Glow worthy computer?

[Betsy Moore]

Hey I'm doing a movie set at Christmas time which means I'll using a glow filter a lot. My 2008 Mac tower with FC7 obviously isn't fast enough to render this in real time, even though it can handle color correction, speed changes, fades, etc. in real time.

My question is, if I want to handle 1080p Quicktime HQ 422 footage with a glow and other goodies, what kind of specs should I be looking at?

PS I'm almost certainly dropping mac and final cut and switching to CS6.

If ya'll have any advice thank you in advance:)

[Panagiotis Raris]

skip AMD processors and AMD/ATI graphics cards if you are going with CS6.

Specs i would recommend (build it yourself if you are so inclined)

SSD boot disk
16GB RAM
Core i7 (4 or 6 core)
RAID scratch disk (on board raid works but RAID card works better)
4 or more HDD's in RAID5 or RAID0 if you plan to back up
GeForce GTX 660 1GB or more
good (ASUS, EVGA, Gigabyte) Mobo
case with good airflow
water cooling (corsair hydro H50 works great on my i7 950 at 4.2Ghz) or good air cooler (Noctua has some good air coolers)

just be sure to read up on setup specs; there is a huge gain in performance if you have your system tuned correctly.

My current machine, which is from 2010, is still pretty formidable, but if i was going to build a new (complete) machine, i would probably budget 4-5k, but you could get away with building one for 2-ish grand. Nice thing is PSU, CPU cooler, case, graphics and RAID card and HDD's you should be able to carry over into your next system, so that cuts $600-800 out of your next build or upgrade. I usually upgrade my machines every 12 months; maybe $200 each time, and CPU/motherboard/RAM maybe every 2 years or when technology advances dramatically. My i7 950 does a great job now, and i cant justify dropping $800 on a CPU/motherboard yet; ill wait until the Intel i7 49xx 6-core series and X99 chipset comes out.

for around $2 grand, this is what i would buy right now. all sourced via newegg. CPU, cooler, RAM, PSU, RAID card, HDD's, SSD, graphics card, case; should be everything you'd need.
I would go with an ARECA 1222 or higher (i have an ARC-1222 and 8-disk array) for better performance. Most parts are cheap right now; i was surprised that 16GB of good RAM was around $100, and with a better RAID card you have the option to add more HDD's as you need them. Also might want to throw in a memory card reader and disk drive. this way also gives you several other upgrade paths for the future; two spare RAM slots so you could max it out at 32GB if needed, two PCI-e slots (one for graphics card, one for RAID card), and a big open case so any additions are easy. i would go with a better RAID card if you plan on using it a lot, and more HDD's.



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[Betsy Moore]

Wow!!!!! What excellent advice. Looks like I've got my work cut out. Thanks so much. It should be a beast.

[Betsy Moore]

Ps the feature is a monster footage wise too. Ill probably need 20-25 tb of storage before backup. Does that complicate the configuration?

[Panagiotis Raris]

let me look into a good NAS solution; 25+ TB is a lot of data, and also a lot to back up. that will increase costs significantly unless you want to burn masters to blu ray or something crazy slow like that.

[Seth Bloombaum]

Also worth looking at eSATA, which could be a raid array if needed.

[Giroud Francois]

you can skip on the corsair hydro and the areca card. (sparing 500$)
most Z77 motherboards (like the asus sabertooth) have 6G sata , enough to build a multy terabytes config.
you can also upgrade the video card (nvidia 660) to a 660ti that has more CUDA for almost same price.

[Giroud Francois]

and you can also skip the 1Tb drives, for same price you can get 2 TB.

[Betsy Moore]

Wow, this is so interesting. Such good feedback! How much things have changed in five short years.

[Panagiotis Raris]

Originally Posted by Giroud Francois

you can skip on the corsair hydro and the areca card. (sparing 500$)
most Z77 motherboards (like the asus sabertooth) have 6G sata , enough to build a multy terabytes config.
you can also upgrade the video card (nvidia 660) to a 660ti that has more CUDA for almost same price.

the RAID card i can understand skipping to a degree, but the H50 works better than the Noctua and most air coolers, and is pretty cheap. the purpose of the RAID card is to give your CPU a break; RAID on mobo eats a good 10-15% on my system compared to 1-2% on the ARECA, and mobo raid 5 (6 disk) was slower than ARECA (6 disk) raid 5.

It is also immensely faster to edit on a mobo/RAID card array on the machine than NAS system with more limited speed; i was not aware her project was so big; i assumed a medium cost build for 3-4TB of data.

I agree on the 660Ti however; more cores for same $$$ is always a good thing. same with the HDD's, i put that list together perhaps a bit too quickly. of all the parts, the case i feel is a bit overpriced actually. and i have 2.