Video Editing PC for €1000

farna_boy

Hi all,

A friend of mine has asked me to spec out a video editing PC for him for about €1000. To be honest, I would know more about a gaming pc but he has very little experience with building pcs so he has asked me to help.
From what I have read, I don't think he will need a very powerful graphics card but I'm not sure so I could do with some help. Also I think an i7 is probably the way to go, but would he see much difference between an i5 and an i7?
Finally he will be using Ubuntu, so do you think that would or should have any effect on what I should recommend?

Here is a list I came up with so far, but any suggestions are more than welcome.

(Prices are taken from komplett for ease, probably will actually buy from elsewhere)

Case:
Cooler Master Centurion 534 Midi Tower B €60

PSU:
Corsair CX 400W €45

DVD Drive:
Samsung DVD±RW burner €22

Mobo:
Gigabyte GA-P55-US3L €90 (not sure about this board but I imagine it would do as he probably doesn't need anything too fancy?)

CPU:
Intel Core i7 Quad Processor i7-860 €265 (again would an i5 be better? )

RAM:
Crucial DDR3 BallistiX 1333MHz 6GB CL7 €152 (would he need more/better RAM?)

Hard drive:
Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB €78

GFX:
PowerColor Radeon HD 4670 €57 (would a lesser card do? is there any need for DX11?)

SSD:
Corsair SSD Performance P64 2,5" 64GB €180 (Added because there was money left over. Although it would be nice, not sure about reliability or even if a 30GB would do, or is it even really needed?)

Total: €947

Finally would there be any need for a Blu Ray player?

Thanks!

leninbenjamin

Seems a pretty decent built, the 860 is very capable at least. I think you can save on the RAM though. 1156 is only Dual Channel so you only need two sticks, and i don't think you'd need above 4GB unless your mate is handling a serious amount of footage at once. Not sure about the PSU though, you might want to up it a little?

I'd go for the the 5670 myself. DX11 isn't necessary at the moment, but having the option for just a €10 extra doesn't seem too bad a deal, particularly if he plans on holding onto it for a long time.

As for the SSD, I'm not sure, I don't think there'd be point using it for the OS anywho. Video editing calls for a lot of throughput, I've seen some places suggest having two separate RAID0 volumes would be a better solution, something about separating the scratch from the cache or some sh*t... I dunno.

Blu-ray is up to the end user really, it's something you should find out from your mate.

youcancallmeal

You should find out what kind of software he'll be using and then look into whether that software can take advantage of multiple cores or even hyper threading. Also you should find out if Ubuntu supports TRIM, if it doesnt then buying an expensive SSD might not be a good idea.

farna_boy

Ok so he's going to be using Cinelerra. The hardware requirements are listed here.

As far as I can tell, these requirements seem to be a little low, although the ATI drivers would possibly be of concern. Would a GT220 be better?

ED E

There is no point in having great render speeds if you cant keep the raw footage coming in the and the writes out. Ideally, the OS and app should be on one drive, the footage on another and the output footage on a third. And then everything needs a backup, footage is valuable.

Graphics wise, is he going to be using one monitor or two? Two is worthwhile if you are going to be spending any real amount of time at working on it. I'm no graphics whiz but I'm guessing the 4670 will do the dual display.

paudie

Hey guys, I'm the friend the OP was talking about.

I have a grand smallish Dell monitor right now and would definitely be looking at getting a second one in the future, but not straight away.

I've seen Raid1 suggested a few times, that basically just means two hardrives that are copies of each other yeah?

Lethal, do you mean I would need three physically seperate drives, or would a partition suffice?

I reckon I'll just use the DVD drive from my current PC, that is possible right? I don't have to spend a full thousand.

Remember I'm brand new at all that stuff.

Cheers,

ED E

Ok, say you have a single drive partitioned in two, and its read write speed is 200Mbps(I know that I/O are different, but bare with me). In that case you only have 100Mbps each, and thats at lab tests, in reality you'll get less.

For basic introductory stuff, I'd suggest 2 drives, its not going to be much more expensive, and it insures that you wont have any problems. You'd wanna be fairly pushing it to need three, but you mentioned an SSD above so I was thinking that was what you were going for.

If you're just starting, here's something to note. If you make say a ten minute clip, you can spend up to or even more than two hours editing that. Longer clips logically take longer, you're eyes are worth the money for a quality big screen. Its a worthwhile investment as its something that wont really date or need replacing anytime soon.

Nehaxak

paudie wrote: »

I've seen Raid1 suggested a few times, that basically just means two hardrives that are copies of each other yeah?

Without getting too technical (as I'd only confuse myself anyway ) if you want to work with video you'll more than likely be dealing with large, sometimes very large files. Drives that are striped in a raid configuration perform faster and particularly allow better manipulation of large files faster.

The reasoning behind having seperate drives for different tasks as mentioned is that the operating system (whether it's linux or windows/mac) accesses the components/files it needs constantly - so you'll be wanting to minimise this on the drives with which you are working with your files on, to further stop any slowdowns in accessing or working with these files.
It's also good practice for you as if the operating sytem drive goes tits up, at least you have working drives (you would hope anyway) with your actual important data/work on.

From my own experience in the past (I used to run an Amiga 4000/060 with a full hardware PVR and ligthwave for animation, erm, eons ago) you very much depend on fast drives when working with video.

You can get away with not doing it though, especially when starting out, but as you get more experienced with the whole lot you will see yourself that the need for both space and speed when working with video files is necessary.

There's also (or at least there used to be) special Hard Drives that are set down for audio and video production uses, if I remember correctly from when I used to be involved with it all, it writes the data on the HD platters from the outside in rather than the inside out (or the other way around maybe :)) and SCSI AV drives were the favoured type for working with files of this nature. SATA has progressed though to be fast enough to work with Video files on a large scale basis these days but most people would stripe the drives to further speed them up. I think you can also get SATA AV drives at this stage, again, special drives that are particularly better for AV usage.

Don't get hung up on it though, it's very easy (and cheap enough) to upgrade your hard drives or add more in the future, just make sure your computer is capable or taking the extra you need without having to also fork out on extra cards for example.

One thing also to bare in mind, if you're working with video you'll also of course be working in some way with audio. Now given you're using linux then you'd want to have a fair old read up and investigate for sure that the components you might be buying will actually work with linux, especially when it comes to audio as it can be a right pain in the arse to find everything works fine other than your audio card which has no working (or flaky) linux drivers.

Same thing for video drivers, make sure your linux distribution has the required stable drivers for working with your graphics card.

Mandriva linux is pretty decent as an out of the box solution without much farting about needed imo.

leninbenjamin

paudie wrote: »

Hey guys, I'm the friend the OP was talking about.

I have a grand smallish Dell monitor right now and would definitely be looking at getting a second one in the future, but not straight away.

Getting a good 22''-24'' to support that will be the best money you spend in the entire build IMO. A second monitor will make more of a difference to your productivity than probably the rest of the build. Don't put it off!

paudie wrote: »

I've seen Raid1 suggested a few times, that basically just means two hardrives that are copies of each other yeah?

There are two basic types of RAID (there are other variations, but these two are the most common for home users):

RAID0 is what I was referring to, this is also called striping. It's where files are split up into smaller pieces and stored on two separate physical disks. So, if you had two disks with a read write of 200Mbps as in Bullet's example, if you were to put them in RAID0, they would appear as one disk to the OS and you could get effective read/write speeds much greater than 200Mbps (probably around 300Mbps).

RAID1 is what's called mirroring. It's the opposite. It's where two drives are used to store two instances of the same file. It's for backup purposes, it doesn't improve performance.

What I've seen suggested in some places is to have a RAID0 volume as the scratch disk (the working harddrive) and then a RAID1 volume for backing up the footage (the storage harddrive). And then if you wanted you could put the OS on a separate drive depending on resources. As I have no experience with these types of setups I've no idea if this is wasteful or not though, I guess it depends on how much footage you would be working with, it probably wouldn't make sense for a hobbyist. Bullet and Nehaxak seem to have more knowledge of this area.

paudie wrote: »

I reckon I'll just use the DVD drive from my current PC, that is possible right? I don't have to spend a full thousand.

It depends on how old the PC is, if it's a SATA drive it shouldn't be a problem. If it's an old IDE drive you'll have to make sure you buy a motherboard with an IDE connector but most should have.