RECENTLY CUSTOM BUILT COMPUTER - What could make it better for editing?

[landonhorton]

First of all, thank you for taking time to look at my post. Disclaimer: I discovered this site 10 minutes ago and immediately made it my home page! Just let me know if I formatted this post wrong and I'll correct future posts.

Below I've posted the specs for a computer I built, intending for it to be used strictly for media. I'm the Director of Media at a church, which means I post videos of church related activities and services quite often. You could say I'm uploading content...religiously. cue awkward laughter

*************START HERE TO SKIP THE INTRODUCTION************************

After the post production is completed, the videos are taking a little over an hour to encode or sometimes even a couple. Based on the specs of my computer below, are these the results I should be getting? I use Premiere Pro CC and all of the videos I shoot are 1080p 60fps. I realize that shooting at a lower resolution would speed up the process, I just want some opinions on the computer I built from a video editing perspective. I built the computer from the perspective of a Computer Science major, as opposed to someone who knows video editing.

P.S Why does uploading to youtube take 4-6 hours?

Important note: I had to return the firepro W4100 since they weren't compatible with another program I run. If you have any suggestions for a replacement I'd welcome any ideas. I'm using a NVIDIA GeForce GT 730 as a temporary replacement until I get some opinions from knowledgeable people such as yourselves.

**********CAMERA**************************

Sony HXR NX5R NXCAM

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?A=details&O=&Q=&ap=y&c3api=1876%2C%7B...=Y&sku=1275939

**********COMPUTER SPECS*******************
OS:
Windows 10 Pro 64-bit

GRAPHICS CARD:
AMD FIREPRO W4100 (DUAL CARDS) ******* No longer in use. Suggestions for replacement?
nvidia geforce 730 *********************temporary replacement

CPU:
Intel Xeon v4 @ 2.60GHz 83 °F
Broadwell-E/EP 14nm Technology
Intel Xeon v4 @ 2.60GHz 94 °F
Broadwell-E/EP 14nm Technology

RAM:
32.0GB Dual-Channel Unknown @ 1064MHz (15-15-15-35)

STORAGE:
476GB SK hynix SC300 SATA 512GB (SSD) 79 °F
953GB SAMSUNG SSD PM851a 2.5 7mm 1024GB (SSD)
3726GB Seagate Backup+ Desk SCSI Disk Device (USB (SATA)) 97 °F
57GB SanDisk Ultra USB Device (USB)
29GB Generic- SD/MMC USB Device (USB)

[johnmeyer]

I don't use Premiere, so I cannot comment on what hardware gives you the best performance.

Regardless of the horsepower of your system, the time it takes to render depends on dozens of variables and, without much effort, you can create a ten minute production that will take several days to render. Things that slow down the render: compositing, effects, codec used, background processes, and many more.

Most NLE sites (this is not an NLE site) post benchmark files so you can compare your performance with others, using a video and project file that is identical to what everyone else uses. My NLE is Vegas, and back when Sony owned it and there was still a thriving Vegas community, there were several benchmarks floating around, and it quickly became obvious which CPU and video card to get. Those are the only two things that matter, in most cases. Yes, if you don't have enough RAM, that can slow things down, and if you really screw up your disk subsystem, that can cause problems, but for timeline performance and rendering, the CPU and video card GPU are the key.

The GPU is always a question mark because not everything in your workflow will be able to use the GPU assist. Also, it is a PITA to figure out which driver to use. You may find that older drivers sometimes (certainly not always) will provide better performance than newer drivers. Again, you want to find a good Premiere forum where such things are discussed.

[KarMa]

P.S Why does uploading to youtube take 4-6 hours?

Youtube will take as much bandwidth that you have available, so it will use up all of your upload bandwidth. If you are like most people, your download speed is many times faster than your upload speed. 1 Mbit of upload would allow you to upload ~430MBytes per hour. Do a speed test at dslreports.com or speedtest.net to see what your bandwidth is.

Since your videos are in a church, I'm going to assume most of the video is of stagnant content where the background does not change and the people don't move around much. This type of situation offers up the most potential in video bitrate reduction via video compression. Potentially reducing the size of the videos to speed up your uploads to youtube. The ideal situation would be to have it encoded with x264 (which is a codec for the H.264 standard) as the H.264 codec in Premiere is not the greatest (not the most efficient) if I remember correctly from the last time I played with Premiere. But I do remember being able to hand off the encoding job to Adobe Media Encoder, which I remember it supporting x264. Might have to download and install x264 VFW to get it to work.

x264 supports CRF, which only does one pass (which is faster) while also being able to maintain a given level of quality like 2-Pass offers. You tell it the quality you want by setting the CRF value of 0-51. Lower values give better quality, higher values give worse quality for smaller size. The general recommended CRF is 18, and maybe pushing it to ~21 if you don't like the file sizes you are getting with 18. x264 supports easy to use presets, with "Medium" being the middle of the road for encoding speed and efficiency. Ultra Fast preset is very fast and inefficient, while very slow and placebo are exceedingly slow and more efficient.

Potentially your encoding speed might stay the same or worsen, but your upload time will probably reduce greatly. But there are a lot of variables in all of this.

[usually_quiet]

Adobe recommends NVIDIA Quadro P6000, Quadro P5000, or Quadro P2000 for those with a workstation who are using Premiere Pro CC. See http://www.nvidia.com/object/adobe-premiere-pro-cc.html
I guess the good news with these is that they are not in demand for cryptocurrency mining so they are still priced at or below the MSRP.

You can probably use a NVIDIA Geforce GTX 10xx series card, although the only models that are not scarce/over-priced due to demand for cryptocurrency mining are GTX 1080 and GTX 1080 Ti cards.

[Krispy Kritter]

Processing power aside, storage is the typical bottleneck. Ideally, you want an OS/software drive (A) and then multiple storage drives so that you can (for example) read data from drive B and write to drive C. You don't want to be reading/writing to the same drive or sharing with the OS drive.

[JeramyRo]

Processing power aside, storage is the typical bottleneck. Ideally, you want an OS/software drive (A) and then multiple storage drives so that you can (for example) read data from drive B and write to drive C. You don't want to be reading/writing to the same drive or sharing with the OS drive.

Good advice, thanks Krispy.

[Arbutis]

I know this reply comes very late but I just found this site recently.

From your description, I would assume the use of 60 fps in your video footage could be the culprit to your long encoding and rendering times. If you do not need slow motion or other processor intensive effects, then 60 fps is overkill and not necessary. Try shooting at 30 or 24 fps and you should see a big difference without a drop in resolution or quality.

[KarMa]

I know this reply comes very late but I just found this site recently.

From your description, I would assume the use of 60 fps in your video footage could be the culprit to your long encoding and rendering times. If you do not need slow motion or other processor intensive effects, then 60 fps is overkill and not necessary. Try shooting at 30 or 24 fps and you should see a big difference without a drop in resolution or quality.

Or just output 30fps from a 60fps source.