Computer build for editing video (amatuer)

[davlow06]

Greetings! This is my first post and I would like to get some opinions on a good computer build for editing videos. I'm not new to it, but would like to get some opinions from others about how to improve my computer power for editing.

I currently have a Windows 7 PC with an i7-2600 quad core processor, 8 gb ram, a 1 tb hdd, and a basic video card, purchased in 2011. I use Magix Movie Edit Pro to edit my video. When I am editing video now, once I get a good amount of video and audio added, it becomes choppy during the editing process, making it hard to get things put in place. After rendering the files to a windows media file, the video plays flawlessly, as it should, but it's hard to create the video due to the issues explained. I can hear my hard drive working hard to keep up a lot of the time as well.

I'm looking to have a new computer built, and the specs I've come up with so far are, Windows 10, i7 6700 quad core processor 3.4 ghz with 8 mb cache, 16gb (2x8 gb) ddr4 ram, a single 2 tb sata/6 gb hard drive with an nVidia GeForce GTX960 2gb pci-e video card. I plan to change video editing software to either Sony Vegas or Adobe Premier Elements.

Some questions I had were, 1) Should I have a second hard drive with RAID to improve the writing speed of the video to the drives? 2) What else am I missing to edit video without such slow downs and choppy editing with the software. I'm open for pointers and suggestions. Also, was looking to spend around $1500 for the computer, no monitor.

Thanks!

[smrpix]

yes, yes and yes. But if you really want to make the experience more pleasant, create i-frame proxy versions of your files and use those to edit with. Then replace them with the originals for final touch-ups and output.

Most likely the problems you are encountering are coming from trying to edit long-GOP material. The processor needs to reconstruct up to 10 seconds of video for each cut and is getting overwhelmed. There's nothing particularly wrong with your computer. Adding more RAM wouldn't hurt. But, you can spend thousands of dollars on new hardware and it won't help much on long sequences.

You may want to try a better NLE too, like Sony Vegas Movie Studio. (edit: I see you are planning on it.)

[davlow06]

smrpix, thank you for the reply! That gives me some things to think about and work on. I had thought about increasing ram and changing video editing software. No need to get a new computer at this point if not needed. Even though my computer is 5 years old, it still has a lot of power and handles everything well. Except for this video editing issue I've got.

Vegas Movie Studio does seem to be a popular choice. I already use Adobe Photoshop Elements for my photo editing, which is why I thought about using Adobe Premier. Keeping with the same software company feels familiar, but I may have to look more into Vegas.

[smrpix]

Premiere Pro is great, but Premiere Elements is overburdened with consumer-oriented "helpers." Vegas Movie Studio is very much like Vegas Pro with some of the broadcast-based features disabled. It's also very well written to use resources efficiently. Both products offer free trials so there's no reason not to check them both out.

Post back with any questions. Best of luck.

[redwudz]

I would use a SSD boot drive, 250GB is plenty big enough. That will speed up your boot time. Then two large SATA HDDs, maybe a TB or more, depends on the price point VS size.

I don't use RAID, but if you do, I wouldn't use RAID 0. And RAID 5 or similar take a lot of HDDs to work properly. Newer SATA 6 HDDs are a lot faster than the older SATA drives.

Most all my PCs use at least three hard drives, BOOT, EDIT and ARCHIVE.

You mentioned W10, OK. But I would suggest a 64bit version and probably add something like Start 10 if you aren't using a touch screen monitor. ($$)

JMO and welcome to our forums.

[SameSelf]

Also, was looking to spend around $1500 for the computer, no monitor.

Hold on for just one second!!!! Stop right now and don't do another thing. Chucking your current machine and spending $1500 is a horrible strategy. But fortunately you came to the right place for all things video. Welcome to the forum

I can hear my hard drive working hard

Some thoughts:

1. How full is your hard drive?
2. When was the last time you defragged your hard drive?
3. How many partitions are on your hard drive?

It sounds like you are running a single partition on a single drive for your OS, APPS, and DATA. Things can slow to a crawl because Windows does a terrible job managing file fragments, especially when the hdd gets too full. Just be warned that defragging a very full 1 TB hdd will take FOREVER! I agree with smrpix in that there is nothing wrong with your computer. Many people successfully edit video on laptops with less horsepower than you have.

Checklist:

• Core i7-2600 CPU: check
• 8 GB of RAM: check
• 1 TB HDD: check
• Basic video card: check (unless you are doing gpu accelerated effects)
• SSD: missing
• RAID: rarely needed, single drive should be plenty fast

So unless you are telling me you want to edit 4K/UHD footage, or want to encode HD content lightening fast, I see no reason to buy a new PC. But then again, some people look for excuses to upgrade and to build a better machine.

The cheapest and HIGHEST BANG FOR YOUR BUCK right now is to buy an SSD, as has been suggested. You can get a decent sized one for less than $100 these days. The Crucial BX100 250 GB is highly recommended and is $80 on Amazon. You will have to likely rebuild your machine because you won't be able to clone the 1 TB HDD to a smaller drive. But you wouldn't want to do that anyway since the OS and APPS go on the SSD and all the DATA go on the HDD. However, what kind of machine do you have? Rebuilding can be difficult if it is a Dell or HP versus a homebrew.

Bottomline, you will be AMAZED at the boost in performance from the simple upgrade of an SSD.

[sophisticles]

It's funny you should ask this because I just finished building a new system and couldn't be happier with what I got and it cost a lot less than $1500, that's for sure.

I had 2 setups, an i5 2400 with 8gb ddr3 using the integrated gpu and an FX 8320 with 8gb ddr3 and a GTX 960, each was using a 120gb ssd.

I wanted something that would offer a substantial speed boot for a reasonable amount and I settled on the following:

16gb Corsair Vengeance ddr3 1600
AsRock H81M-HDS mb
MSI R7 265 2gb
Xeon E3 1241 v3
250gb Samsung 850 EVO
SanDisk Ultra II 960gb
6tb My Book external hard drive

The Xeon is basically an i7 4790 without the integrated gpu and man is this system fast. I can copy from the 250gb ssd to the 6tb external drive at about 170MB/s or about 15 minutes to move 120gb of data. From Samsung to Sandisk it copies at nearly 400MB/s or about 20 minutes to move 250gb of data.

I should mention the 2 ssd's are formatted with btrfs and the external is ntfs.

It encodes 12bit x265 1080p using the ultrafast preset at 13fps, 8bit x265 faster than 30fps and 10bit x264 at over 100fps.

I personally feel the Skylake cpu's are substantially overpriced, a Haswell is a much better value for the money.

Edit: I'm running Fedora 23.

[usually_quiet]

It wouldn't hurt to try an SSD and see if it improves performance enough in the short term.

Waiting a little while longer might be worth it, especially for someone wanting to use Windows 10. Kaby Lake is still supposed to be to be released later this year. Kaby Lake is supposed to offer native support for USB 3.1, support for Intel's Optane storage technology, and better integrated graphics, including HDMI 2.0 and HDCP 2.2 for those who plan to buy a UHD TV or monitor in the next few years. At present HDMI 2.0 and HDCP 2.2 are available only with some motherboards which have a Z170 Express chipset and an Alpine Ridge or Megachips MCDP28x0 controller, or with a NVidia GeForce GTX 950 video card or better GTX 900-series video card.

[fritzi93]

I would use a SSD boot drive, 250GB is plenty big enough. That will speed up your boot time. Then two large SATA HDDs, maybe a TB or more, depends on the price point VS size.

That would go a long way towards solving the OP's problem. Notice he mentions getting a second hard drive. so at present everything, OS, raw footage, edits, completed projects, etc, are on that single drive.

[davlow06]

Thanks for everyone's replies. Gives me a lot to think about for the future. Looks like I will look into an SSD and change over to Sony Vegas to get things started and see how it goes from there.

[smrpix]

Sounds wise. And to state the obvious, any hardware and software you buy to enhance your current system can be used in a new system if you eventually decide to go that route.

Best of luck.

[davlow06]

I'm back to follow up on my original topic. About the SSD to add to my system; I have seen some state that an SSD is sometimes considered a boot drive, but on here, some have replied that it will help make the editing better and not choppy during editing, like I have encountered. Would the editing software be installed on the SSD drive?

[usually_quiet]

I'm back to follow up on my original topic. About the SSD to add to my system; I have seen some state that an SSD is sometimes considered a boot drive, but on here, some have replied that it will help make the editing better and not choppy during editing, like I have encountered. Would the editing software be installed on the SSD drive?

I think that in this case, the SSD is being suggested as a boot drive, and most SSD users also install their software on their boot drive.

Although some participants in this thread also use SSDs for video that they are editing, I think the majority are recommending that you use a fast HDD for that.

[redwudz]

SSD's are fast, but modern HDDs are fairly fast and a lot cheaper for large files.
That's why I use a SSD boot drive and three 1.5TB SATA 6 HDDs.

And my PC is fast enough, but it's also a few years old.
I can process DVDs from the optical drive to a ~2GB MKV/H.264/AC3 file in less than 15 minutes.
Fast enough for me.

I use 16GB RAM, also enough. For encodes, less than 3GB is used, so I don't need more RAM.

And I had no problems transferring my W7 OS from a 1.5TB HDD to my new SSD, a 250GB Samsung SSD 850 EVO.

[davlow06]

So the HDD I am looking at is a Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB SATA/6G (7200 rpm's). Would that be a fast enough HDD to help improve choppy playback while editing videos?

Other than adding an SSD and the HDD listed above,I'm also getting a PC with the following upgrades:
Processor - i7-2600 to i7-6700
RAM - 8 gb to 16GB DDR4 Memory via 2x Kingston 8GB PC4-17000 (2133MHz)
Video card - AMD Radeon HD 6670 to AMD Radeon RX 480

My biggest issue is the choppy playback while editing videos. On my current system, it's so choppy that it makes it hard to edit.

[redwudz]

Video editors are not the best video players, so choppy playback is not unusual.
But your upgrades will undoubtedly help.

It also helps if your PC has a SATA 6 interface.

[SameSelf]

My biggest issue is the choppy playback while editing videos. On my current system, it's so choppy that it makes it hard to edit.

Choppy playback is usually not a function of drive speed unless you are editing something like uncompressed footage that has a bitrate exceeding the drive performance. IOW, choppy playback is often due to the cpu/gpu/NLE's inability to decode the footage fast enough. What sort of video are you editing? And what NLE are you using? For example, AVCHD/H.264 is very heavy in terms of decoding, and some NLEs simply are not optimized for it even even though it rarely exceeds the bitrate that even a slowly spinning hdd can provide.

But don't feel like you are alone. Even video professionals struggle with choppy playback like when dealing with raw 6K footage. Imagine what kind of drive performance is required for that! So what they often do is transcode the footage to an editable format like ProRes or DNxHR which is called a proxy workflow. Or if the NLE is capable of it, they will cache the footage. Either way, I would look into learning about these sort of techniques before running out and spending a bunch of money on hardware without knowing for sure what the problem is.

EDIT: And why is this thread not in the Computer sub?

[davlow06]

Thanks for the feedback. Here are some questions answered to the best of my knowledge. I'm most definitely an amateur video editor.

I currently use Magix Movie Edit Pro 14 and working with raw video footage from my GoPro 3+ Black, shot in 1080/60. The times of the videos are typically anywhere from 2 minutes long to about 15 minutes maximum. When I get the video in the timeline, I typically edit it down to a much smaller size to put together the video I want to put out. When I'm going back through to edit the crossover effects, fades, titles, or adding music and trying to get the video to match up to the music, is where I get my choppiness. My edit videos are typically 3 to 5 minutes total after I'm done. The video can render in about 15-20 minutes typically, and plays back flawlessly. It's only the editing that gives me trouble.

I'm going to download Vegas Movie Studio Platinum this week and play around with the trial version to see if that software helps better than Magix.

Also, as for transcoding footage to an editable format like ProRes or DNxHR, I have no idea about doing that. I will look into how to do that this week as well. Does it require any other software?

[SameSelf]

I have never used Movie Edit or Vegas, but since GoPro video is typically h.264 in an mp4 container, my guess is your NLE isn't well optimized for decoding h.264 content. Also, are you adding any sort of effects to the timeline? Those can really slow down playback.

Transcoding to ProRes/DNxHD is not hard, but does require separate software. ffmpeg is one option. Just search this forum for instructions.

[Cauptain]

So the HDD I am looking at is a Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB SATA/6G (7200 rpm's). Would that be a fast enough HDD to help improve choppy playback while editing videos?

Other than adding an SSD and the HDD listed above,I'm also getting a PC with the following upgrades:
Processor - i7-2600 to i7-6700
RAM - 8 gb to 16GB DDR4 Memory via 2x Kingston 8GB PC4-17000 (2133MHz)
Video card - AMD Radeon HD 6670 to AMD Radeon RX 480

My biggest issue is the choppy playback while editing videos. On my current system, it's so choppy that it makes it hard to edit.

Hi davlow06,

I build a new computer for videos, records, edits and games.

My new PC specs are:

I7 6700K - 4Ghz
Gigabyte Z170 Gaming 5
Geforce Zotac 1080 AMP EXTREME
64GB DDR 4 Corsair Vengeance - 2400
2x SSD Samsung EVO PRO 250GB
4x HD 6TB Seagate Desktop 7200

My hope is no have bottleneck problems.



Claudio

[Markfx]

Premiere Pro 2.0 has been freeware for many years.
I use it to edit 1080i/720p video captured from a cable box/splitter with a Blackmagic Intensity card with no issues.
I use a SSD for my boot drive, a separate archive drive and two drives using a windows mirroring setup for capturing.

[SameSelf]

IIRC, Adobe did not add h.264 decoding and editing to Premiere Pro until CS4. Definitely not CS3 or earlier.

[pepegot1]

VideoStudio Pro X9 has a small learning compared to Vegas and is a powerful program.