Curious. What HW & SW do you use?

[Jedinovice]

OK, I am new to these parts so please be patient with me.

I am now an ex-pat teacher in Indonesia but I was a software test manager in the old country before and so I am interested in IT stuff. So... I am curious as to what software and hardware people are using. It seems Sony Vegas seems to be pretty much a standard but I don't know. So... for my idle curiosity’s sake,

What hardware are you using?
What software?
Why?

Simple enough. It's just for comparison purposes!

Me:
Hardware: A dual core atom n2840 ASUS X200 laptop at circa $250! (I do have a 4 core 2940 atom ASUS x200 but that's the backup!)

Software: Kdenlive 0.9.6 running under Mint Linux 17.0 KDE edition.

Why? I live in Indonesia! Sticking with Windows was no longer an option cost wise and, frankly, at the time I could not face enduring Windows 8. (I also have to use minimal hardware as I am constantly on the move and, as I put it to my students, "Imagine if I had a $1,200 i7 laptop… and I dropped it.") I figured Linux precluded multi-track video editing but then I found Kdenlive in the repositories and … wow! For free?! No way! Every bit the equal of Magix Movie edit pro 17 which I used prior to Linux… and that was a crashathon. Very fast, very easy to use and, for the price, top marks!

So, yeah, I edit very much on a budget. Like $0.00!

[Qyot27]

My main editing machine is a 14-year-old eMachines T1110 that's been upgraded out the nose. The motherboard, CPU, keyboard, and one of the sticks of RAM are original, everything else is much newer or gone through upgrades a few times (right now the only thing I need to do is replace the CPU cooler, but only because the fan is way too noisy). Runs XP Pro SP3 and [currently*] Ubuntu 15.10. Editing software is Adobe Premiere 6.5. I'm one of that minority that actually uses - and likes using - the rubber band opacity controls. My hope is that whenever Lumiera or VLMC mature/come to fruition, that they'll be competent alternatives for that sort of editing. The existing offerings aren't. Most/all of the pre- and post- software are open source programs...and probably personally cross-compiled by me under Ubuntu.

*the actual answer here is 'whatever the current 6-month release is', and it's been that way since 5.10.


However, about three weeks ago I did purchase the Quantum Byte (and subsequently took advantage of the free upgrade to Windows 10), mostly for non-editing stuff, but it is a nice little HTPC and it definitely could handle my editing workload if it wasn't restricted to a tiny 32GB eMMC card as main drive storage. I do use it as an encoding prep machine for DVD authoring, though, since the other options I have at my disposal are too cumbersome and/or I don't have constant access to them. Downscaling from 720p->480p with Lanczos4Resize in AviSynth+ and encoding with HCenc 0.28, it can encode in roughly real-time, so I don't generally mind it - I let it do that while I sleep or when I'm at work, and then transfer the encodes back to the main computer since that's where the burner is. And it's dead silent when operating, which really takes some getting used to.

Not that I couldn't use external hard drives or the SD card, but my desk configuration is not really conducive to the external drive idea at the moment and I'm currently pulling my hair out wrangling with trying to get around the 32-bit UEFI/64-bit CPU combination and esoteric boot options as it pertains to installing 64-bit Ubuntu to the 64 GB SD card I do have (again, mostly for a cross-compilation environment; I'm tired of having to wait three hours or more to compile FFmpeg). I even tried putting Debian 8.2 on an external hard drive - after installing, it booted once, and then either the drive corrupted itself (which I knew was a possibility) or something about the configuration changed and rendered it inert. I'll eventually build a power desktop to handle this, and I won't have that problem anymore. Although as things have been going before, it may not be until Cannonlake gets released.

[Jedinovice]

Hi Qyot27. Thanks for the data. I'm still unclear as to your hardware mind! What CPU are you using?

Also, I am curious. You say you dual boot Ubuntu. Fair enough. But, I am curious how you find the Unity UI. Do you use Linux much or is it an add on? Do you find Unity OK for productivity. I have generally regarded Unity as a cellphone interface more than desktop so I am interested in the experience of an actual user. Bear in mind that Mint is geared very heavily towards the Windows 9x 'classic' desktop experience.

And thanks for the reply! Cool.

[Qyot27]

I don't use Unity, I use LXDE 99% of the time, or occasionally MATE if I feel like switching it up a bit. I'm only under Unity for a few minutes at the start of a release cycle in order to install LXDE, after which I don't log back into Unity until the next release gets installed. Whether that would continue holding true on a machine that had the hardware specs to run Unity well is up in the air.

The main computer has a 1GHz Coppermine-128 (i.e. Pentium III-based) Celeron in it, with a GeForce 6200 graphics card. The Quantum Byte has an Atom Z3735F CPU (Bay Trail-T platform), 1.33-1.83 GHz, quad core.

Software patching, compiling, or other miscellaneous things I might do with code are almost always done under Linux. My online banking is done exclusively under Linux.

[Jedinovice]

Good heavens! So you are using hardware even less powerful than my 2.16 GHz dual core atom n2840. (The wife has just taken the four core away from me so this is it now!)

Wonders never cease.

As an aside, my introduction to video editing was on my Pentium 133 with the rainbow runner editing card and ulead Media Pro 2,5b. wonderful software and I was looking for years for something as usable after it was obsoleted. I was stunned when I fell over Kdenlive in the repositories! "This is what I have been looking for!" I would render over night for 10 minutes of video which I would transfer to video tape, wipe the 7GB hard drive and start the next cut...

Put together my own rendering of Fritz Lang's 'Metropolis' on it! Have it on soft copy.

Yeah, jumping to LXDE makes sense both in the sense of minimizing the load on 'classic' hardware and in terms of doing anything productive.
I do get the impression Unity is for the cellphone crowd.

[MrNosec]

Hardware:
-SKILL Ripjaws X Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 2333Mhz [ 9-9-9-24-1 ]

-Intel Core i7-3820 Sandy Bridge-E 3.6GHz (3.8GHz Turbo Boost)

-GTX 980 4GB

Software:
After Effects CC 2015 and Adobe Audition CC 2015

Why?
I used Sony Vegas Pro 12 for most of my older videos ( mainly satiric GMV's that became more famous than they should ) now I use After Effects, because my projects are far more complex nowadays and vegas just won't do ( like using Twixtor to make 60fps anime and edit compositions with 1800+ tracks ), and with the change in software came a suiting change in hardware, and videogames might have had something to do with it aswell.. ( might! )

[Jedinovice]

Hardware:
-SKILL Ripjaws X Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 2333Mhz [ 9-9-9-24-1 ]

-Intel Core i7-3820 Sandy Bridge-E 3.6GHz (3.8GHz Turbo Boost)

-GTX 980 4GB

Software:
After Effects CC 2015 and Adobe Audition CC 2015

Why?
I used Sony Vegas Pro 12 for most of my older videos ( mainly satiric GMV's that became more famous than they should ) now I use After Effects, because my projects are far more complex nowadays and vegas just won't do ( like using Twixtor to make 60fps anime and edit compositions with 1800+ tracks ), and with the change in software came a suiting change in hardware, and videogames might have had something to do with it aswell.. ( might! )

Thanks for the data. That's er, some serious... stuff.