Tough Questions About Windows Workstations and Canon H.264 Editing Performance
 

I'm feeling a bit philosophical this morning.

Let me preface this by saying that I haven't even thought about a new computer since I built my AthlonX2 workstation in 2005, so I'm pretty far removed from current technology.

I just finished tooling around on Apple's website looking into the new 12-core Mac Pro setups. The machines, while beautiful (and I'm sure very capable of handling anything I could throw at them) are grossly overpriced. I guess this is a product of some extreme component mark ups. Anyway, after setting up my $9,400 (conservative) fantasy system, I began to wonder just what the hell I was doing going with a Mac, especially when the new FCX prog is a piece of dookie. I can surely save many thousands of dollars if I build this thing myself on a Windows platform.

I bought a Canon 60D about three months ago. For the price and the overall video/photo product, it just makes sense to look beyond all the problems with H.264 encoding and all the other little blippy problems with DSLR video. The looks you can achieve right out of the box are stunning. End of story. Anyway, I'm sure that's all been covered extensively and you guys have read volumes on the subject.

What I'm wondering about is this stuff I've read concerning how H.264 is not a good native format for editing video. There seems to be a large community of professionals that recode all their footage to ProRes or AVI or whatever for editing. I read that high-end computers running CS5.5 can handle rendering H.264, even with a few effects, in the timeline with no problems. I guess, my question is this: how high-end do we need to get here, people? Do I really need to go out and buy a car's worth of computer just to edit some rinky-dink, poorly encoded HD video from a DSLR? What can I get away with?

I don't really feel as though I need two six-core Xeon processors, 48GB of RAM, three solid state drives and all the endless bells and whistles. That just feels wrong for the amount of data we're talking about.

What are your thoughts? I'm totally sold on the reviews for CS5.5 and the stability of Windows 7. I just need to nail down the hardware.

Word.

Re: Tough Questions About Windows Workstations and Canon H.264 Editing Performance
 

In the long run you are better of buying a nice reasonably priced i7 machine and transcoding the video.

It doesn't take that long and once you have the video in an edit friendly format the performance improvement is so great you'll ask yourself why anyone would quadrupole the cost of the computer to get the same job done.

Yea, its a bit oversimplified but in reality the people writing the editing software haven't figured out the best way to decode H.264 so it can be easily edited. That day will come (as it did for MPEG2) but whether the solution is software, hardware, or SW+HW remains to be seen. Either way its going to cost you.

My workflow looks something like this - I import the dSLR footage into the machine NATIVE then do a quick rough cut of what I know I'll need. I select the clips and transcode what I know I need. If I miss a bit here or there I can go back and grab it from the bin and transcode it as I need it.

If I shoot something more long form with a H.264 camera then I transcode everything on injest.

Re: Tough Questions About Windows Workstations and Canon H.264 Editing Performance
 

For the past six months I have been editing raw video files from my Canon 60D on my 5 year old Acer Aspire 3 core computer with Vista 64 with no problems. No transcoding needed. I don't even use Cineform Neoscene anymore. No playback problems either. Try using Sony Vegas Pro 10. It works great!

Save your money.

Re: Tough Questions About Windows Workstations and Canon H.264 Editing Performance
 

To which format are you transcoding exactly? The thought of editing and storing uncompressed AVIs at 1920x1080 makes my brain swell.

Re: Tough Questions About Windows Workstations and Canon H.264 Editing Performance
 

I have absolutely no experience with Vegas, but I'll look into it. When you say "no problems," am I to take this as meaning your software is running buttery-smooth?

Re: Tough Questions About Windows Workstations and Canon H.264 Editing Performance
 

Nick,

Have a look at some of the better performing systems here: PPBM5 Benchmark

These are all Windows systems, but remember that MAC's are like hookers, they look sexy but afterward you wonder whether your money was wisely spent. MAC's are overpriced and under performing in comparison to Windows machines because of the lousy multi-threading of the OS. Not to mention the limited and very pricey options for expansion.

Re: Tough Questions About Windows Workstations and Canon H.264 Editing Performance
 

Download a trial of pro 10e and see for yourself.

Re: Tough Questions About Windows Workstations and Canon H.264 Editing Performance
 

Hi Nick,

As mentioned, a PC with the Core i7 -2600 will work great to natively edit your H.264 footage in Premiere CS5.5. Be sure to get a supported Nvidia display card though, as the GPU acceleration provided by the Adobe Mercury Playback Engine makes a big difference.

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

Re: Tough Questions About Windows Workstations and Canon H.264 Editing Performance
 

Nick...I would suggest you take a look at VideoGuys 'DIY 8 Hot Rod' set-up. I built that system a few months ago, loaded MS 7 Pro OS (recommended by VG), and Sony Vegas Pro 10.0 and haven't looked back. The machine is screaming fast, stable, and purpose built for a Video NLE. One of the things I've learned in the process is I was under the misconception that the 'gamer's' video cards (GPU) were the hot ticket. I couldn't have been more wrong. I'm no expert, so I'll just say the 'math' required for video 'throughput' is different than a 'gaming' card. Spend the money and buy a 'real' Video GPU, like nVidia 4000 or better. I used an Intel 970i Hex-Core processor, with matched 3-stick 12Gig of RAM. The other thing you'll want to consider is the MOBO. I ended up with an ASUS P6X58D-E. I'm sure the 'configuration' has been upgraded since I last looked.

Good luck,

J.

Re: Tough Questions About Windows Workstations and Canon H.264 Editing Performance
 

BTW, regarding HDD storage, I have a VelociRaptor 10k RPM, 600Gig 'system' drive, a W-D 7.2k 500Gig HDD finished Video Projects storage, and a stand-alone G-RAID, 2TB 0-RAID for video clip storage. My whole system, starting from scatch, cost about $2,750.00, including one ASUS 24" monitor (I already have one other). The only 'mistake' I made was I should have gotten a 'modular' power supply because cable management would have been more...err,more manageable.

Just my $0.02 worth. YMMV.

J.

Re: Tough Questions About Windows Workstations and Canon H.264 Editing Performance
 

+1 on the Video guys recommendations. I built a system based on their ideas and it's good enough (http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/non-line...ml#post1691061). There's always better, faster, cooler ($$$). Combine the system with workflow optimizations and you're good to go. I went

Re: Tough Questions About Windows Workstations and Canon H.264 Editing Performance
 

Build your own. It's worth it. I had Mac pro's. My last was a 2008. Got tired of the apple tax. My latest build is a dual xeon X5670 - 24gb ram - ATI 6950 for around $3300 bucks. Feel allot better knowing what's in it. Saved a couple hundred by getting my processors from eBay. Zero problems. A new sandy bridge will keep your costs down further. I'm just stuck on which video editing software to get coming back to windows. Good luck.

Re: Tough Questions About Windows Workstations and Canon H.264 Editing Performance
 

An i3 or i5 processor with 8GB ram and 7200rpm HDs are all you need for H.264 - especially if your brain swells on anything more complicated. If you want a GPU-based rendering platform, throw in a GTX that matches the software you are using. With the money you save from the system, buy a good LCD monitor and a color calibrating system and you're all set.

More money makes it faster, not better. How fast do you want to go?

Re: Tough Questions About Windows Workstations and Canon H.264 Editing Performance
 

Right, if you want a system that is slow as a snail, who brakes before cornering, follow Sareesh advise. Even a top i5 CPU with only 8 GB memory is more than 3 times slower than a low end i7 with more memory. An i3 is even slower. Without hardware MPE around 20 times slower, but even with hardware MPE it still is around 7 times slower than a low end i7.

H.264 is about the most demanding codec to edit and an i3 or i5 just will not suffice if you want to do anything more than single track editing, in comparison to an i7.

What makes an i7 more complicated than an i3 from the users perspective? That is nonsense. It is the same socket on the same mobo.

Re: Tough Questions About Windows Workstations and Canon H.264 Editing Performance
 

You're just scaring the kids, Harm...I've done double track h.264 on a core 2 duo with 4GB RAM on a 32-bit machine (so all I get is 3GB). It is slow, of course - but doable if one can't afford anything better.

You might want to remember, people were editing 2K (and possibly 4K) stuff long before the i series was introduced. There are many ways to make cheaper CPUs and RAMs work - one just needs to be bright with computers.

Like I said, how fast does the guy want to go?

Re: Tough Questions About Windows Workstations and Canon H.264 Editing Performance
 

The extra cost for a i7-2600K or even the newest i7-2700K over an i3-2120 is less than 10% of the system cost. You need the same mobo, memory, cooler, PSU, video card, case, disks, monitor, etc. But you get a system that is at least 6 times faster for less than 10% more and with the same complexity of buildiing it. I consider that extra cost a no-brainer and worth every penny.

If you have all the time in the world, never under time pressure and never use multicam, then I agree that the i3 may work, only it is so slooowww. If you can't afford that extra cost, why are people then using such an expensive software program like Premiere Pro? They would be better off with PE and save money, to be used for a better system.

Re: Tough Questions About Windows Workstations and Canon H.264 Editing Performance
 

Very true (based on what I submitted to the PPBM5 site). An i3 is barely sufficient for single-layer AVCHD editing. In fact, an i3-2100 with 4GB of RAM is still well over two times slower than a stock-speed i7-2600K with 8GB of RAM (again, based on the systems that I submitted - and in the Relative Performance Index (RPI), not just the total benchmark time). Plus, one can overclock the i7-2600K or i7-2700K substantially (assuming that he has a CPU cooler that can handle the job) while the i3 can't be overclocked much (if at all).

As for using an i3 with just the integrated graphics and CS5.x, fuggedaboutit. That system, though far from the slowest in the world, is still significantly slower than what we'd consider a comfortable minimum (as opposed to the absolute minimum) needed to run CS5.x properly.

As such, I'd recommend buying cheap on the CPU only if one is sure that he'll never do anything heavy-duty (as far as video editing is concerned) for the foreseeable future.

Re: Tough Questions About Windows Workstations and Canon H.264 Editing Performance
 

You have to understand exactly what you want your entire workflow to be (i.e. Your Business Needs), and all the components in that workflow, the workstation being just one component.

You (or it seems just about anyone these days) can spend <1k on a Canon T3i, and then suffer the cost of a 4-10k on a workstation to handle editing in that format.

Or, you can spend <6k on a Sony EX1 camera (more expensive) and 2-3k on a laptop (less expensive) editing in XDCAM, for example.

For my needs, I don't have to consider supporting a multitude of acquired formats during the edit (that's not my core business- I shoot and edit my own stuff) - so I went with a workstation that doesn't require alot of horsepower on the editing side. I chose to spend more on the camera side, and adding something like a nanoFlash allows me to support a lot of compression methods if I want to "hand off" my work.

Obviously, you can spend a lot on a workstation, and a lot of threads here suggest you "need to". You might. You might not. It depends.

The benchmark site is a great place to start. But it doesn't tell the whole story of what YOUR needs are. I almost bought a 7-10k system because I thought "I HAVE to spend this to get Premiere to work right".

Premiere hasn't crashed once for me, I do multilayer, albeit in a different timeline format, and love every minute of it, and all my savings.

Re: Tough Questions About Windows Workstations and Canon H.264 Editing Performance
 

I get your point but I see no downside to having a screaming computer. I've got a few and I'd rather use my fast ones. The prices are right, not sure where you got $4-10K (Macs?), so I'd rather error on the side of too fast. Cheers

Re: Tough Questions About Windows Workstations and Canon H.264 Editing Performance
 

Actually, you do need to spend (relatively speaking) a lot of money on both the system and the disks if you're going to do anything HD. There is simply no free lunch: Either you spend cheap on the CPU and RAM but an astronomical amount of money on the disk subsystem (because any format that doesn't take much CPU horsepower will require an extreme amount of disk bandwidth), or you spend a lot of money on the CPU and RAM but cheap out on the disks (because formats that doesn't require much bandwidth requires an astronomically expensive and extremely fast CPU) - and there is absolutely no happy medium in between whatsoever (or that anything that's in between often gives you the worst of both worlds). However, please note that what I stated in this paragraph assumes that the user will be working with an extremely wide array of formats that he receives to work on. If the user is going to be working primarily on compressed formats such as AVCHD, then more money should be spent on the CPU and RAM but not so much money on the disks. If on the other hand the user's workflow consists primarily of uncompressed or very high bandwidth HD videos, then more money needs to be spent on the disks but not so much on the CPU. And the only formats that are not so dependent on the total cost of a system are those that deliver relatively poor quality-to-file-size ratios, such as DV or HDV (the image quality of DV or HDV is often worse than formats with lower bandwidth, even at higher bandwidth).

And yes, I did attempt to edit using a relatively inexpensive laptop. It simply can't do anything above low-definition 320x240 videos at all because the CPU is too weak to handle compressed formats and the hard drive subsystem is way too slow to handle anything higher than extremely low-bandwidth ultra-compressed content. Worse, playback of MP3s and audio files is extremely choppy and utterly unlistenable on that laptop. In other words, I actually got the worst of both worlds with that laptop.

Re: Tough Questions About Windows Workstations and Canon H.264 Editing Performance
 

Nick...I don't know what your 'pain threshold' is for cost, but here are the latest DIY system prices from VideoGuys:

Sandy Bridge - $1,485.00

DIY 8 Budget - $1,415.00

DIY 8 Hot Rod - $2,541.00

The configurations have been built and tested by VideoGuys and they work.

Videoguys.com 800 323-2325 we are the video editing and production experts

JMHO, YMMV.

J.

Re: Tough Questions About Windows Workstations and Canon H.264 Editing Performance
 

Keep in mind that they are only the core components of the recommended builds. Most higher-end editing packages require more disks than what's in the base configurations. As such, Videoguys recommends additional disks in RAID.

Re: Tough Questions About Windows Workstations and Canon H.264 Editing Performance
 

Randall...yes, I have a 'stand alone' G-RAID, 2TB 0-RAID (~80 hrs AVCHD storage) sitting on my desk. So, you would need to increase your costs another $250.00. This is the 'cost' of working with, and storing HD video. I was having an email conversation with a working video professional, he informed me 'currently' he has 25TB of archived storage video clips on various 'disc' technology requiring he 'spin them up' once a month. This something we all need to consider in or 'work-flow' solutions. I am looking into a 'service' like Amazon Simple Storage Solutions. 'Storage', no matter what you do, unless you format your 'storage media' every time you use it.

Regards,

J.

Re: Tough Questions About Windows Workstations and Canon H.264 Editing Performance
 

Good points all. Lots of experience here. I'd just say, do not skimp on RAM. I've killed HDs with swapping gone horribly bad. Get the fastest and largest amount you can afford and watch the HD light like a hawk. If it starts swapping a lot, or even a little, time to go shopping for more memory. Cheers.

Re: Tough Questions About Windows Workstations and Canon H.264 Editing Performance
 

Corsair 12Gig Matched RAM.

J.

Re: Tough Questions About Windows Workstations and Canon H.264 Editing Performance
 

VideoGuys specs are very good. Only on the SandyBridge platform I would suggest using a Z68 motherboard with nForce200 chipset to overcome the problems with limited PCIe bandwidth. ASRock Z68 Extreme7 would be an interesting choice here. It's a recent product, I bet they weren't able to test it yet.

Re: Tough Questions About Windows Workstations and Canon H.264 Editing Performance
 

Actually, I can't say that it's a good value at all: That ASRock motherboard actually costs significantly more money than the Asus X58 motherboard that's recommended by Videoguys for the other two builds. And it would not have completely solved the LGA 1155 platform's PCI-e bandwidth limitation because it actually converts 16 full-duplex PCI-e lanes into 32 half-duplex PCI-e lanes; thus, the total PCI-e bandwidth would be no higher with the NF200 chip than without.

Re: Tough Questions About Windows Workstations and Canon H.264 Editing Performance
 

Ah, I didn't know that, and have fallen prey to the marketing machine again. Thanks for the correction, Randall.