check that out and if the 950 Pro I'm installing does get hotter than I'd like I'll look into providing direct fan coverage to cool it. Once I have a handle on that my confidence in its lifespan will be improved.


Brian

 

[AllanM]

^^ I have a SanDisk SDSSDHII 960G as a 'working drive, plus two 256G SSD drives for the OS & temp. All cool (;>)

Hope the build goes without hitch.

 

[ringolong]

My system is similar.. i7-5820K (OC'd @ 4.3Ghz) and I also use PP.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti is a great bit of kit - great value for money. No regrets there at all!

Was there a significant performance increase with the OC? I installed a coolermaster heatsink for ocing when I built, but have not seen a need to yet.

Mine jumps to 4.46 when rendering.

 

[AllanM]

^^ Out of the box, the i7-5820K is a 3.3G with 3.6G turbo speed...?

What are you using to measure processor speed? If you haven't OC'd it then unlikely it's 4.46Ghz.

Be interesting to know what export setting people are using to benchmark the 4K export.

 

[ringolong]

HWMonitor is what I use to monitor. It is running at 4.36 here. It could have been 4.36 and not 4.46 like I thought. I will do a longer running test to see.

 

[AllanM]

^^ Ahh... that is for an i7-4790K, I was thinking you had an i7-5820K. yes, that should turbo up to 4.4.
So out of the box, no, there isn't a great deal between the two processors. I have two more cores running considerably slower.
OC'd I have two more cores running at about the same speed.

BUT.... and this is paramount, the i7-5820K has nearly double the number of PCIE lanes (16vs28) which gives some overhead after a PCIx16 Graphics card is installed. With the i7-4790K you immediately have a bottleneck if you have any, or indeed add another PCIE device.
Of course a graphics card is not used unless you use HW accelerated effects / filters, so saying it takes 45secs to render a minute of 4K is really a bit meaningless.

On my setup,
With Graphics HW disabled it still takes about 45 secs to render 4K with no effects. Add a couple of HW accelerated effects and we're up to 4 minutes / minute.
With Graphics HW enabled it still takes about 45 secs with no effects and still less than a minute with the same effects as above.

 

[ringolong]

Thanks for the info!

The 4790k seems quick enough for what little bit of editing I do. Just mostly color grading, but if I need more speed in the future I will move to a 6 or 8 core.

 

[RaptorMan]

Yeah, the 5820K looks to be in the sweet spot for performance/price though it is now a generation behind. I wish there was a comparable 14nm version but with 8-cores.

The GPU isn't the deal breaker unless you are effects heavy bur if you do have a number of effects a good GPU is very helpful. I could have gone with a lesser GPU than the EVGA GTX 980 Ti, but when you do have effects and when rendering it's nice to have a good GPU.

I have about 2.5TB of still images and video at this point and loading that onto the 6TB drives I ordered will likely take several hours over USB 3.0.


Brian

 

[IrishSights]

Hi Brian, good choice, last spring I built a very similar 5820K 32 gb workstation to run Photoscan Pro. Just a few differences. I used a Quadro 2000 only because I got it it really cheap from Germany, slightly smaller HD and SSD. I do only a little 4K editing with PP and it handles it like breeze and it's not overclocked. Have fun.

 

[RaptorMan]

Hi Brian, good choice, last spring I built a very similar 5820K 32 gb workstation to run Photoscan Pro. Just a few differences. I used a Quadro 2000 only because I got it it really cheap from Germany, slightly smaller HD and SSD. I do only a little 4K editing with PP and it handles it like breeze and it's not overclocked. Have fun.

I have to believe the Photoscan Pro makes heavy use of a GPU but don't have any experience with it myself.

I do plan to OC a bit but definitely not pushing it. The stock clock on the 5820 is 3.3GHz and some folks have OC'd to about 4.6GHz or even a bit more -- I plan to stay around 4.25GHz. I will similarly OC the GPU but once again, only to about 75% of what's feasible.

I have a NAS with 4TB and more than 8 externals of about 2TB each. When travelling I take 3 externals for still images and 3 for video so that I always have 3 copies of all images and video, though I don't always update the second and third copies everyday. When you get in late and it takes an hour to upload the images and video it's not always practical to stay up another hour to copy all files to all drives particularly when you wish to be out the door by 5AM the next day.

Cloud storage ... ha ha ha ha ha!


Brian

 

[RaptorMan]

I received all the components Monday and built the rig yesterday but didn't have a DisplayPort cable so I had to wait till today to power up. Installed Win 10 Home and installed and updated the drivers for the GPU and SSD. I then installed the main software (Office, Photoshop, Lightroom, Premiere Pro and AfterEffects) as well as the main utilities like Dropbox.

I then connected up the two 6TB HD's I'd left unplugged until the OS was installed and have begun loading up my image and video archive -- should be finished tonight. I still have mu media/flash reader to install and will do that after I've copied the media onto the HD's.

I have not yet started to OC and probably won't for a while until I know what the baseline is. So far temp are very low and CPU is running along about 24C with the highest temps on the motherboard about 33C. At this point the fans are slow and pretty quiet.


Brian