Planning to put together a budget video editing system

[Drunkenvalley]

...I should be thinking? Because you're presenting an absolutely apeshit situation as an acceptable scenario?
You do not accept such a demand. Not with any form of budget machine like the OP's trying to get.

Firstly, you do not export your work every few minutes so someone can doublecheck it.
Secondly, begin using lists of what to do. Typos? Add it to the list. Jesus, it's not that tricky.
Third, begin using actually appropriate file formats for YouTube, dammit.

[Asera]

Drive setup I would do for this:

Boot: WD Caviar Blue/Black, Spinpoint, whatever size you want.
Scratch/Project: 2x WD Caviar Blue RAID0 (dual 500gb's are the cheapest option)
Storage: 2TB WD Caviar Green

I can tell you from personal experience the 2500K will obliterate any Phenom II in RAM previews, and edge off the X6's in final exporting as well.

If you stay with the AMD system with that board, DON'T GET G.SKILL RAM FOR IT. Please save yourself endless headaches and get Kingston stuff that's more or less guaranteed to work correctly.

As others have said, nVidia for CUDA would be the smart option.

If you can get a cheap Z68 with a Virtu chip, it's a good investment for what you're doing. But not necessary.

Probably everything was already said but whatever.

[Deleted]

I'll just add this:
you want a lot of RAM.
raw video has a tendency to eat up everything you got so the more the better.
anyone saying anything different has obviously never spent time waiting for raw footage to load and unload =/

[Cyanotical]

a bit to add, if you can afford it, go with a nvidia quadro and a workstation board, the bios on both are designed for handling workloads more then a standard or gaming computer

a way to think of it is like this:
a workstation build is like a jeep wrangler
and a gaming computer is like a corvette

on a premade asfault road, the corvette is much faster, but when there is no road (ie you are making your own) the jeep will win


here's the drawback though, workstation components are much more expensive, and all you are really paying for is that special firmware, as most of the time the hardware is almost identical

but, if you decide to look:
Nvidia's WS cards are called "Quadro"
ATI's WS cards are called "Firepro"
Intel's WS CPU's are called "Xeon"
Most of Asus P6T series of motherboards are WS ready

if you are set on AMD for price then use a standard 890gx motherboard

[vesseblah]

Third, begin using actually appropriate file formats for YouTube, dammit.

What format would give better quality for mass-producing 1080p youtube videos than Quicksynced h264?


Again, OP has not explained what kind of video editing he's doing, so most of this bullshit is purely theoretical.

[Drunkenvalley]

What format would give better quality for mass-producing 1080p youtube videos than Quicksynced h264?

I'm sorry, my brain 403'd when you put "mass-produce," "1080p" and "YouTube" in the same line. Moreso when thinking about a budget machine.
Unless you mean things like 5 second films. But something ala blogger length, ie several minutes at a time?

Then again, you're not being very clear what sort of content you're thinking about. When I'm hearing "mass-producing" I'm thinking relatively short clips being pumped out daily ala TotalBiscuit.

[Asera]

Might be good to note that AMD systems have ECC support in mainstream components (M4A89GTD has support for it). Intel would require you to go to a Xeon.

Almost forgot about that.

[Wries]

Point half taken. I do see a benefit in draft-making but that's just as much an assumption on what OP needs as anything else. And as drafts are drafts, could go with a less cpu-intensive codec to begin with.

[vesseblah]

I'm sorry, my brain 403'd when you put "mass-produce," "1080p" and "YouTube" in the same line.

Just about every mobile phone and camcorder does 1080p video now. HD quality clips have really been mass produced for few years now by just about everybody and their cats. The need for faster video encoding even for Average Joe is real.

Then again, you're not being very clear what sort of content you're thinking about. When I'm hearing "mass-producing" I'm thinking something less relatively short clips being pumped out daily ala TotalBiscuit.

For example.

Or you want to upload 100 old home movies for relatives. Could be any number of easily imaginable scenarios.

[Deleted]

get a blu-ray burner aswell

[vesseblah]

get a blu-ray burner aswell

Depending on where/how you need to send the videos it might be crucial or total waste of money.

Problem with BluRay burning is that the discs cost almost the same as regular 7200RPM HDD for $/GB but it takes 50 times longer to burn 100GB of files into stack of BluRay discs than copy those into external eSATA disc.

[Cyanotical]

get a blu-ray burner aswell

Not really needed as optical media is going away

[Drunkenvalley]

Just about every mobile phone and camcorder does 1080p video now. HD quality clips have really been mass produced for few years now by just about everybody and their cats. The need for faster video encoding even for Average Joe is real.

For example. Or you want to upload 100 old home movies for relatives. Could be any number of easily imaginable scenarios.

"Every mobile phone and camcorde does 1080p video now"? Absolute pill of crock shit. Seriously, find me this "every mobile phone and camcorder" on a site where the pricetag is even remotely relevant for Average Joe.

The OP also isn't Average Joe. If he doesn't already know how to pump out a proper clip onto YouTube, or learn it properly, then I'm afraid no hardware in the world will help him.

Finally, 100 old home movies for relatives? Yeah, they won't be in 1080p.

[vesseblah]

"Every mobile phone and camcorde does 1080p video now"? Absolute pill of crock shit. Seriously, find me this "every mobile phone and camcorder" on a site where the pricetag is even remotely relevant for Average Joe.

Slight exaggeration there, but my $200 Android phone does 720p video. Every single $100 pocket camera does now 720p video and almost every single $200 pocket camera does 1080p. HD video is really everywhere at Average Joe budget.

Finally, 100 old home movies for relatives? Yeah, they won't be in 1080p.

Old home movies are usually in 8mm format, if you use modern DV camcorder to digitize those they will be 1080p. Film rolls don't really have any set resolution being analog media, and you should always digitize at highest possible quality available to lose least amount of details of the analog source.

[Drunkenvalley]

Slight exaggeration there, but my $200 Android phone does 720p video. Every single $100 pocket camera does now 720p video and almost every single $200 pocket camera does 1080p. HD video is really everywhere at Average Joe budget.

Oh. Sorry, I thought you were talking about devices with vague amounts of quality to them. >>;

But rather hugging the edge of outright offtopic I think it's time we return to the motherboards. It really doesn't help the OP to be discussing average Joe, considering he clearly isn't one when he intends to build a dedicated machine for video-editing.

What I believe, to be fair and honest opinions are all we're gonna have in this particular discussion, is that under no circumstances should he be running into your described scenarios. As far as I'm concerned these are simply unrealistic and made to showcase the z68 in a much better light than it really is. However, I won't make the claim that z68 boards aren't going to be much faster.

Video-editing industry is really not one where you want to hurry things beyond what's absolutely necessary. And pleasing your boss meetings with quickly exported content is really not a necessary hurry.

Old home movies are usually in 8mm format, if you use modern DV camcorder to digitize those they will be 1080p. Film rolls don't really have any set resolution being analog media, and you should always digitize at highest possible quality available to lose least amount of details of the analog source.

While this is perfectly true, I wasn't apparently thinking old enough when you said "old home movies" :P

[Havermeyer]

WD consumer drives don't tend to play nicely with hardware (which you aren't using now ) RAID these days. And, at least anecdotally, the 2TB Green drives have given people a lot of grief since they were introduced.

Hitachi 5K3000 and Samsung EcoGreen F4 (the Samsung NEEDS a firmware update if you get old stock to prevent data loss) are some nice cheap 5900RPM 2TB storage drives (regularly as low as ~$60 each). My 5900RPM 2TB 5K3000 drives have a slightly faster sustained read speed than my WD Black 1TB (FALS) 7200RPM from a few years ago. Supposedly Seagate's newish 5900RPM 2TB 'green' drive is really quick, too. But... it's a Seagate.

For marginally faster 7200RPM 2TB, WD Black is slightly faster in synthetics, but trades blows with the Hitachi 7K3000 in more "real world" type testing: http://www.storagereview.com/hitachi...ds723030ala640

[robrusleg]

Hey guys, thank you so much for your input! With everything being said, I've come up with the following build:

Case NZXT GAMMA Classic $35.99
PSU CORSAIR Enthusiast Series CMPSU-650TX 650W $89.99
Mobo ASRock 890GX $109.99
CPU AMD Phenom II X6 1055T $159.99
CPU Cooler Stock Free
RAM Kingston 8GB (2 x 4GB) $89.99
SSD OCZ Vertex 2 60GB $99.99
HDD WD Caviar Green 32MB Cache 500GB $49.99
Optical Sony Optiarc SATA DVD/CD Burner $19.99
GPU EVGA Geforce GTS 450 $119.99
Subtotal $775.91



Changes:

• Changed AMD graphics card to a Cuda-enabled one
• Added an SSD that I'll put Windows + Premiere/After Effects on, with a small HDD for storage
• Changed the case to a less-expensive alternative
• Changed the Mobo to a less-expensive alternative
• Changed the RAM to Kingston brand

I have one more question. Could I save money by opting for a different PSU? 650W seems overkill? Could anybody direct me to a cheaper, yet equally reliable one?

[Xuvial]

Just check around for an Antec 500-550 or w Corsair CX (builder) series 500w, it should run that fine.

[Chickensoup23]

Just check around for an Antec 500-550 or w Corsair CX (builder) series 500w, it should run that fine.

A quality 450-500 watts will do the trick. If you want good shit, try to look towards Antec (Earthwatts, Truepower series), Corsair (TX/HX) or SeaSonic (all of them!). Anything in those that's 80+ will do the trick, honestly.

Just like Xuvial and others said, a quality power supply will make your system shine

[vesseblah]

SSD OCZ Vertex 2 60GB $99.99
HDD WD Caviar Green 32MB Cache 500GB $49.99

If you're editing videos longer than about... umm... 4 seconds this will be a big mistake.

You'll start the programs from SSD only once, but when you're putting together longer movies from many cuts, the speed of HDDs will be about the most important thing that speeds up the process as the clips will be too large to fit into memory whole. There is a good reason why professionals use RAID0.