Help me spend $5K on a video editing system

[jose]

Hello, A friend of mine recently put together a system for photo & video editing.

He had a matox rt capture board from a previous system. Here's what he got:

P4c 3.0 ghz
2 gigs of pc3500 ddr
asus p4c800e mobo
GFX5900se
LSI u160 scsi contorller
Maxtor 15k 36g hd.
4 - WD 74g raptors raided together to form 2 - 140+ source & destination drives
Plex dvd-rw

The rest he got from his prev. system. (case, sound, etc.)

This is not the Best but it's still pretty fast. ($2500) You'd have to get into a Xeon or Operons w/ 64bit pci & 64bit raid controllers to see better performance.
But remember you still need to purchase software etc. Also this system should be fast enough for the majority of casual users.

Regards,
Jose

 

[gsellis]

I use Pinnacle Liquid Edition 5.5. It does dual and uses the GPU. I just checked Adobe's page and they seem to still recommend a P4. Hmmm..

Not to hurt the AMD fans feelings, but the one place Intel is better than AMD is video rendering with SSE. Sorry. It is also the only place that Prescott is better than Northwood in fact (otherwise, Prescott is just includes a free space heater when compared to the Northwood).

I am look at build this in a month. My budget is 2K, so I will bump the numbers.

ASUS PC-DL Deluxe Mobo
2 - 3.06 or 3.2GHz Intel Xeon (newest BIOS may be required for 3.2)
4 - 512mb pc2700 dimms (I am going for 2)
2 - 73gb WD Raptor drives (SATA RAID 0 for OS - I am doing 37s)
2 - 250gb WD JB series SATA drives. If you must go bigger, another storage card or use PC133 PATA drives in addition.
Pioneer A07 DVD burner
Cheiftec Dragon case (Your choice. I like the front usb and 1394 and the price)
Vantec 470 or 550? EPS power supply - XEON requires a different PSU than ATX.
ATI 9800 AIW Pro 128 BUT you may want to do an XT (and get a dedicated AV/DV)
Dedicated AV/DV on a budget - Canopus ADVC-100.

Something you may want with your budget is:
JVC BR-DV3000U Professional DV Compact Editing VTR, RS-422 Control, SMPTE Time Code, NTSC/PAL
That would give you DV and miniDV. You can do a search to find specs. They are about $1500.

I do believe Adobe does have a forum, so don't be afraid to ask there. There are plenty of folks that use it daily. For dual system stuff, 2cpu.com is a great place for setup info. Another good resource is dvinfo net.

Oh, and I would use caution on planning for overclocking. Overclocking and MPEG creation can cause issues.

 

[vailr]

This thread at 3dgameman forum may be of interest:
Dual Intel Xeon 2.8GHz System - Project Dual Xeon!

 

[LethalWolfe]

my 2 cents:

1. Any name brand 7200RPM ATA/133 HDD is fast enough for DV. A 250gig drive would be a good place to start.
2. Get a Matrox video card (G550 maybe). You are working w/2D video. You do not need a powerful 3D video card.
3. Screen space is your friend. I would go no lower than a pair of 19" CRTs or a pair of 17" LCDs
4. Buy a TV (doesn't have to be big) to use as a "broadcast" monitor. Video on a computer monitor looks very different than video on a TV.
6. Don't forget about speakers.

What software will you be using and how do you plan to get video on and off your computer?

 

[Cerb]

Originally posted by: gsellis
I use Pinnacle Liquid Edition 5.5. It does dual and uses the GPU. I just checked Adobe's page and they seem to still recommend a P4. Hmmm..

Yeah, and recommend a 3.06.
AKA they haven't bothered updating it in a year or more.
While I don't trust PC World any more than anybody else, and am a bit dubious at the G5 results, the FX and P4 results are close enough. Google yielded nothing more for Premier.

Not to hurt the AMD fans feelings, but the one place Intel is better than AMD is video rendering with SSE. Sorry. It is also the only place that Prescott is better than Northwood in fact (otherwise, Prescott is just includes a free space heater when compared to the Northwood).

Correction: SSE2 and SSE3.

I am look at build this in a month. My budget is 2K, so I will bump the numbers.

ASUS PC-DL Deluxe Mobo
2 - 3.06 or 3.2GHz Intel Xeon (newest BIOS may be required for 3.2)
4 - 512mb pc2700 dimms (I am going for 2)
2 - 73gb WD Raptor drives (SATA RAID 0 for OS - I am doing 37s)
2 - 250gb WD JB series SATA drives. If you must go bigger, another storage card or use PC133 PATA drives in addition.
Pioneer A07 DVD burner
Cheiftec Dragon case (Your choice. I like the front usb and 1394 and the price)
Vantec 470 or 550? EPS power supply - XEON requires a different PSU than ATX.
ATI 9800 AIW Pro 128 BUT you may want to do an XT (and get a dedicated AV/DV)
Dedicated AV/DV on a budget - Canopus ADVC-100.

Something you may want with your budget is:
JVC BR-DV3000U Professional DV Compact Editing VTR, RS-422 Control, SMPTE Time Code, NTSC/PAL
That would give you DV and miniDV. You can do a search to find specs. They are about $1500.

I do believe Adobe does have a forum, so don't be afraid to ask there. There are plenty of folks that use it daily. For dual system stuff, 2cpu.com is a great place for setup info. Another good resource is dvinfo net.

Oh, and I would use caution on planning for overclocking. Overclocking and MPEG creation can cause issues.

Overclocking can cause issues with anything. Overclocking tip: Don't OC on an Athlon64 unless you have a SiS chipset one (fixed PCI and AGP).

 

[gsellis]

Originally posted by: Cerb
Correction: SSE2 and SSE3.

Yep, incorrectly or not, I did leave the version off.

Overclocking can cause issues with anything. Overclocking tip: Don't OC on an Athlon64 unless you have a SiS chipset one (fixed PCI and AGP).

True. The MPEG encoder times seem to be very sensitive to OC and I think I remember it was a clock issue. Wish I could reference it, but I forget where it was and the detailed description.

 

[JYDog]

G5(bare 1.6Ghz is probably enough) with 4Gigs of RAM
SCSI RAID Array
Apple Cinema Display


ED: Actually, I would scrap the need for SCSI and get the more important area like displays. Two large LCD and a Matrox dual card would be the best starting point. Also the 1.6 doesn't have PCI-X which would bottleneck a SCSI RAID setup, but its not even needed.

 

[Looney]

42

 

[NokiaDude]

Modern E-IDE > SCSI

Get the Pentium 4 EE for sure.