2010 Tandem NLE Desktop Dream Spec

[goobersnuftda 0]

It all comes down to money. Dream machines are nice but there is a balance between performance and your budget.

Hard drives are relatively cheap. Ideally you would have your boot drive where your programs are installed. Having a 7200 RPM hard drive is fine but where you are working and rendering, the big $$$ gets into a pair of Velocoraptors spinning at 10,000 RPM. The reason why I say pair is that they would be set up as a RAID-0 config which means they are striped. Even data on one, odd data on the other basically doing half the workload at 10,000 rpm while the other drive is doing the same. Lightining fast but with a compromoise. If one drive fails, you have lost everything on both. Ying and Yang.

And since you can get some rather big storage for less than $100, slap in some additional archive drives. Uncompressed video files take up tons of room.

The very best thing to do is buy as much horse power as you can afford right now. That means processor, MB and the precious, precious RAM. You can always add hard drives later (wether Raid-0 or Raid-1 for backup) and as many TB drives as you need for storage. Once you commit to the CPU and MB, you are basically done as your core system. Next years new processors do not like old MB let alone RAM.

Swap out your video card if you want more later, plug in more RAM, more HD etc. but I would put as much $$$ in to the ponies that make it run first. Next years budget is for storage.

Windo$e 7 64 bit of course. They finally got a stable rocking OS going. Was running CS4 to render a very complex after effects project and it took about 2 days to render the final project (could have tweeked the settings for faster render time but couldn't find the sweet spot). Upgraded to 64 bit CS5 under windo$e 7 and the performance upgrade on that reduced render time to about 14 hours. Both situations were running an Intel Quad core, 8 GB ram.

Have fun. Computers are awesome and the center of my business and personal life. It is absolutely amazing at what they can do in order to make your life fuller. (Skype for free from Thailand back home, video edit for $$$, invoice directly to customer etc.)

[Icon134 0]

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For NLE you'll want another hard drive... and the system doesn't include a specification.

Scott

By 'another' hard drive, do you mean a second drive in addition to this one? Or a different drive instead of this one.

What kind of specification is it missing?

For Nonlinear editing it is usually a good idea to have more then one hard drive.

and I think I must have been distracted regarding the spec comment... I think I was going to point out that this system doesn't include an OS so you'll need that as well...

Livin' on the Edge... sleeping with my rigger's wife...

[AHoyThere 0]

So far, I've already got some of the smaller stuff. A couple of monitors, Win7Pro-64bit, 4x1TB raid 5 NAS for archival storage. We're learning Sony Vegas Studio.
But we want to upgrade the computer and upgrade Vegas.

[goobersnuftda 0]

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We're learning Sony Vegas Studio.
But we want to upgrade the computer and upgrade Vegas.

If you are truly starting from scratch, you might want to consider starting on another path. The Adobe line of products are the basic standard and they all talk to one another beautifully while working on the same project at the same time.

Editing a photo in Photoshop while using it as a still in Premiere is completely seamless. Take a video chunk and do some funky special effects in After Effects and that too is seamless. If you have the horse power you can run all of those programs at the same time and pop into one and the other and it automatically updates between them all. Not to mention that there are thousands and thousands of plug ins available for all their programs.

Vegas may be good but if you are learning from scratch, might be a good idea to choose your path wisely before you being your journey.

This is no different than starting out with Canon. If you happen to buy Nikon and get a few lenses, you are basically screwed to try and start over again unless you got mega $$$ to duplicate. Do your research and choose the right path for you because once you travel down the path, you get to a point that it is too far to turn back and do it properly instead of just continuing on.

Remember Harold and Kumar? They left their cell phone in the apartment and they were too far to turn back and get it. It's kinda like that :)

[DSE 3]

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If you are truly starting from scratch, you might want to consider starting on another path. The Adobe line of products are the basic standard and they all talk to one another beautifully while working on the same project at the same time.

A-Adobe CS is far from the "basic standard." Avid and FCP are the basic standards. Period. Everything else is a wanna-be.

B-None of the Adobe products can be automated.

C-The learning curve is significantly higher with Premiere and it's tools than Edius, Speed Edit, or Vegas, all of which are much more suited for fast-turnaround of video. This is why Edius and Vegas are the "basic standard" in the news industry for posted broadcast.

If you're editing video for yourself and turnaround for tandem or team isn't important, and you're making a feature or docco where time is only as valuable as you feel you're worth, Creative Suite is a terrific toolset.
At 5 times the street price of Vegas, Edius, or SpeedEdit.

[BlindBrick 0]

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I read an article recently from a computer mfg.

That article ignores the most germane feature of a multi-core processor when it comes to NLE, speed in threaded apps. Video rendering is a threaded app, and there the AMD X6's seriously trump Intel.

Yes, each core on the Intel chip works marginally faster, but that speed advantage evaporates in the face of the extra two cores on a X6, which give the X6 a 50% advantage when working threaded apps.

I do have a couple of questions for you Spot. We're probably putting a NLE power rig together for my wife. Right now my build spec has 16 mb of low latency RAM supporting 4 writers because 16 mb was the max I could install without going to a far more expensive specialist mobo. Will that be enough or do I need to look at other boards? Second, is there any noticable speed difference between a mouse and a wacom pen/tablet combo when it comes to editing?

-Blind

"If you end up in an alligator's jaws, naked, you probably did something to deserve it."

[Zlew 0]

*16 GB? maybe?

not sure you can do much with 16 megabits of ram these days. :)

I have a wacom for photoshop and love it. Not sure what the video application would be or how that would impact speed...but it's a great product for what TI use it for.

[Zlew 0]

Also, if you are getting a SATA3 board, might look at one of the SATA3 SSD's. The read speeds these things are getting are insane. So far I have been really happy with mine.

[BlindBrick 0]

yeah, 16 GB. I was a little distracted when I was typing. My 14 month old was chasing her older sister around with a club trying to settle a grudge.

Thanks for the pointer on the SSD.

-Blind

"If you end up in an alligator's jaws, naked, you probably did something to deserve it."