Building the ultimate video editing machine.
Like a lot of people here, I'm looking to build the best video editing machine that money can buy. While I used to be pretty good with hardware, I'm not up to date on the best places to buy, newest
cards, etc. So I've gone through the boards and collected some data on building the ultimate machine for editing video as of April 2nd 2006 and done my best to sum it up here in a fashion which would be accessible to users of all levels. I'll probably keep my spending to ~$3000 though I might go higher if the value is significant.
Could those with more knowhow than myself correct or update whatever errors I make or offer advice to those like me who are looking to build the ultimate machine?
1. Dual core, dual chip AMD Opteron. The Opteron is usually used for servers, and is a 'high end' chip.
AMD chips deliver considerably more power per clock cycle than Intel chips. (Intel is optimized
for some video encoding tasks.)
Hyperthreading is just a buzzword and in reality you want true-multiprocessing with two indepedent cores, and ideally two independant chips with two cores each. Hyperthreading is nice in theory, but is just a stepping stone to multi-processing.
Can a motherboard that can run a Athlon 64 (or FX) processor also support a Athlon 64x2 processor?
If it's Socket 754, then no.
If it's Socket 939, then you should be able to run an X2 with only a BIOS upgrade (if that).
Additionally, there's been some concern re: pentium's support of DRM though they don't seem to be including it in their current products.
As for dual*cores* which just came out. All you need to do is upgrade your BIOS on your motherboard and the operating system will recognize the chip in a similar way as a dual processor set-up.
The AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ Toledo 1GHz FSB has also been suggested as a good chip.
2. Hard drives and RAID arrays
The advantage of using RAID1 or RAID2 is that if a single disk fails you can use the other disk and no data is lost, also, because 2 disks are being used at the same time the through put is doubled, resulting in a highly noticeable decrease in access times for the disks which greatly adds to performance of the system.
In short, you're losing disk space and gaining disk read speed with RAID. You're also gaining some protection against disk failures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundant_ ... dent_disks
While most technical documentation doesn't say that RAID reduces write speed, one user has made this assertion.
Generally speaking, faster RPMs (7200 upgraded to 10,000) are considered less of a good investment than processor speed first and RAM second. At what point would hard disk write speed start to become a bottleneck? What about read speed? Are they really not significant? I have a 500 GB external USB 2.0 harddrive and could easily purchase another, but I want my main computer to be fast. Likewise, are two 250 GB USB drives with 8 MB cache faster than one drive with 16 MB cache? Cache on a hard drive is only good for transfer of smaller files, right? What's the limiting factor on a USB hard drive? Is it drive/seek speed? The transfer rate of the USB cable?
Today, SATA is somewhat faster than the equivalent PATA drive although hard drive tech still has a tough time saturating the PATA-100/133 interface, let alone the SATA-150 interface. And NO, 10,000 RPM drives aren't worth it. Especially since
you can get 500GB 7200 RPM, worth of storage for the same price as a 150GB 10,000 RPM drive ($300).
Memory - Min 1 gig in RAM. You're better off with two paired RAM chips than one big one, as the two can be accessed simultaneously (dual channel feature.)
DDr memory is the way to go for amd boards, you need to run two sticks to utilize the dual channel feature of the amd onboard memory controler. The onboard controler is why the amd can make such fast use of the memory. Most of the motherboard manufacturers have recomended memory brands, most of the good name brands work fine but some boards are fussy.
ECC - Some memory has error correction code. Avoid it. This is for computers which are mission critical, and it makes your RAM run slower.
DVD burner - Should work with + and - disks. At least x48 read speed.
OS - Windows XP Professional (not home) or Linux to make sure your multiple cores are supported. (Is windows XP 64 better if processor is 64 bit?
Software - Premiere (version?) or Vegas Video 6 and up support multithreading. (what about 64 bit processing) .
Adobe Premiere is a multi-threaded program and thus every other frame, in theory, is rendered by a different processor.
Also if I wanna do something else like play a game.
Since Windows XP also supports dual processors (look at the task manager and set CPU affinities),you can set the render job to CPU0 and then go do something else with CPU1.
Video cards - If you're just looking to rip video from DVDs and not capture it, a powerful video card is not needed.
However programs (which ones, which versions) are increasingly dumping some of their processing load onto the GPU's
system resources, so a video card with onboard processor can still be helpful. ATI all in wonder cards are frequently reccomended. This is one thing I know little about. I also want to do 3D video editing, so I need a card which supports
that function as well. PCI-E is 16x (twice the speed of an AGP card)
For video cards that will do good VIVO (video-in/video-out) almost everyone will recommend ATI.
Nvidea 32 -or- 64 are very good cards that do not cost much and handle 3D.
You don't need a good video card for AMVs, but you'll appreciate graphics processing horsepower. More and more applications are starting to experiment with moving computationally expensive processes onto GPUs.
Additionally, higher-end video cards tend to have quite fast 2D, and some bundle features to accelerate video playback.
you need a graphics card that has outputs your monitors can take. If you've got two CRTs, then you need a card with two D-SUB (VGA 15-pin) outputs.
The ATI all in wonder cards support dual monitors, you would need a DVI-VGA adapter plug for the dvi output if you have two vga monitors. If you get an SLI motherboard you can run two video cards separately and run four monitors. The 1800X AIW by ati should be fast enough for almost any gaming.
That being said, the pci-e slots for video cards are 16x slots. When used in sli mode they work as 8x slots. Gigabyte just came out with a board that runs both sli slots at 16x.
Places to buy;
www.cclcomputers.co.uk or
Ebuyer
buy.com
newegg.com
tigerdirect.com
Memory Express' Online Quote actually helps to do that part for me, negating the boards that do not work with the processor you choose. But I'll be sure to double check everything when I make my mobo choice. Thanks.
Motherboard- make sure your motherboard supports SATAII even if you don't get this type of hard drive, as SATAII will be eventually worthwhile. Your motherboard selection will be determined primarily by processor selection.
Make sure your motherboard supports dual channel memor usage. Any other advice or warnings?
Pick your proc, know your socket. Know your socket, pick your mobo. Pick your mobo, know your max RAM speed. Know your max speed, pick your RAM.
There are AMV wikis on hardware at
http://www.amvwiki.org/index.php/Category:Hardware



