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Advice for a new home system?
Hello all,
I’m thinking about upgrading my home edit from a 2009(ish) iMac and I was wondering what everyone’s thoughts were on whats available on the windows market these days. I know this is off-topic but I see a lot of discussion about hardware choices on this forum from people who seem to know their eggs so this looks like a good place to tap into the collective knowledge on the subject.
I am a freelance editor and most of my work is done away from home, but I like to have a setup at home for smaller side jobs and personal projects (in particular I am interested in cutting short films in my spare time). My first thought was to just get a new iMac but now that I am contemplating a switch of software to Premiere Pro and/or Avid MC it seems to make sense to consider if there are similarly priced windows solutions out there that may be better equipped in terms of GPU to take advantage of these program’s 64bit architecture.
I’m not looking for an enterprise level workstation so if we take the price of a top-of-the-range iMac as a price guide could anyone point me in the direction of some good websites or manufacturers who could kit me out with a decent PP/MC setups (I’d like to keep my options as open as possible at this stage when it comes to software packages).
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21 Replies
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[Christopher Travis] “could anyone point me in the direction of some good websites or manufacturers who could kit me out with a decent PP/MC setups”
adkvideoediting.com
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
[Christopher Travis] “could anyone point me in the direction of some good websites or manufacturers who could kit me out with a decent PP/MC setups”
The other thing I should mention is the Videoguys DIY (do it yourself) build lists. Complete lists for high value / low cost systems. Even if you don’t want to roll your own, the list is a great way to learn what you need to look for in a goold NLE box.
https://www.videoguys.com/Guide/Default.aspx
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
Thanks Herb,
I’m in the UK so can’t but from either of these sites, but it’s a great place to start looking at what I need.
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I am using a laptop with 27 inch external monitor and keyboard (shuttle) connected a raid and it works great ( I mostly work in avchd,hdv,dv) My camera is an af101.
I do events, and comerical, web and currently working on film for a local station. I chose the lap top because of its small footprint and portability (I can edit at the clients place or in the field.
Besides it saves a ton in power versus a desktop. Besides editing I do some compositing and color correction. I Have CS5.5 production premium and avid 6. For what I do both work great.
For this I have a sony vaio fx series 8 core i7 with 8 gbram. It has esata,firewire,usb 3 ans sd card slots.
Will be purchasing a matrox mini as soon as PPro gets it right.
Richard Cardonna
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I would suggest that you contact DVC in brighton,https://www.dvc.uk.com, they are great guys to deal with and really know the business. I would also suggest that you look at Edius as it is a great real time performing and stable system.
Geoff
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I bought Edius from DVC the other week at half price.
I build my own PCs with parts that usually come from dabs.com, and my current one has a Core i5 2500, Asus P8Z68-V LE, GeForce 460 and 8Gb RAM. You’ll see a lot of posts on here talking about Xeon this and that and chat about expensive workstations, but actually you don’t need all that stuff to do most editing jobs. The thing I’m working on in Edius at the moment is big on effects, though only in SD, and it takes a lot of layers to need any rendering at all. I expect if I was doing this one in HD the machine go a bit slower, but thinking time is always good.
You’ll also see a lot of stuff about the horrors of Windows, but I sit here switching back and forth between a Hackintosh running OSX and a W7 PC. Neither crashes, there are no BSODs on either machine, and people talk an awful lot of b****cks. I keep the Mac because I use Soundtrack pro and Motion.
Personally I prefer Windows because I like my applications to close when I close the window, I like to be able to delete things by pressing the delete key, I like Alt to be called Alt and not Option, and I like to be able to cut and paste as well as copy and paste. But that’s just me.
Bernie
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You can Bootcamp your 2009 iMac and run Windows 7 on it.
Granted it’s still a 2009 iMac as far as technology but it would allow you to get going on Windows software and if you added Parallels you could move things back and forth.If you’re happy with iMacs (all in one) you could do that with a new iMac as well. As Thunderbolt support is about to commence on Windows it might allow you to move new peripherals between the OSs as well. The one downside is lack of CUDA if you move to software that can use it (PP for example).
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Thanks Craig,
I know about bootcamp, I also know I’m able to buy Mac versions of MC and/or PP. What I’m interested in is the improved realtime performance of these 2 programs when running on supported hardware. I think my experience in either PP or MC on my old iMac would probably be about the same as I am currently seeing in FCP7 (I just realised my iMac is 2007 not 2009).
Thanks everyone for the tips. I’ve been sniffing around the Zen and DVC sites and it looks like, for the price of a top range iMac (about £1,600) I could get a pretty tricked out windows box with more processing power and a better, CUDA enable GPU. I’m still very interested to hear about any custom builds people have made on here and their experiences with them.
Another question. When ordering MC6 and/or CS5.5 do you get different DVDs for Mac and Windows versions, or is it the same DVD?
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They have a nice “making of” video here –
https://www.zenvideo.co.uk/pc_systems_for_video.htm
– thought their chipset recommendations lower down the page are already out of date.Making a PC these days is a lot like Lego, and nearly as easy. Doesn’t matter which operating system you load it with – W7, OSX, Ubuntu, whatever – the build is the same. And when it starts for the first time, it’s a very satisfying moment.
B
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