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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

3K editing system reqiurements

Dancsó Péter

Dancsó Péter

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What is a reasonably priced pc for editing scarlet footage (+magic bullet)? Not like a 8 core 32 gb ram one, but a medium, where the pc doesn't choke by the footage in CS4. Is dual core enough? The guys at the computer store told me it's useless to buy a 4 core CPU, because no software use all the cores.
 
When it comes to video post-production he's wrong, you definitely want at least a quad core(if not a dual quad), and considering the price difference between dual and quad these days you might end up spending $50 for nearly doubling the capacity of your box.
 
If people are editing 2k RED footage on iMacs, I'm pretty sure a dual core should be fine.

I've asked around and RED users say that my 2.53 Dual Core MB Pro with 4 GB of RAM should run 2k without problems..
 
When Snow Leopard comes out, it's should utilize all the cores... finally :drool5:
 
So buying a quad core will make the workflow twice fast? I'm talking about PC and Windows system. Also, will Windows 7 will be a better system for editing than XP? Umm, I've heard that XP only uses 2 cores. And also upgrading to a 64 bit system should make things quicker.
 
A quad-core won't outright double your throughput, but you'll see a pretty dramatic improvement in recoding and conforming. You'll also be better able to handle realtime playback from multiple clips. Considering the small price difference there's not a good reason not to go with a quad.

XP is fine, but 7 will give you 64-bit support, which is another speed improvement. You'll also have access to OpenCL and Direct X 11 when the standards finalize, and they'll open up GPU rendering avenues which should dramatically increase playback and transcoding.
 
Well... there is a 64bit of XP as well. It's been out for like 7 years. And all XPs can use more than 2 cores (I think XP can use up to 16 cores before you have to start using Server Edition).

But I would go with 7. I like all the OS level stuff it improves on over XP. Or at the very least go with Vista x64. However I don't think AE or Premiere have been compiled for 64 bits yet... so it would be nice to be x64 for most things but neither will use more than 3GB of RAM.
 
Hmm

Hmm

I am hoping that my computer is sufficient to edit 3K and 5K Scarlet footage. Obviously I've never used the RED One or edited anything above HVX200 720p footage, but at the same time this is an 8-core Mac Pro with dual Quad-Core 3.2 Ghz Xeon processors. It has 10 gigs of 800 Mhz DDR2 RAM and an AJA Kona 3 card installed, plus a CalDigit HDOne 2 TB RAID drive attached as well, so it was built for editing.

Ideally I was going to wait before getting a big editing computer until I was close to buying a newer camera, but I couldn't wait because we were editing on an old G5 that was slower than the two MacBook Pros I have, and so we used the MacBook Pros but it was too slow editing music videos.
 
Kenneth Elkington said:
Yeah, but it's barely worth mentioning IMO, because of its disastrous driver support.
Click to expand...

Ha. Triple agreed! But some people claim they get about 10% better performance out of it. I haven't noticed any performance hit at all. In fact on our render farm I see a larger discrepancy between identical machines than I ever saw between XP and Vista.

Don't believe the anti-hype. Vista is better.
 
I have a Quad Core i7 Overclocked to 4GHz per core, and it handles red code very well....

Specs are

i7 920 @ 4GHz
12GB of DDR3 Triple Channel
3 TB hard Drives

I say that a quad core at the very least is future proofing a little bit, and does help with simultaneous renderings...
 
And what about DDR2 or DDR3? Is the memory speed more important that the quantity of it? Or DDR2 is enough if you have a lot of it?
HDD is another important aspect. I've heard that an SCSI system is the best option you can have.
I've downloaded some 3k and 4k REDcode files. Imported to Premiere CS4. For 4k: my pc told me he's had enough and stopped.
For 3k: playback is painfully stuttering, rendering takes 10 minutes for a 15 second clip. At least when I compress the footage to 720p, I have a smooth playback, still my magic bullet says it can't open up when I try to apply it to the 720p H264 footage.
My spec looks like this: (3 year old)
Core 2 Duo 2,4 GHz (no oc)
3 GB RAM (DDR2 800MHz) - that's the maximum my mobo can handle
SATA 320 GB HDD
Nvidia Geforce 7950

I guess I should improve the HDD to RAID. Or the whole system, but that's not going to happen in the near future. Any advice on upgrading?
 
Dancsó Péter said:
So buying a quad core will make the workflow twice fast? I'm talking about PC and Windows system. Also, will Windows 7 will be a better system for editing than XP? Umm, I've heard that XP only uses 2 cores. And also upgrading to a 64 bit system should make things quicker.
Click to expand...

Since you mentioned CS4, I recently had to use it on a quad-core XP (32bit), Premiere used all 4 cores and the GPU for processing videos (it wasn't RED or 2K, but the software does take advantage of these resources).

I don't know if CS4 currently supports 64bit, or the extra memory you get from a 64 bit OS like win 7 (XP32 is limited at 3GB, even it claims to have more).
 
Dancsó Péter said:
And what about DDR2 or DDR3? Is the memory speed more important that the quantity of it? Or DDR2 is enough if you have a lot of it?
HDD is another important aspect. I've heard that an SCSI system is the best option you can have.
I've downloaded some 3k and 4k REDcode files. Imported to Premiere CS4. For 4k: my pc told me he's had enough and stopped.
For 3k: playback is painfully stuttering, rendering takes 10 minutes for a 15 second clip. At least when I compress the footage to 720p, I have a smooth playback, still my magic bullet says it can't open up when I try to apply it to the 720p H264 footage.
My spec looks like this: (3 year old)
Core 2 Duo 2,4 GHz (no oc)
3 GB RAM (DDR2 800MHz) - that's the maximum my mobo can handle
SATA 320 GB HDD
Nvidia Geforce 7950

I guess I should improve the HDD to RAID. Or the whole system, but that's not going to happen in the near future. Any advice on upgrading?
Click to expand...

Give Vegas 9.0a a try - there's a 30-day demo that you can download for free on the Sony site (just Google Sony Vegas Pro Demo Download) and it should help. Your system specs aren't much different than mine and I can playback RED 4K (at half and quarter res) without too much trouble.

That being said, I am in the process of upgrading to an i7 running Win 7...
 
Mark Holmes said:
Give Vegas 9.0a a try - there's a 30-day demo that you can download for free on the Sony site (just Google Sony Vegas Pro Demo Download) and it should help. Your system specs aren't much different than mine and I can playback RED 4K (at half and quarter res) without too much trouble.

That being said, I am in the process of upgrading to an i7 running Win 7...
Click to expand...

Thanks for the tip. Could you post a link to a r3d footage that plays back well at you?
 
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