Video Production Build recommendations

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zrikz

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Looking for some recommendations on a video production build.. mainly premier encoding with HD video, photoshop, etc. building it for work

I'm assuming the best would be Core I7?

Components I need: all minus the monitor, unless you can fit in another 19" currently have a dell 19" ultrasharp we are using here... if you guys leave enough room I'll get the matching monitor myself.

Case can be fugly, don't care about looks as no one is seeing it.

Budget: $2500

Requirement: 2TB of disk space.

Buying time: Within the next 5 days.

If you have a better monitor suggestion that fits in the budget I'm open for suggestions!

/edit - preferred newegg or 1 retailer for all parts, makes purchasing orders easier to submit.

/edit 2 - spose I should answer the questions as well..

1) What will you be doing with this PC? Gaming? Photoshop? Web browsing? etc
HD Video editing, photoshop, web, etc
2) What's your budget? Are tax and shipping included? $2,500 Firm - no room going over, not even 1 cent included taxes and shipping.
3) Where do you live? NC - 28804
4) What exact parts do you need for that budget? CPU, RAM, case, etc. Please be very specific. All minus monitor
5) If reusing any parts, what parts will you be reusing? Please be especially specific about the power supply. List make and model. - Monitor Dell Ultrasharp 19"
6) Will you be overclocking? No
7) What size monitor do you have and/or plan to have? 19" Dell Ultrasharp
8) When do you plan on building/buying the PC? Within the next 5 days
9) What features do you need in a motherboard? RAID? Firewire? Crossfire or SLI support? etc. SLI not required Need 2TB of disk space
10) Do you already have a legit and reusable/transferable OS key/license? Unknown right now
 
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Sorry to bump so soon, I believe we are trying to purchase this thing by Friday.
 
Definitely go for an i7 920, but have you thought about going pre-built? For mission-critical stuff, I wouldn't bother building it -- its much easier to get a dell workstation with Pro support and NBD on-site replacements.

... but if you must...
i7 920
Asus P6T series or Gigabyte UD4P or UD5
12GB DDR3-1333 CL8 (use 6GB for a SuperSpeed RAMdisk+, and use as scratch for Adobe)
GTS250 512MB (not sure if higher end cards benefit video encoding or not, so look into it)
Intel X25-M 80GB (RAID0 - OS/apps -- should drop down to $225 as soon as stocks get replenished)
Intel X25-M 80GB (RAID0 - OS/apps -- should drop down to $225 as soon as stocks get replenished)
WD1001FALS (RAID5)
WD1001FALS (RAID5)
WD1001FALS (RAID5)
Antec TP New 750W
Cooler Master RC-690
Blu-Ray Burner
Superspeed RAMDisk
Windows 7 64-bit Enterprise or Pro

That should be around $2300, and the rest for tax and shipping. I would've preferred a dedicated RAID card, but a good one didn't fit in the budget. Chose an NVIDIA card for CUDA, but as I stated earlier, I'm not sure if all you need is a lower end card w/ CUDA or if the higher end cards greatly improve performance or not, so you should really look into it (I wish I had the time, but alas, me sleepy, sorry).

EDIT: If you have a server to host your files, then RAID5 I proposed isn't needed.
Tiraides build is good as well. Add another SSD for RAID0 for the OS/Apps drive and it'll perform nearly the same as my build, hehe. The Intel SSDs have much faster small write speeds, making them much better choices over the vertex drives. Also, since this is for production, Intel's firmware is more stable than OCZ/Indilinx, IMO (I had the vertex drives, lol).
Since this is for videos, I figured you'd want a BR burner, hehe.
 
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Here's one such build:

$135 - Antec Three Hundred Illusion case & Antec Earthwatts EA650 PSU* combo deal
$505 - Intel Core i7 920* & Asus P6T* combo deal
$200 - TWO sets Mushkin SP 3x2GB DDR3 1333 RAM (@ $100 each set)
$230 - OCZ Vertex 60GB SATA SSD
$30 - StarTech SATA35252X 3.5" bay to dual 2.5" SATA HDD adapter
$170 - TWO Samsung SpinPoint F1 1TB SATA HDDs (@ $85 each HDD)*
$55 - HIS Radeon HD4650*
$32 - Samsung SH-S223L SATA DVD burner
$110 - Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit OEM w/ Tech Guarantee (free upgrade to Windows 7)*
=====
$1467 - Subtotal (not including shipping, taxes, or rebates)

Items with an asterisk (*) denote items with free ground shipping.

The above build could handle your needs while leaving you with some leftover spending money. Since you're not gaming, the HD4650 is more than enough; plus, it has the ability to offload HD video encoding/decoding from the processor.

The SSD offers faster performance than any HDD in the market, but it's pretty expensive. You can use the SSD as the OS drive (and for your programs), the two 1TB HDDs as storage, and one of the two 6GB RAM sets (along with a RamDisk software) as a scratch disk. The SSD needs an adapter to fit the case, but the dual-SSD adapter that I found reportedly works better than the single-SSD adapters that NewEgg has available.\

To save money, and/or for additional storage space, you could replace the SSD with another HDD. For a performance/OS drive, I recommend the Western Digital Caviar Black series -- the 640GB or the 1TB HDD would perform well (only 10% slower than the 10K RPM VelociRaptor).

The OEM version of Vista comes with a free upgrade to Windows 7, if/when you decide to go that route. Since you're using lots of RAM, stick with the 64-bit versions of the Windows OS.

Others will most likely chime in with other parts recommendations, but again, the above build is just fine for your needs.

I don't know much about RamDisk software, but I'll let someone else chime in:

Joe Average said:
In other words, as I said, the cost of the devices + the cost of populating them becomes absolutely ridiculous. Grab two Velociraptors and have fun... or even a handful of SSD drives and RAID 'em together. The overall price-to-performance ratio will blow these iRAM devices clear off the planet surface...

Sad, really, because I've been a proponent of actual RAMdisks for decades now. Hell, I used to boot my Amiga 500 off a RAMdisk, so I've seen pretty much every attempt at making such devices as the iRAM that have appeared, and they all suck, period. They just can't do the job adequately and keep the price-to-performance ratio anywhere near a reasonable level.

I built a RAID 0 box for a small image studio 2 weeks ago, a new startup here in Vegas that is making waves. They wanted a "demo" workstation to see what's possible for processing as they don't want to create a massive server-type situation in the office, but 3-4 workstations that are equal in performance and then just using simple file sharing as required. Very simple setup in terms of the network, but the workstation I built used 2 300GB Velociraptors (tried to sell 'em on SSD but the amount of data they're dealing with wouldn't be practical - again, a price-to-performance and ROI issue).

The hard part was getting them to spring for 16GB of RAM because of the cost, but a few weeks ago I saw that sale for 4 4GB sticks of RAM for about $450 and made a few phone calls and snagged a similar deal.

I set up Photoshop CS3 for 'em (their legit retail copy) on Vista Business x64. They started messing around with it, loading some rather large TIFF files in excess of 150MB a pop, several at a time, performing some basic scripted actions on 'em, blurs, filters, etc. Using the Velociraptors in RAID 0 meant very snappy and consistent performance, as well as having 16GB of RAM too. Also, it's a Q6600 based machine running rock solid at 3 GHz.

They were very pleased with the performance at that point, but I had a surprise for 'em. ;)

I asked if I could have 20 mins 'alone' with the workstation to "rewire it" as Tim Allen might say. That consisted of grabbing a trial version of SuperSpeed Software's RamDisk Plus 9 and installing it, doing the simple configuration, and then creating a 10GB RAMdisk and told Photoshop "Ok, you want a scratch disk? Here, try this on for size."

After I did some tests of my own using the same scripts they'd done earlier, boy... I tell ya. You haven't lived till you see 225MB TIFF files literally snap onscreen in the blink of an eye, multiple huge TIFFs with resolutions like 5000x5000 and even higher. That's what's possible with RAMdisks, because even Velociraptors in RAID 0 pumping out something like 280MB/s sustained pales to the close to 5GB a second in bandwidth of that RAMdisk.

I told 'em to come back in and rerun their test scripts.

Jaws hit the floor, folks. Well, not quite but figuratively speaking, at least.

They asked what I'd done, I told them I put the scratch disk in RAM where it should be if you have the RAM to make it happen, and they bought 4 licenses of RamDisk Plus 10 mins later, and I got a signed contract to construct 3 more workstations identical to that one top to bottom and also be their "geek" if any issues come up.

It was a very good week... ;)
Click to expand...

What to use the extra money on? Well, you could buy another monitor... plus the RamDisk software... plus more hard drives....
 
In addition to what tiraides said... buy another monitor. The 19" Ultrasharp isn't going to do anybody any favors. At lease something that will do 8-bit colour... The Dell 2209WA for $290+tax&shipping, or $348+tax&shipping with 5-year warrentee are the very minimum I would grab for the task. The main drawback is the res is 1680x1050, not exactly capable of displaying (fully) 1900x1080 material pixel-for-pixel.

There are several other good monitors as well - the HP LP2475W ($508+tax & shipping at provantage) is another good monitor, provided you get one without the green->pink tint issue some people have had (which I think most do not ship new with that nowadays). Its resolution is 1900x1200.

And why do you want 8-bit colour? Colour-accuracy - a TN panel (most likely in that Ultrasharp) does not display 8-bit nativly, and the dithering associated to produce 8-bit colour will most likely throw off colour correction.
 
What are you outputting onto? BluRay?
What formats are you going to edit?

Is Photoshop and Premiere part of this $2500 budget?

We use a Matrox RT.X2 editing card in our HD Suite which gives us 1920x1080 output to a 24" monitor in real time from the Premiere CS3 timeline.
The card itself is pricey, at around $1300 I think.
 
Zepher said:
What are you outputting onto? BluRay?
What formats are you going to edit?

Is Photoshop and Premiere part of this $2500 budget?

We use a Matrox RT.X2 editing card in our HD Suite which gives us 1920x1080 output to a 24" monitor in real time from the Premiere CS3 timeline.
The card itself is pricey, at around $1300 I think.
Click to expand...

Photoshop and premier have already been purchased, and I'm not sure on the output / formats to be honest, its for my co-worker who is good at the video stuffs but doesn't know very much on computer specs, so I'm doing that part. I'll check with him.

We aren't doing anything too fancy, no blu-ray that I know of. Govt organization, mainly doing documentaries or educational videos, but our camera shoots in 1080p I know of for sure and is some giant behemoth fancy looking thing that they spent a good deal on.... I know nothing of video =/
 
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Anyone have any suggestions to add / change Tiriades build? Just got a phone call saying our computer budget expires as of 3pm est today, so I have to buy in a few hours... love government purchasing.
 
If you can afford to, follow enginurd's advice on the SSDs and the RamDisk.

Don't forget to inform us of your "final" build list once you purchase everything.
 
2x SAMSUNG Spinpoint F1 HD103UJ 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive - OEM
2x ASUS VW246H Black 24" 2ms(GTG) HDMI Widescreen LCD Monitor - Retail
1x HIS H465FS512P Radeon HD 4650 512MB 128-bit DDR2 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFire Supported Video Card - Retail
2x mushkin SP 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666) Desktop Memory Model 998586 - Retail
1x StarTech SATA35252X 3.5" Bay to Dual 2.5" SATA HDD Adapter - Retail
1x Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 64-bit for System Builders w/ Tech Guarantee - OEM
1x LG Blu-ray Burner Model BH08LS20 - Retail

2x OCZ Vertex Series OCZSSD2-1VTX60G 2.5" 60GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid state disk (SSD) - Retail
The Antec Case / PSU combo
i7 920 & Asus motherboard combo
Subtotal: $2,302.82
Shipping: $42.73
Grand Total: $2,345.55
Budget: $2,500.00



The blu-ray burner is not really necessary, but we figured since we have the budget, might as well add in in just incase

I know they are not the perfect monitors, but he wants em.. if you guys have a better recommendation let me know, I just found out all of this has to be from 1 vendor as well.

/edit so I think I'm going to steal this, take it home and drop my 4890 into it =/
 
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honestly if you plan to go with photoshop and all that you might want to go with a nvidia card like enginurd suggested since all the new adobe apps support cuda.. and im not sure if they support the ATI cards for hardware acceleration but some one correct me if im wrong on it not support ATI cards..


also there are a few video encoding apps that are moving more toward cuda encoding so a nvidia card would be even more of a benefit..

and you might want to look into the WD 2TB GP drives for long term storage.. run quieter, cooler, and less power usage.. they are slower then the standard drives.. but for long term storage they have their benefits..
 
Would something like a Nvidia Geforce GTS 250 take advantage of that? Nearing budget limits.. had to add in 2 flashdrives for other employees.. bleh only $60 less though. Sitting at $2409.53 now
 
Personally, I think the SSD's are overkill for the OS/Apps drives since that amount of speed is not required for this type of work.
If I were building this, I would do a WD 640 Black OS drive (partitioned to 200GB and 400GB) and 2x 1TB WD Black drives.
 
Such a nice budget and no SSDs? :confused: I'd keep 'em. They'd greatly improve photoshop performance, as would RAMdisk.

From what I've read, CUDA greatly improves performance in Adobe's suite, especially in Premiere. Yes, the GTS250, and many other cards, support CUDA.
 
Ok good deal, going for the GTS 250, and keeping the SSD's. Looks like we managed to get an extension until next week on the purchasing as well so we can make sure we get everything perfect.

Have to get some approval for the monitors for some reason.. they are trying to make us purchase it through some work contractor and instead of $410 for 2 - 24" its $405 for 1 - 24" monitor hyundai brand.. ugh. You would think someone would be logical here.
 
If you are doing photoshop work do not use a TN panel monitor. TN panels do not display colours accurately. 200$ 24" inch monitors are all TN panels. 24" Non-TNs start at 400$. If that is a 400$ TN panel monitor don't touch it.
 
Jospeh said:
If you are doing photoshop work do not use a TN panel monitor. TN panels do not display colours accurately. 200$ 24" inch monitors are all TN panels. 24" Non-TNs start at 400$. If that is a 400$ TN panel monitor don't touch it.
Click to expand...

It is indeed a TN.. photoshop is not something big we do here, just primarily the video with a little photoshop every now and then.
 
I'd still stay away from TNs if you are doing visual work. I guess it depends on the type of work but if you are adding in any sorts of special effects or messing with the colours TN monitors are a really bad investment.
 
I agree, stay away from TN panels for the usages you listed... but hey, maybe you have a separate production monitor to do playback so you can see the colors better? iunno... whatever. We don't even do visual work here and I wish I didn't buy these TN panels, lol, but eh, its only text, so it doesn't really matter for us.
 
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