Video Editing Rig Spec

O

opinionhated

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Hi All,

Need help deciding on specs for a video editing rig building for the SO. Mac is out of the question on price.

No idea where to begin, thinking of something i5 with dedicated graphics, SSD and 4K display.

Any lessons learnt, or advice on what graphics card, processor, amount of RAM.

Budget: 15k
Professional Use: Adobe. Starting a production business.
 
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And what sort of editing - where on the spectrum from occasional home videos all the way to fulltime professional editing and rendering?

And what NLE?
 
Processor - the faster the better
Motherboard - one of the cheapest that has enough expansion options for your needs
RAM - the more the merrier
Graphics card - don't worry about it
Storage - dedicated SSDs as boot and scratch drives if you can, large mechanical drives for storage
PSU - probably a lot lower wattage than you think
Case - your choice
Backup and archival - I bet you forgot about external storage for these purposes - DO NOT use the same drive for both!

If you give a budget I can give a build, but without a budget I can't do much more than the above generic advice. As Arthur asked, which NLE are you using? The Adobe suite?
 
Corsair makes very nice square high-airflow cases. Their 'Air' series has models for all the price ranges. They are very spacious and look great.
 
CPU, RAM, and disk are most important. Then i/o for getting video into and off the system, though your source is probably the slowest device.

If I was still seriously into video editing I'd build an overclocked liquid-cooled dual Xeon with 4TB of SSD, 24GB RAM, and another 10-20TB of fast external storage.
 
I'm looking at an i7, 16gb ram and SSD for my rig
 
[XC] Oj101;17182447 said:
Processor - the faster the better
Motherboard - one of the cheapest that has enough expansion options for your needs
RAM - the more the merrier
Graphics card - don't worry about it
Storage - dedicated SSDs as boot and scratch drives if you can, large mechanical drives for storage
PSU - probably a lot lower wattage than you think
Case - your choice
Backup and archival - I bet you forgot about external storage for these purposes - DO NOT use the same drive for both!

If you give a budget I can give a build, but without a budget I can't do much more than the above generic advice. As Arthur asked, which NLE are you using? The Adobe suite?
Click to expand...

I would think processor above i5 would have quickly diminishing returns.
Regarding graphics card, my layman understanding would think you need something dedicated.
 
nadimm said:
Regarding graphics card, my layman understanding would think you need something dedicated.
Click to expand...
Counter-intuitively perhaps, NLE doesn't need a fancy graphics card. You're just driving an HD display. Even if you're into calibrating your monitor and graphics card for pro-level/broadcast colour-correction, editing and rendering, just about any mid-level graphics card these days is fine. Ten or fifteen years ago you'd have to look a little more carefully, starting with Matrox or at least an ATi-based graphics chipset, but not these days. Even if your NLE uses the graphics CPU and engine for rendering assistance, today's graphics cards are more than adequate.

For NLE on Windows, I switched from Adobe Premier to Vegas Pro many years ago. The company was acquired by Sony Media.
 
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nadimm said:
I would think processor above i5 would have quickly diminishing returns.
Regarding graphics card, my layman understanding would think you need something dedicated.
Click to expand...

When it comes to video you want more cores/threads so i7 minimum.

I doubt your budget allows for an X99 build but I'll scratch around a bit later.
 
Oh, forgot to mention: Two displays are important. Wouldn't think of video editing without two displays. Apart from a full-screen full-res realtime render, it's a useful place to park toolbars and utils, greatly aiding workflow.
 
Is 4K worth it? I don't think she's going to be doing 4K, since its broadcast quality and lower.

For similar cost, I could do 2x128GB SSD Raid 0. Or 1x 256 GB. So question is capacity or speed?
 
Arthur said:
CPU, RAM, and disk are most important. Then i/o for getting video into and off the system, though your source is probably the slowest device.

If I was still seriously into video editing I'd build an overclocked liquid-cooled dual Xeon with 4TB of SSD, 24GB RAM, and another 10-20TB of fast external storage.
Click to expand...

You just listed an edited version of my sig, which was built for media editing :p

If you're going dual Xeon, they may as well be air cooled. The maximum overclock you'll get is a around 4-5 %, which isn't going to add any discernible amount of heat output. Older Xeons (such as the ones in my sig) could be overclocked using the BCLK, but that required a motherboard that allows you to increase the BCLK of which there were very few - the EVGA Classified SR-2 being one of them.

nadimm said:
Budget ~ 15k
Adobe suite
Professional usage. She does some editing in her current role as a producer.
Click to expand...

Wow, that's a tight budget. Let me play around, it's extremely tight though. I was hoping to at least do something with a six core Core i7 and 32 GB RAM on the X99 platform, but that definitely won't be happening.

nadimm said:
I would think processor above i5 would have quickly diminishing returns.
Regarding graphics card, my layman understanding would think you need something dedicated.
Click to expand...

Nope, video editing is all about having as much processing power as possible. I'm running dual Xeons for a reason, if the returns weren't worth it over a single Core i5 I would have saved myself an ass-ton of money and bought the i5.

As for graphics, there are very few scenarios where rendering makes use of the graphics card - with a budget as tight as yours, a card shouldn't even be a consideration.
 
[XC] Oj101;17182891 said:
You just listed an edited version of my sig, which was built for media editing :p

If you're going dual Xeon, they may as well be air cooled. The maximum overclock you'll get is a around 4-5 %, which isn't going to add any discernible amount of heat output. Older Xeons (such as the ones in my sig) could be overclocked using the BCLK, but that required a motherboard that allows you to increase the BCLK of which there were very few - the EVGA Classified SR-2 being one of them.
Click to expand...
Blerry Intel. ;)
 
Its not a hard and fast budget. If I need to spend a little more than so be it. I just need to consider buying the displays in the budget.

She was going to spend 29k on an iMac i5
 
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