Hey Nerds... I'm Building a video editing PC. Help me.

dell30rb said:
pcpartpicker.com

has some builds with current parts prices. You might find it helpful

I’m not an expert but it seems like intel and nvidia stuff is worth it.

I built an i7-8700k machine with 32gb ram, 1080ti and SSD’s. It’s a beast. I think it will stay relevant for at least another 3-4 years.
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Beast on anything but Adobe software. :D It's like the Crysis meme. Adobe is the Crysis of creative software.
 
@SixPapaCharlie

Here are the notes from my stepson.
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Here is the parts list I came up with for the budget: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/pPHNvW
It should handle 4K video editing no problem and has pretty good future upgradeability.

Some notes:
  • The thermal compound is not needed but I recommend getting it. The CPU comes with a cooler with pre-applied thermal paste which is fine for performance but I've found that it almost acts as an adhesive and makes it hard to remove later on. It's also not reusable so you'd need thermal paste anyways if you wanted to remove and re-install it.
  • It does not have built in wi-fi. If you need/want it you can grab the motherboard version that has it for around $30 more, a PCIe add-in card for roughly the same price or cheaper, or a usb one.

Places to save money:
  • The case: You can save around $10 by going with a case from an even cheaper manufacturer although at that point you're really getting the bare minimum of a case and I wouldn't recommend it if you want a good time building in it. ex: https://bit.ly/35PZ8nH
  • GPU: If render times are not a major concern and a cheaper build or better and smoother editing experience (through upgraded CPU or SSD) you could replace the 1660 with a 1650 SUPER (https://bit.ly/388sorm). This would still greatly help rendering but also save around $40.
  • Thermal paste: Like I said I'd recommend it but if you know you won't need it or already have some you could save $8 not getting it.
  • RAM: going with 3200MHz RAM instead of 3600MHz could save you around $20. The performance downgrade would (from what I've heard since I'm running 3200MHz) be noticeable.

Potential upgrades/changes:
These are things I would do with the money left over from the budget and/or savings from the above list.
  • Upgrade CPU to a 3800X (~$50): Going with the cheaper 1650 SUPER listed above and upgrading to this CPU is honestly just as good an option as the original build and a very similar price (~$10 more). It's hard to find benchmarks that help quantify the differences but my guess is this one should have slightly worse render times and slightly better editing and timeline performance. https://bit.ly/36QnOO2
  • Upgrade CPU to a 3900X (~$170): This exceeds the $1000 budget not matter what but is still worth considering. This CPU is MUCH better than the other 2 with 12 cores instead of 8 (at same clock speeds). Simply replacing the 3700X with this one would put the total at around $1120. But applying ALL the cost saving measures above puts the total at only ~$1040 (https://pcpartpicker.com/list/gQm8jp). This is very much a matter of personal preference at this point. I personally would prefer all the small things you'd lose by downgrading some of the components than absolute sheer computing power but it's your choice.
  • Get an m.2 NVME SSD (~$70): These are a step above even SATA SSD's and are incredibly easy to install (plug in at an angle, lower, 1 screw in). Not needed but could be a nice-to-have and would make a great boot SSD. https://bit.ly/2thRS6J (not the fastest but great price to performance).
 
jrcox19 said:
Slight nitpick, but your statement is incorrect. M.2 is a form factor that can support a variety of communication protocols, including SATA. What you likely meant to recommend is an M.2 NVMe SSD, which is faster than traditional SATA and M.2 SATA drives.
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Yes, NVMe drives are faster than SSD, but in my experience the M.2 SSDs are themselves significantly faster than regular SSD. I'm sure that depends, in part, on the SATA controller on the motherboard, but the boards I've seen support higher speeds even for SSD on M.2. YMMV.

So yes, NVMe is the way to go to maximize speed, but M.2 SSD will beat traditional SSD.
 
You dont always get more by paying more. The hospital spent $12,000 on each of the new PCs to run our production software and I can blow it out of the water on a little pcpartspicker 'budget build' gaming box I put together with my son last year for a tenth of that.
 
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deonb said:
. But even the rig above is not nearly enough for editing 4k footage in Premiere without using proxies in a 9-way multi-cam. You can't even view all the cams without it dropping frames. You can edit a single track no problem, but once you go multi-cam you don't go back.
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mr_happyland said:
Yup. That'll do it. I haven't tried that with my new setup yet but I would expect similar results, at least with my current USB 3.0 RAID drive. My next purchase might be the OWC Thunderblade external SSD. 2800 MB/s transfer speeds :eek:
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Just an update to this...I played back 15 layers of 2.7K (that's what I usually shoot) gopro mp4 at full quality with color correction on all layers and the imac i9 didn't even blink, the fan didn't kick on and still butter smooth scrubbing on the timeline. Sweeeeet.
 
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SixPapaCharlie said:
I bought a mac mini once and I gave it 2 weeks before I began making up reasons why I hated it and I gave it to a homeless man in downtown Dallas.
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And there's your problem. You're a nerd. Which is to say you ain't just using a computer for emailing aunt Kay the latest funny youtube clip you stumbled across or that link to the web page you told her about that had all that info about why she should really look into a reverse mortgage.

You need a computer that can actually do stuff. Someone like you trying to make the leap from PC to Mac by going with a mini is like a fixed wing pilot making the switch to rotor by selling the Cessna 414 and buying a Robinson R22 and then being disappointed because the R22 just isn't capable of performing the same missions.

Well no of course it doesn't do the same missions. Duh. That's not what it was made for. The problem isn't the platform, its the user who looked at the price tag and assumed it could do the same things a PC could do for that price. It can't. Macs cost more. That's just how it is. But they also work extremely well for what they do and they hold their value a heck of a lot longer than their PC counterparts. Total cost of ownership is a thing with computers just like it is with airplanes, and Macs do quite will in that regard.

You're not a dumb guy. If you figured out how to do what you do on PC's you can definitely figure out how to do it on Macs and like it or not, Macs are still the goto platform for trying to do what you're trying to do. But you ain't gonna do it on a mini. Get a real Mac, spend a week or two learning it and be done with it.

Like yourself I was a life long PC guy. I bought my first Mac because I was doing PC repair and I had to learn the platform in order to expand my client base. Then I realized we had been buying my wife brand new $800 laptops every 18 months or so and trashing the computer it was replacing because it was used PC junk. Meanwhile 8 years later I was using the same macbook I'd bought used for $2400 and it was still running like a top. I never again questioned the wisdom of spending more for a high end Mac.
 
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mr_happyland said:
Just an update to this...I played back 15 layers of 2.7K (that's what I usually shoot) gopro mp4 at full quality with color correction on all layers and the imac i9 didn't even blink, the fan didn't kick on and still butter smooth scrubbing on the timeline. Sweeeeet.
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In multicam??
 
deonb said:
In multicam??
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First test...no. I just reduced scale and checkered them across a 1080-sized sequence. I just tried 2nd test...15 clips in multicam view, switching between cams, slightly steppy at full resolution after about 10 seconds. Dropped it down to half res and it was perfect. Playing back on a 5K display. I'm happy.

I will add, however, that I rarely cut multicam and when i do it's never more than 6 cameras. I'm more interested in smooth playback of raw camera codecs, combined with multiple effects layers and fast renders/exports. I haven't had time to mess with that on this system yet.
 
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Matthew said:
You can always go old-school and save hundreds of dollars:

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I made my living assembling PCs from parts in the early 1990s. Sold as many as 300 a year. My hands never healed; I was always bleeding because the cases and internals were razors.
 
mr_happyland said:
First test...no. I just reduced scale and checkered them across a 1080-sized sequence. I just tried 2nd test...15 clips in multicam view, switching between cams, slightly steppy at full resolution after about 10 seconds. Dropped it down to half res and it was perfect. Playing back on a 5K display. I'm happy.

I will add, however, that I rarely cut multicam and when i do it's never more than 6 cameras. I'm more interested in smooth playback of raw camera codecs, combined with multiple effects layers and fast renders/exports. I haven't had time to mess with that on this system yet.
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Challenge accepted. I have a Core-i9 MAC that I can dust off and compare the difference. Will post results later. What's the specs of your machine?
 
deonb said:
Challenge accepted. I have a Core-i9 MAC that I can dust off and compare the difference. Will post results later. What's the specs of your machine?
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It wasn't so much a challenge as an observation, but I'm curious as to your results :) I've got a 2019 iMac 27" i9 8 core, Radeon Vega 48 GFX, 64 GB DDR4 RAM, 1TB internal SSD. Media is on an external Caldigit USB 3.0 Raid 0 HDD drive (which is now currently the slowest component in the setup)
 
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Kenny Phillips said:
I made my living assembling PCs from parts in the early 1990s. Sold as many as 300 a year. My hands never healed; I was always bleeding because the cases and internals were razors.
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Yeah, I can't remember how much DNA I've left on the pointy sides of circuit boards.
 
Just build a Hackintosh, maybe with dual-boot
 
wsuffa said:
Just build a Hackintosh, maybe with dual-boot
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I run MacOS in VMWare for XCode. I should see if it will pass-through the NVidia to the VM (maybe It'd be better with a Radeon for macos?) but it runs great and for a PC guy who wasn't GPU-accelerating, it might be a nice compromise. Price is right at $Free too. :D
 
mr_happyland said:
It wasn't so much a challenge as an observation, but I'm curious as to your results :) I've got a 2019 iMac 27" i9 8 core, Radeon Vega 48 GFX, 64 GB DDR4 RAM, 1TB internal SSD. Media is on an external Caldigit USB 3.0 Raid 0 HDD drive (which is now currently the slowest component in the setup)
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Ok. It's... weird. Also on an MacBook Pro 8 Core i9, Radeon, 4TB internal SSD.

The create proxies took 2 hours on the MAC, as opposed to 40 minutes on the PC.

However, without a proxy, I can play 9 Cams at around 2 FPS on the MAC, where I can only get around 1 FPS on the PC.

Since 2 FPS is still not really usable, I prefer the quicker proxy gen. But it's interesting that there isn't a clear winner between the two. My suspicion is that Create Proxies is wildly multi-core and Macbook Pro's overheat almost immediately on multicore and step down the CPU's.
 
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schmookeeg said:
I run MacOS in VMWare for XCode. I should see if it will pass-through the NVidia to the VM (maybe It'd be better with a Radeon for macos?) but it runs great and for a PC guy who wasn't GPU-accelerating, it might be a nice compromise. Price is right at $Free too. :D
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Many server motherboards with SR-IOT tech and later can pass an entire PCI card straight through to a guest OS on various virtualization platforms. The pain in the butt is it’s often quite an exercise of getting the right BIOS and other firmware on everything, but it was commonplace to do this for a while with things like 1G and 10G Ethernet/fiber cards.

Not too horrible on a single server, bit when you start doing live migration of OSes and there needs to be an identical card in the exact same spot on the PCI bus waiting in server 2 for the VM to grab... gets weird.
 
denverpilot said:
Many server motherboards with SR-IOT tech and later can pass an entire PCI card straight through to a guest OS on various virtualization platforms. The pain in the butt is it’s often quite an exercise of getting the right BIOS and other firmware on everything, but it was commonplace to do this for a while with things like 1G and 10G Ethernet/fiber cards.

Not too horrible on a single server, bit when you start doing live migration of OSes and there needs to be an identical card in the exact same spot on the PCI bus waiting in server 2 for the VM to grab... gets weird.
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Sure. I just don't think MacOS supports NVidia cards at all, so I think the drivers are complete unobtanium. :D
 
I bought the and mRyzen chipemory from the video but doubled it to 32gb

Still researching video cards.
 
deonb said:
Ok. It's... weird. Also on an MacBook Pro 8 Core i9, Radeon, 4TB internal SSD.

The create proxies took 2 hours on the MAC, as opposed to 40 minutes on the PC.

However, without a proxy, I can play 9 Cams at around 2 FPS on the MAC, where I can only get around 1 FPS on the PC.

Since 2 FPS is still not really usable, I prefer the quicker proxy gen. But it's interesting that there isn't a clear winner between the two. My suspicion is that Create Proxies is wildly multi-core and Macbook Pro's overheat almost immediately on multicore and step down the CPU's.
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Aren't MacBooks rather thermally limited these days compared to their desktop counterparts?
 
deonb said:
That sentence needs to be taken out back and shot.
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Ha! I didn't even notice that. I must have touched the screen inappropriately after typing the sentence. I purchased the chip and the memory.
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
Ha! I didn't even notice that. I must have touched the screen inappropriately after typing the sentence. I purchased the chip and the memory.
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Just as long as you didn't have your tablet in the shower
 
And no one suggested open-source Linux yet. Tsk tsk. As in dropping the fancy, expensive Windows programs.
 
flhrci said:
And no one suggested open-source Linux yet. Tsk tsk. As in dropping the fancy, expensive Windows programs.
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Generally people who know Premiere and After Effects have invested so much time into learning it that if you give them the choice between a $5k machine running Premiere + AE and a free machine running Linux and something else, they'll buy the $5k machine every time.
 
I believe that this:

SixPapaCharlie said:
Then I went the software route and now I am out of patience when it comes to time wasted on glitches and waiting for the PC to catch up.
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Makes this advice:

flhrci said:
And no one suggested open-source Linux yet. Tsk tsk. As in dropping the fancy, expensive Windows programs.
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...An invitation to either constant tech support or an AMD Ryzen (or it's alibaba competitor, the 'and mRyzen chipemory') being thrown out of a window, lofted on a wind of profanity and strange oaths.

:D
 
Buy up a bunch of SGI machines and edit like its 2004. Just have to jump in the way back machine to make it happen.
 
gkainz said:
Buy up a bunch of SGI machines and edit like its 2004. Just have to jump in the way back machine to make it happen.
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Heh. I used to have an SGI Indy back then. Now my phone is 10 times faster with 10 times as much capacity.
 
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