Need help upgrading my PC

[Rupert Hopkins]

Hi,

I'm currently editing 4k Red one Mx footage in Premier Pro CC and it runs smoothly at 1/8 resolution. I'm about to upgrade to dragon and i'm worried that 5k and 6k footage might be a bit too much for my system. Unfortunately the computer was originally made with gaming more in mind and I hardly play any games.

The computer is running in a micro ATX case with both the graphics cards and cpu water-cooled and over clocked.

The specs are;

Gigabyte GA-Z97MX M-ATX motherboard.
16gb 2x8 gb Corsair vengeance 1600mhz ram
800W Moduler PSU
Intel I7 4790k @ 4.8ghz
500gb SSD
2x GTX 780

I know that biggest lacking here is probably the memory. Do you think that another 16gb would improve the performance enough to properly edit red dragon files?

I was thinking I might sell the system and buy a full tower with duel xenons or something but its a pretty expensive process so if theres anything you guys think that might drastically improve my current setup. I'm not sure my graphics cards are hardly been used by premier, I'm pretty useless when it comes to workflow is there anything I could change in premier to get more usage from the GPUs?

I prefer to just stick red files into premier than go through proxies or anything.

The export time is pretty slow as well so any improvements there would very useful.

If I did get a new system what would you suggest thats fairly good value that might have a significant improvement over my current system? If i went with a full tower I could also Raid 0 a few hard drives with which help with some of my workflow.

Thanks so much for any replies!!

 

[Stefan Scherperel]

With the setup you have listed there you should be getting much better performance than you are. I have a water cooled tower that I built 2 years ago with slightly lesser specs than your machine and I get 1/2 realtime playback of Epic X 5K footage. Exports to 1080P are also pretty snappy from the premiere timeline. I would look into your settings first as that could very well be what is slowing you down.

 

[Rupert Hopkins]

Thanks Stefan. I have gone through my settings and found that I hadn't enabled the multiple GPUS on export. Its now exports untouched 4k footage to 1080p in slightly faster than real time. The playback can do 1/4 now but just about doesn't work on 1/2 res. So much better than before. I think perhaps it wasn't using the GPus at all. Also my monitor is just shy of 4k could this be contributing to the slow speeds?

I have some money to spend so I think i might get some faster and larger ram and also another SSd to raid 0.

Has anyone got any decent tutorials on setting up premier pro for red footage? Its a bit trial and error and I'm not really an editor but I find myself having to edit alot of my own footage at the moment.

 

[Stefan Scherperel]

I highly doubt the RAM is going to be a factor in your playback speed. Hard drive speed and GPU are going to be the big difference. I suspect that you may not have mercury playback enabled in premiere, or maybe your card is not supported. With dual GTX 780's you should be seeing at least 1/2 res playback. you can also check out how to force premiere to use your card if it is not doing so.

 

[Rupert Hopkins]

Thanks, I will try and have a look. Ill budget in an SSD and ram but will look into more research on premiers settings before I buy. To be honest i'm fine running 1/4 so long as it stays there with a few effects and transitions.