4k Editing PC build?

FlyingFish11 · 8 Jul 2016 at 09:14

Hi All,

Apologies, I am not very tech savvy when it comes to computers!

Long story short, I am setting up a commercial drone business and a lot of my footage will be shot in 4k. After realising my MAC was not capable to run said footage, it leaves me no choice but to fork out for a new computer

Ideally I would like to spend as little as possible as I have just spent £5k on a drone! but I appreciate this type of computer is not going to be cheap. I am looking for a computer play and edit 4k footage, I do not require it for any other function.

Any help / suggestions would be greatly welcomed

thanks all

adam98150 · 8 Jul 2016 at 09:24

The good news is you don't need a high end PC for your needs. High end video cards don't offer that much of a boost when editing video, so the more expensive the card doesn't necessarily equate to better performance. The GTX 960 comes with a high efficiency video codec (HEVC) to help deal with 4k footage and is pretty cheap compared to other cards on the market. Pick up one those, plenty of ram, a decent processor and you should be all set.

I'll let somebody else put a build together as they'll do a better job.

FlyingFish11 · 8 Jul 2016 at 09:26

Thanks for that, that eases my concerns lol

Biz.Kid09 · 8 Jul 2016 at 17:02

Do you have some kind of baseline figure you want to spend?

Do you need operating system, monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers and so forth included or?

FlyingFish11 · 8 Jul 2016 at 18:42

As little as possible lol. Below £600 if possible. I'd need an os, mouse and keyboard. But worse case just the tower.

Biz.Kid09 · 8 Jul 2016 at 18:48

Ok, any chance you can get a copy of win 7/8 cheap so you can upgrade to win 10 or would you rather just buy a copy of win 10?
Mouse and keyboard are pretty subjective so perhaps you should choose those and then let us know what you have left over?

FlyingFish11 · 8 Jul 2016 at 18:53

I may be able to, but let's just factor in windows 10 included. Ignore mouse and keyboard then, il sort those at a later stage

joeyjojo · 9 Jul 2016 at 16:06

What video software will you be using? That will dictate everything else.

What CPU does your current machine have?

£600 will probably not be enough for a huge upgrade. The current crop of 6-core CPUs start at about £350 and go up to £500-600.

adam98150 said:
The GTX 960 comes with a high efficiency video codec (HEVC) to help deal with 4k footage and is pretty cheap compared to other cards on the market.

Do you mean NVENC? I'm not sure this is an option. For streaming games maybe, but not high quality video encoding.

FlyingFish11 · 9 Jul 2016 at 17:07

Final cut pro / adobe premier pro. I couldn't tell you.. all I can say it's a 2011 mac, so fairly old.. if I have to pay more than 600 that's fine, however I'm trying to keep the cost down as much as possible at the moment. I don't need the computer for anything other than editing. Thanks

adam98150 · 9 Jul 2016 at 18:42

joeyjojo said:
Do you mean NVENC? I'm not sure this is an option. For streaming games maybe, but not high quality video encoding.

I honestly don't know that much about it just had abit of a read on a few forums. As far as I'm aware it's a decoder that helps handle 4k HEVC files.