Spec for video editing

Yannimedia · 13 Oct 2008 at 14:05

Hi all, I'm looking to build a new machine to be used primarily for video editing.
Looking to spend about £1000, hopefully with a monitor but can use my existing one and spend more on the system, suggestions for both would be great. Cheers

Yannimedia · 13 Oct 2008 at 14:13

oops, it was my first post and I forgot to ask nicely, sorry guys.
If you can offer any advice I'd greatly appreciate it (and might buy you a pint...

Thanks

psd99 · 13 Oct 2008 at 17:02

For video editing get yourself a quad core based machine for sure.
Get 4GB of ram too.

Mick-1965 · 13 Oct 2008 at 18:05

If youre dealing with raw 16 or 24 bit avi files, then a 3 or 4 disk raid 0 array to edit and encode from, then another drive for the OS and to receive the encoded file.

Energize · 13 Oct 2008 at 18:13

Buy two quad core machines so you have 8 cores to use!

And if your editing raw hd footage you will need multiple hard drives.

Grimley · 13 Oct 2008 at 18:14

This is what I'd get

Oh curse - forgot the hard drive - this one then

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showp...oint F1 1TB SATA-II 32MB Cache - OEM (HD103UJ)

Yannimedia · 13 Oct 2008 at 18:52

Thanks for the replies guys but I have a couple of questions.
why do you need multiple hard drives?
What benefit is the RAID 0?
Is the Q9550 a good overclocker? Would a good Q6600 thats overclocked be better?
I like the thought of the 2 quad pcs but Im afraid that my budget won't stretch to those just yet, but how do you connect the 2 pcs together, Im assuming that it improves render time.
Ta again

Energize · 13 Oct 2008 at 19:00

Yannimedia said:
why do you need multiple hard drives?

If your encoding and even more so passing through raw hd video you will need multiple hard drives to keep up with it.

1920*1080*24fps*24bits = 150MB/s.

No single hard drive can read or write data that fast.

What benefit is the RAID 0?

With hard drives in raid0 you are gaining much read and write performance.

I like the thought of the 2 quad pcs but Im afraid that my budget won't stretch to those just yet, but how do you connect the 2 pcs together, Im assuming that it improves render time.
Ta again

You could certainly fit it within £1,000, you certainly don't need a £120 graphics card when the cpu is doing all the work. With 8 cores you are halving encoding/rendering times (obviously depends on what your program supports), you connect them via lan and use a program like pvm to run them as if they were one computer.

Mick-1965 · 13 Oct 2008 at 19:28

Yannimedia said:
Thanks for the replies guys but I have a couple of questions.
why do you need multiple hard drives?
What benefit is the RAID 0?

Just to add to what energize has nicely put.

Whats the point of having a really fast processor when the hard drive cannot feed it data fast enough.

Adding drives in stripe mode, increases the speed the more drives you add.
ie 1x hd = 80MB/s, 2x hd = 160MB/s, 3x hd = 240MB/s, 4x hd = 240MB/s etc etc etc.

A real life example. My 3 x 250GB seagate 7200.10 raid 0 only puts 80% cpu load on my dual core e6400@ 3.4 encoding 24 bit 720x576 raw avi.
So to feed data fast enough to top out a quad core youre going to need something a lot faster or dont spend so much on a cpu.

decto · 13 Oct 2008 at 22:34

And don't try to read and write to the same disk or array if you want speed.... Need to seperate input and output

One disk for in and one for out is quicker than trying to read and write to a single Raid array.

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