Building a computer for hd
 

I'm looking to build a computer that I can use to edit HD footage in. I'm used to a basic Mac for all of my SD stuff, but this is a big step. What would you suggest that I look into?

Also, I'm used to editing on a mac, but I've been reading that Macs can't burn blu-rays due to DVDSP dropping the ball on that. Will I need to pick up a PC as well just for burning those DVD's? Should I make a complete platform switch? Is that worth it? I've been using FCP since 4.0 was new, and I'm very adjusted to that, but I also know that NLE's are basically the same with different cookies here and there.

I guess one of the things that I really question is what processor speed, how much RAM, and what kind of video card? I don't need a Bugatti, but I know that if I buy a used sub compact, I'll be repairing/replacing it in a year.

**EDIT** This is, of course, mainly to be used for weddings. I won't be making a Star Wars film on this, so I don't need to go that over the top.

Hi Alex,

I think for HD, you should go for a PC and build your own. Do not buy PCs from Dell, HP, etc, it is very difficult to upgrade them and they come bundled with a bunch of pre-installed crappy proprietary software that drag your performance down. If something is wrong, you have to send back the whole PC for repair. If you build your own, and something is wrong, you can RMA just the malfunctioning item.

Processor: I would suggest to go with the new Intel Core i7. Its performance with Premiere Pro is absolutely fantastic. Moreover, this processor must be mounted on LGA1366 motherboards which holds anything up to 24GB DDR3 RAM which is colossal! I have an I7 920 with 12 GB RAM and I can say that rendering is ultra super fast, previewing is top quality (1920x1080 60i solid as rock). If you don't overclock, you can use the stock CPU Fan. If you want to overclock, you will need one of these two beasts: Thermalright Ultra 120 LGA1366 or CoolerMaster V8.

Motherboard: The 3 best LGA1366 motherboards are: The Asus P6T Deluxe (up to 12GB), the GIGABYTE GA EX58 UD5 (up to 24GB) and the EVGA 132 BL E758 A1 (up to 12GB). Any of these 3 will be great.

RAM: With a LGA1366 motherboard, you cannot have less than 3 x 1GB DDR3 RAM (3GB) because it works in Triple Channel. Which means you have to put 3 DIMMS or 6 DIMMS, not 2, 4 or 5. My recommandation is 6GB (3 x 2 GB or 6 x 1 GB). 12 GB is way too much... for now (I have 12GB). So buy 6 GB and then you can always add 6 more GB when you will need them. The price will probably be better. Corsair Dominator or OCZ Gold / Platinum series are among the best DIMMS on the market.

Disks: For HD editing, you will have to consider 2 HDDs stripped in Raid 0 for Vista 64-bit and the applications (don't store any data on those disks, only the OS and the apps). I recommend you buy two WD Velociraptor 150GB HLFS 10000RPM (Ultra fast, and silent).
For storage you can go for two WD Black Caviar 1TB.

Videocard: I have an Asus DK HD4870 1GB DDR5. It displays Bluray, AVCHD and any HD format extremely well! Plus it has two DVI outputs (you can transform them into HDMI outputs with an included adapter) so you can have 2 monitors. PLus, if you work on some 3D effects, it will help a lot.

Case: I would strongly recommend you the Lian Li A70B. It is the best case on the market when you consider Price, Craftmanship, Design, Functionalities, Real Estate, etc. Anyway, you should consider a 100% Aluminum case.

OS: Vista 64-bit

NLE Software: Premiere Pro (in my opinion, the best match for i7)
YouTube - Editing Many HD Formats with Adobe & Intel Core i7

If you need any advice for the other components (Power Supply, UPS, Bluray Burner, etc.) do not hesitate. If you have any problem assembling and installing, just post, I will try to assist you.

You can also take a look at this forum for additional information:
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/high-defi...n-scratch.html

One more detail.

These 3 motherboards have HD sound integrated so don't waste your money and time purchasing a soundcard unless you really need Home Theater on your office.

Another Option
 

Alex, another option is to look at what type of HD editing. If your doing HDV and simple graphics you could do an Intel iMac with a Firewire 800 drive. Blu-ray on a Mac you can use Toast. It offers simple menus and blu-ray burning on a Mac. I actually edit XDCam HD on my iMac at home with a Firewire 800 1TB Lacie. Author blu-ray using Toast. Clients are happy.

Reason why I like the iMac, small foot print. Simple updates on software, easy support if needed and its a pretty powerful computer. Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz, 320GB System Drive, Firewire 400 / 800 Ports and an ATI 2600 256MB Video Card.

On the other hand I do have a MacPro Quad 2.8Ghz to handle my DVCPro HD and Animation Codecs. Currently us Leopard with Final Cut Studio 2. Using the factory default configuration and added more storage and memory.

MacPro's very powerful and require very little maintenance and again easy software updates.

Overall PC to Mac is what software you want to use. Final Cut Studio 2 is pretty solid. On the PC Adobe Production Suite is coming along and very powerful. If it comes down to Blu-ray consider the Toast and external burner option. However more support on the Mac side for Blu-ray is coming. Personally look at the amount of time you do editing versus blu-ray burning. If Final Cut Studio is already familiar to you, stick with what you know.

Hopes this helps in your consideration.

Jeff is right, you should take into consideration the learning curve when working with a new NLE software. FCP is rock solid. And I am sorry, I didn't read the **EDIT** part of your post. Of course the machine I recommended you was for editing highly compressed files such as AVCHD. For HDV, you don't need a Ferrari. If you shoot in AVCHD format, take into account that Final Cut Pro doesn't edit AVCHD natively, it will convert it into its own format. You will lose in quality. I am not saying that future versions of FCP won't do it but for now, you are limited if you want to edit AVCHD natively. On a Mac, you will be able to do it with Premiere Pro.

Hardware only exists to run software. Deciding on editing tools and OS comes first. Data strategy second.

I do FCS and CS4 on mac. It's a tough time to buy a Mac Pro. The new models will have significant performance bottle necks removed. But will these come out winter or fall? We just don't know. I expect the new low end Mac Pro to easily beat the current high end model. It is true that there's always something faster down the line, but the new intel processors are a pretty big jump for video editing.

If PC I agree with Alexs Core i7 recommendation. Specifically the $300 quad processor. This setup moderately overclocked will perform well into the current Mac Pro line. If you build it yourself only use tested memory. I would fill all six slots with the same memory. Depending on software 6gb of high speed memory might outperform 12gb of standard memory. I would also suggest installing Vista 64 (yuck) if it's proven with your software choice.

I've built a lot of PC's. The thing I hate about mac is that they come finished. Where's the fun in that?

RE:
Disks: For HD editing, you will have to consider 2 HDDs stripped in Raid 0 for Vista 64-bit and the applications (don't store any data on those disks, only the OS and the apps). I recommend you buy two WD Velociraptor 150GB HLFS 10000RPM (Ultra fast, and silent).
For storage you can go for two WD Black Caviar 1TB.

Some corrections to this ...

before we talk hardware, we need to talk concept

You need

* Opsys/apps disk - Single -c:
* Read Disk Set - RAID - d:
* Render Disk set - RAID - e:
* External Storage - eSATA or USB2 - f:

Specifics ...

* Your opsys disk should be a reliable single drive 250G or greater, to hold your apps, opsys, saved data. If you have $$$ but a 10K drive.
Once setup - Ghost regularly and save Ghost images on external drive set.

* The read disk set is for capture from your video unit, so needs to be fast for write. The obvious solution is RAID 0. (stripe)
So if you striped 4 x 250 GB disks you end up with roughly 1 TB total storage, but with the advantage of data being written using 4 seperate drive head sets
When you want to render, the RAID 0 arrangement offers very fast read speed, again we see the advantage of 4 read head sets.
The disadvantage is that if one disk fails, the whole raid array is lost, with any data. However you mitigate the risk of this by only using it for scratch space.
Of course you can create a RAID 0 set with just 2 disks .. up to you ....

* The render set is if possible a similar 4 x 250 GB RAID 0 set. The idea here is that for performance, you want to avoid drive head contention, (simultaneos READ/WRITE tasks) , so we design the architecture to use the read set as the source and the renders set as the fast write set.

With drive arrays , scale is better than just single 10k or 15k disks .... the more heads/platters the better ....
Use SATA II disks for best bang for buck ....
Super fast processors like the i7 are great, but if your disks are too slow to provide data to them, they are waiting around doing nothing until the next chunk is fetched. Best performance is acheived by having your processor and RAM contantly working without need to wait for a disk access to get the next workload.

* You external drive will hold your archived projects, critical file backup, etc ... best practice for critical file managment is (multiple copy, multiple media)
That means have several copies on different media sets .... that way you always have a fallback position that will be successful.

Hi Justine,

" You need

* Opsys/apps disk - Single -c:
* Read Disk Set - RAID - d:
* Render Disk set - RAID - e: "

- Where would the project files/scratch be placed in this setup?
- What setup would you suggest, for a workflow that also includes using intermediate renders?

Scratch files can always live on your RAID arrays ... Its important to understand that RAID arrays are sensitive to disk failure, but then again those drive may run for 10 years in the array with no issues. The key message with all drive setups, be that multi-disk or single disk is that you keep multiple copies of critical files on multiple media sets. With TAPE based video camera's you keep important shots on tape, and keep easy to access RAW copies on hard drive or DVD/BLUray disks

if you have two raid 0 array sets, then they are really interchangable, but if you want to keep it pure, you move intermediate renders back to the READ set overnight when you are not time critical. The purpose of all this performance scaling is to make Capture, arrangement and render phases as fast as possible ... especially for HDV/AVCHD video where so much more demand is being made of the equipment.

True. A two drive RAID is twice a susceptible to a drive failure than a single drive. Four drives? Quadruple the risk.

One should be circumspect with advice that you gotta have something in your system. In this case, RAID can offer benefits but it comes with a price. Not only money but time spent managing it and others. RAID adds a level of complexity to your system. There are many who use RAID and are happy with it. There are others that don't and are just as happy. RAID is not a panacea. It's a tool that some need, and some do not. You have to decide which camp you fall into.

I edit native HDV with CS3 with lots of After Effects Dynamic Linking and color grading. I use a fair amount of QT files using the Animation codec. I do three camera HDV multi-cam edits and I don't need a RAID. Not yet anyway. I'm also running a Quad Core 6600, 4GB of RAM, three SATA internal disks and an nVidia 8800 card. It is a minimal system, I'll admit, but it works and I get product out the door without gnashing teeth and wringing hands.

It may be heresy, but let me recommend this. Get the best base box you can afford. Fast processor, big memory, good video card, big and fast internal storage (eSATA should do for starters. Buy quality bits and kit it all up. Use that for a while and see how it works for you. From there you can add and reconfigure as you see fit.

In my world, little bites are always best.

Stick with a mac buy toast and the upgrade to burn blu-ray. Raid 0 or 5 and you should have more then enough power to cut HDV

> especially for HDV/AVCHD video where so much more demand is being made of the equipment

Keep in mind the datarate for HDV is no higher than for DV - I agree with Tripp's comments on Raid being potentially more hassle than it's worth.

I keep seeing that toast is the only option for Mac. Is it possible to have DVD menus that don't look terrible? DVDSP makes it pretty easy, and I don't understand how toast works, I guess.

Also, I have no idea what you guys are talking about with RAID. I've heard OF it, but never understood it.

OK, let's say it's Friday afternoon and you and your colleagues are in a bar having a pint of beer before the weekend starts. You have only one throat to pour that pint into, so luckily it may take you some time. That is what happens without a Raid. Now think of a situation where you have multiple throats to pour the beer into, say two or more. That will make the beer to be finished much sooner. That is what happens with a raid. You will have multiple throats to pour that beer in, going much faster. For humans it would probably be called a RAIT, a redundant array of independent throats, instead of computer nerds calling it a redundant array of independent disks. but the effect is the same (without intoxication). It all works faster.

Read up here Alex on Raid configurations

RAID - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I too do not use a RAID in my system yet happily edit HDV and AVCHD. My system has Q9450, 8G RAM, 250G boot disc, 250G temp disc, 2 x750 video storage and three external eSATA drives, 2x 500G and a 1T. I use Edius to edit and convert the AVCHD to Canopus HQ but edit the HDV native on the timeline realtime in a three camera multicam edit with no problems. I keep a regular image of the Boot drive on one of the external drives and a rescue CD to boot from. In editing/rendering I always arrange for read and writes to come and go from different drives so that one drive doesn't have to read and write. Performance wise this is faster than a two disc RAID that is only about 1.7 times single drive speed for a single action ( read or write) because of head movement wereas the single drive case can stream the files if they are contiguous on the drive. IF I was in a production environment rather than a hobby then I would use a multidisc RAID with fast discs too but more than two discs in the array for sure for the reasons described earlier. About the only reason to use just one 2 disc RAID is to make life easier since it just looks like a big drive. But in this case it may be slower than two separate drives is some cases.

Ron Evans

Ron... Well said. There are performance gains to be had without a RAID but to this point, in this thread at least, no one has pointed them out.

A truly wise man looks at the whole situation from many angles and devises the best strategy to address it. Nicely done.

The data rate is no higher but the interframe nature of MPEG-2 requires more processor horsepower.

Edit: My previous statement, while correct, is irrelevant as part of the discussion it is part of.

I use Raid 1+0 but honestly I am more concerned about losing a drive and losing footage. The Raid O is just to speed up the drives so I don't lose so much speed in the mirror.

Seperation of read and write drives offers the most basic level of performance gain because you avoid "drive head contention".

Using one array (RAID 0 or other) to perform simultaneous heavy READ and WRITE (eg render ops) probably does offer less benefit than just having a two seperate disks, one reading, one writing. (benchmarking needed to confirm this)

If both your READ and WRITE drives are arrays, that will beat two seperate single drives for performance, because the READ array can channel more data to the processor so the processor has fewer WAITs and the WRITE set is able to keep up with the demand to offload processed data so the processor has fewer WAITS.

How you scale up drives into arrays is dependent on budget and your need for fast productivity. For the home hobbiest two drives are sufficient, unless your playing with RAW . Render times are not critical ...
For pro's ... You scale up your hardware until you are able to cover your workloads in a time frame that's satisfactory.

In the film and game industrys; I have heard of companies using render farms of hundreds of boxes to process single render jobs. Thats big scale, because time is money ....

OT:
RAID 10, Stripe + Mirror, from practicle experience has a slower write time than RAID 0, but still offers very fast READ times. Its biggest advantage and why its the array of choice for big database storage is its redundancy.

I suspect part of the debate here is being fueled by a lack of clarity/agreement on what we all mean by "performance".

For example, I color correct all my footage and so performance gains for me come from a faster CPU, or in the case of tools like Colorista a powerful GPU. So at present my non-RAID drives essentially hang around waiting for me to save up the $$$ for a CPU that can match their exisiting datarate.

Good performance is when tasks complete within an acceptable timeframe. REALTIME is always the goal.

Jobs lengthen in time when the sum hardware or a component of, hits a limit. The processing bounces along the ceiling until it completes. Run the same job on much bigger equipment and the job will complete faster because it is not constrained by same level of limits.

Jobs that 10 years ago would been considered very heavy for PC class equipment, are now almost instant on your iphone or windows PDA. However, jobs now considered heavy for current PC grade equipment, 10 years ago would have only been possible on big mainframes .... Our hardware is getting cheaper, bigger and faster, but also the amount of data that we are processing and the level of complexity is also getting bigger, so processing times in relative terms are not getting shorter ....

eg. 2 years ago, let say it took 2 hours to render a DVD on your PC at the time, that same job now on your new PC takes 30 minutes, so you have made a great performance gain. But clients now want HD quality on BluRay. So that takes your current PC 8 hours to produce ....

With performance you have three choices , scale vertically , scale horizontally or a combo

If the jobs you do are very heavy for floating point OP, then verticle scaling of the ram and CPU/GPU will offer the largest performance gain.

If your job is very large data processing, RAID arrays are an example of horizontal scaling;
eg. moving from 2 disk RAID 0 to 4 disk RAID 0

however, if you had existing arrays of SATA 7200 spin seagates, you could vertically scale these to 10K SATA or even 15K SCSI to increase performance.

Generally speaking, a two disk RAID 1 mirror will have similar write speeds as a single disk but its read speed can be a little faster. With RAID 1 a read will come from the drive whose head is physically closest to the data you want on the disk.

RAID 1 writes can be slower than a single disk if your configuration doesn't mark the write complete until it physically writes the data to the platter, which I don't think is the norm. Most systems mark the write complete when it's moved to the drive's memory buffer, which is good for speed but puts data at risk if there is a power loss.

I too have an i7 920 CORE with 12 gigs of RAM and a ATI 4870 1gig GPU

This machine renders full HD mpeg4 video straight out of the cam FAST!!

I am currently using CS4 Prem Pro and it will edit files straight from the EX1 cam!

I just rendered a 15 minute 1920x1080 30p clip in about 21 minutes!!

i7 core is the way to go all the way!! It blows away everything else out today!

To me it does not matter anymore PC or Mac , its all in the hardware now.
Mac and PC are both great with CS4 Prem Pro !!

Justin, I'd like to understand what you say about disks dedicated for reading, and disks dedicated for writing.

As I understand you, the source footage (for example, MPEG files for native HDV editing in Premiere) should be placed on the READ disks.
Exported movies should export to WRITE disks. Is that correct?

Render files should also, at rendering, be written to the WRITE disks?

If you could clarify just what kind of files should be where, I'd be deeply grateful. Planning to update to a DVCPRO HD editing system.

Nikolaj , my system currently has a 250G boot, 250G temp, and two 750G for video files. I also have two external eSATA 500G and a 1T. All programs use the temp disk for their temp files and I arrange for source files to be on one disc and final render to another. I have a lot of choices. Motherboard is an X48 with Q9450, 8G RAM and running Vista 64. For most of what I do the CPU is still the limiting factor not discs. It is my understanding that a two disc RAID 0 is about 1.7 times the speed of a single disc in a single read or write operation so recommendation is to use at least three discs. If the one RAID 0 has to read and write at the same time, and deal with temp file operations it has a high probability of being a lot slower than separate discs. With the current discs having sustained transfer rates of over 50Gps( HDV or DV only needs 3.5G) and large capacity I see no reason to use a RAID. Uncompressed files may be different.

Ron Evans

Excuse my ignorance, but what exactly is the temp disk for then?

READ DISKS: source material
WRITE DISKS: render files, export files

Where does "temp" fit in this picture?

IF you look in the preferences of all the NLE's there is location for temp files( normally under tools>preferences>general ) Current versions of Vegas have just one location needed but Adobe CS3 has 7 locations needed) If you do nothing to redirect these temp/scratch files will be processed in the default folder normally where the program was set( boot drive "C" !!!). This can lead to the boot disk having a lot of disc access. The OS and all these program uses as well as these temp/scratch files. This can easily become the performance bottleneck hence the need for a temp drive. That way the OS can access the boot drive, the program can also have assess to the boot as well as use scratch files on this temp disc, but high volume process and transfer will be done between the read and write discs. These temp files are used mainly for preview etc but may be used for pre-rendering too.

Ron Evans

Thanks Ron for that clarifying description!
Regards,
Nikolaj

Having just re-read my post I should correct the data rates to be 50MBps for disks transfer NOT Gps and 3.5MBps for DV and HDV, I think I must have been half asleep writing that!!!!

Ron Evans

Is it really necessary to build a desktop for HD editing? I would like to be mobile with a strong laptop. Even though I think the new mac pro 17" should have a quad core option and at least one hdmi port, I'm thinking it would probably suit my needs. I'm totally inexperienced with video editing, but I have a decent camera and I would like a strong machine that will simply work, period. Any thoughts on the new Mac pro?

I think you are confused about Mac computers. The Mac Pro is the desktop, MacBook Pro is the laptop. The latest MacBook Pro does not have a quad-core option, they only use the Intel Core 2 Duo processors and they do not have an HDMI port.

I wasn't very clear in that post. I meant to write "macbook pro" and that in my opinion, they should offer a quad core and should offer at least one hdmi port, but I realize that is not offered. I'm just curious if the hardware configuration of the 17" macbook pro will handle high def video editing.

RAM-Specific Question
 

I followed this thread religiously since I'm building a brand new system for HD editing. Kadafi has been of great help listing out those items and several others, (particularly Justin) have really make that post very informative.

I have one question regarding RAM memory (Kadafi or any other member can help please). Which one is better to get (for RAM):

CORSAIR DOMINATOR 6GB 3x 2GB PC3-15000 1866Mhz DDR3
CORSAIR 12GB 6x 2GB XMS3 1333 Mhz 10666 DDR3 MEMORY?

I can't find the 12G PC3-15000 1866Mhz anywhere. (If you have a place, please send me the link) So is the 6G PC3-10666 1333Mhz faster/more powerful than the 12G PC3-10666 1333 Mhz?

Power Supply: I'm planning to get the PC Power & Cooling Turbo-Cool 860 ATX12 & EPS12V. Is that piece excellent?

Bluray Burner: I'm getting the LG GGW-H20L 6X Blu-Ray Burner 2X BD-RE 16X DVD+R, is that a decent piece or do you have even a better choice?

UPS: I don't know what that is. Please help.

Etc...: Please be more explicit so I make sure I have everything I need.

Thank you for your help.

I'll be producing/editing 5.1 surround sound projects. Does the HD sound have surround sound 5.1 capabilities? If you think not, please advise. Otherwise, thanks for the sound card saving$$$.

Justin, your post is very interesting. Would you recommend specific drives and/or drive array montages (RAID) which you know works (for you) for each of those 4 bullets above?

Thanks man!

The conventional wisdom is that the memory speed should divide evenly into your chip and front side bus speed for best efficiency. For example, my chips are 2.66GHz, the FSB is 1333MHz and the memory is 667MHz.

But this could be total nonsense and I may have bought it because I'm a dope.

Justin. Let's say I render 120-minute long HD/Film clip out to a 100Gig file. I would save it to the Render Disk set (RAID 0 according to your config).

Do you think I can copy/save a 100Gig file from the RAID system to a single External eSATA or USB2 Hard Drive??? I thought those drives can't save any single file larger than 4Gig. Please advise and anybody is welcome to enlighten me.

At this point, I'm tempted to go with the following config:

* Opsys/apps disk - Single 10K 300G Cache 32MB
* Read Disk Set - Single eSATA or USB2 1TB drive
* Temp and Scratch Disk files - Single eSATA or USB2 1TB drive
* Render/Storage Disk set - RAID 5 with 4 drives (2T minimum) for good storage safety.

Would anyone help with their opinion? Thanks.

Fire good, USB bad
 

No USB drives... at all! For storing your family pics, mp3s podcast downloads, etc or even backups, USB2 drives are fine. For editing, get the idea of using USB out of your head. You don't want it. Don't even have them attached whilst working in your NLE. Just leave 'em on the shelf.