$3500 budget PC Desktop - what would you buy?

[Jeff Kilgroe]

I have found the Mercury engine to not only be fantastic on the timeline but it speeds up my renders by huge amounts. When its enabled its like the render doesnt have any color correction at all, the card just pounds through it leaving the cpu to handle the other tasks.

Depends on your workflow. I guess I knew Mercury does speed up rendering, it just doesn't seem to with most of my R3D work since I tend to use the Rocket for the final render. As for Mercury, playback or render, All the color operations are handled by the GPU, so are transformations, scaling, GPU-accelerated FX. Footage decompression and primary render happens on the CPUs. Same as in playback.

When working with 4k RED files on the timeline, I have to turn the Rocket OFF because the Rocket actually becomes a bottleneck for Mercury. All debayer operations from the Rocket are done at full resolution and quality and when working at a lower resolution/quality on the timeline, the CPUs on most decent workstations will outpace the Rocket. For final rendering, I turn the Rocket back on as it then plows through full resolution and quality frames faster than the CPUs can, which is nice, and leaves the CPUs and GPU to do most of the other work. I'm not sure how much the GPU factors into the final render, if it's the same as during playback or if they push more to the CPUs to maintain consistency and better accuracy.

 

[Alexander Ibrahim]

I find myself in strong agreement with Jeff Kilgroe.

I can't remember who gave the advice about waiting for the Scarlet to actually be in hand before buying a computer, but its a very smart move.

As far as the render farm thing... I don't think Media Composer or the Adobe Suite have distributed renderers. I am not at all sure about Smoke.

If not, then the render farm will only help with output from Compressor and 3D apps.

So, you need a single fast computer for editorial at least in Windows.

I'd plan on using render nodes only after you have tested that workflow.

That said, render nodes are an economical way to bring compute power to a problem.