Needed a faster pc
 

After editing on the same system for the last 3 years, the increase in sophistication of our wedding work was making our faithful system creak a bit. With more cameras being used for weddings and schools, together with more audio recorders, it was sometimes a bit much for the AMD quad core cpu, 8gb of ram and an AMD graphics card, resulting in annoying lock ups from time to time. Now that we also have two 4K cams, it would only play back 4K footage at a stuttering pace. A steady backlog of weddings to be edited finally decided us to get a new system alongside the old, so that we could both edit at the same time, with the new system able to handle the more demanding jobs.

Funds were somewhat limited, but we finally settled on an Intel i7-6700 @ 3.4GHz 16gb DD4 ram and an Nvidea GeForce GT 740 with 4GHz onboard ram. We also added two HD monitors as 4K would be out of our budget and we will be dropping 4K footage down to HD after editing anyway. I had the computer built by a company locally that I know, to avoid any additional bloatware and other nasties. They persuaded me against my better judgement to upgrade from Win7 to Win10, by offing to revert to Win7 if I wasn't happy or my preferred software wouldn't run.

Two days after ordering, it was ready so I collected and spent the day installing my preferred NLE Magix Movie Edit ProX7, along with Mercalli 4 image stabilizing software, NewBlueFX and Photoshop for stills. Everything installed and ran perfectly and there was a massive difference in all processing speeds. Out of interest I downloaded a 30 minute 4K clip from a recent unedited wedding, which ran very smoothly. I then copied the clip to 2 more parallel video tracks to see if it would run 3 streams of 4K. Again very smooth with no stuttering, so we are now able to exploit the cropping possibilities of 4K for HD output.

For school and theatre productions, we normally use 3-5 cameras, to follow the action in closeup plus full stage coverage. For the next one, we will also experiment with one 4K full stage camera in addition, so that we can carry out all closeup and cast movements with key framed crops in post production. It should make a huge saving in time both at the filming and PP stages.

The other advantage of the new system is that rendering to MP4 from HD multi camera timelines has now been speeded up by 70%, as has output to DVD. So far, Win 10 has been extremely docile and easy to use, with much faster boot up and access times. All in all a good upgrade, the only downside being that Claire and I are now competing for who uses the new system.

Roger

Re: Needed a faster pc
 

Best of luck with your new PC Roger

My PC is getting a bit long on the tooth but going great, so, no big rush for me to upgrade... just yet :)

Re: Needed a faster pc
 

Hi Anthony,

For me it about being able to edit 4k footage properly as much as anything. With two 4k cameras it was becoming a bit frustrating not to be able to edit to any useful degree, so now I can start experimenting properly :-)

Roger

Re: Needed a faster pc
 

My iMac is struggling with 4K, a new one however is £3,500 with all the bells and whistles, I do feel it is inevitable though

Re: Needed a faster pc
 

I've never been a Mac man, and prefer the flexibility of a pc with the wider choice of hardware and software both in cost and variety. I think a lot of people have grown up with the greater stabily of the Mac OS, but over the last few years that has really become a far lesser issue.

My recent upgrade to the new PC cost around £1000 and the difference over the old one is very satisfying. Even my wife is impressed and reckons it has ruduced her editing time by over 50%. We have just finished filming our first 4k wedding and the system is handling the 4k with the same smoothness that the old one handles HD, only a lot faster. With the amount of weddings building up for next year, we may well change the old system for another new one.

Roger

Re: Needed a faster pc
 

I never had much luck with PC's, I used to get them built to spec by reputable people but always had problems and conflicts etc, I never had one that I was still happy with after two years.

The new 27inch iMac however has me wincing at the cost of 3.5K, I do however love the OS and it has been totally trouble free.

I guess the PC/Mac debate will go on forever.

Re: Needed a faster pc
 

I certainly wouldn't dream of criticising the Mac as it has a great stable OS and is well built. For me, the cost of hard and software and limited choice has always been the deciding factor and I've never been restricted by sticking with pc formats.

Roger

Re: Needed a faster pc
 

I have had my Mac 3 years, it cost £2500 back then, a new one now will cost £3500. That's bit of a hike.

A well specced PC would cost about half of that, I use adobe cloud so no software issues, it has me thinking, it does appear that most are saying PC's are better now.

Re: Needed a faster pc
 

A fully specked P.C. with a new and complete editing system in mind will easily go over $2000.00.

Re: Needed a faster pc
 

I was able to install all my existing editing and processing software on the new PC, but if I bought it all again it would certainly have increased the cost considerably above the £1000 I spent. I also had extra monitors already, so no additional outlay there. I could also have spent another £150 on a faster graphics card and had a lot more ram installed, solid state drives etc,, but you have to draw the line somewhere and the new system does exactly what I need at the moment.

Roger

Re: Needed a faster pc
 

That's the main difference between a mac and pc, a mac you buy as a complete system, a pc you buy just what you need and transfer drives or cards from a older system. My last pc was a i7 4790k with 32gb memory and a 256gb ssd for just under 1000euro, I transferred my videocard, harddrives, a hd spark pro card for edius and my OS from my old pc.

It doesn't matter if you buy mac or pc these days, both are good, only pc's you need to know what you are doing or you need to have a good and reliable systembuilder.

Re: Needed a faster pc
 

Another option you may want to consider is a desktop replacing gaming laptop. I just purchased one from graphics card-motherboard manufacturer EVGA (their first attempt at a laptop) that has a 4K 17.3 inch display, i7-6820HK processor, NVIDIA GeForce GTX980M graphics, 32GB RAM, 256GB SSD drive, 1TB storage drive and Windows 10 OS, for $2,400. I sent in a rebate form that will give me $200 back. I am using the rebate to get an external 3TB USB 3.0 drive and portable USB 3.0 blu-ray writer. So far, I'm loving it. the display is beautiful, the sound is great (includes a subwoofer), and it's fast. It's the only relatively inexpensive laptop that I know of that comes with included software for overclocking, up to 4GHz. Even the included gaming mouse is really nice, with weights that you insert or remove for just the right "feel". The only disadvantage that I can see so far is that it only has 2 USB 3.0 ports and 1 USB 3.1 port, but I can work around that. I could easily replace my desktop machine with this one and have the advantage of being portable. So for around $2,500, you could have a desktop replacement that you can take on the road with you. It's heavy though, so you'll need a way to transport it. I am going to use a small suitcase (with a trolley) from a luggage set that we have. It will house everything and I can transport it on wheels. I put some extra padding in the suitcase for protection.