Editing System for Premiere

[Rob Ainscough]

Fair enough, some places it’s all about familiarity and not having to discover options and performance is “good enough” … all good.

For anyone else reading this thread who’s primary concern is performance:

APPLE Rack Mount ———————————–

Apple M2 Ultra with 24-core CPU,

76-core GPU, 32‑core Neural Engine

192GB RAM

8TB SSD

Nano-Texture Glass 32″ 6K monitor

$18,298

PC Rack Mount ——————————————–

AMD 7995WX Pro with 96-core CPU + Motherboard ASUS Pro WS W790E + 4U Rack case $11,410

nVidia 4090 GPU 512-tensor cores $1599

DDR5 RDIMM ECC 256GB RAM $1,866

8TB (2X 4TB M.2 990Pro) $640

Dell 6K monitor 32″ $2559.99

$18,074

For equivalent cost, AMD PC will render output about 4X faster than Apple’s Mac Pro. As an edit station you’ll see better performance also (but not 4X). I don’t know what most companies do, but I typically free up my workstation and send my render jobs out to other PCs to complete while I continue on other projects.

As far as stability, I haven’t found either to be better or worse but on the PC side you do need to be more vigilant with hardware selection (especially RAM) and driver updates and OS updates.

Cheers, Rob.

[Mads Nybo jørgensen]

Hey Rob,

Great, thank you for sharing.

Full disclosure:

My new £ 4,800 machine in a laptop back-pack might travel further straight out of the door without delay, but will get no-where near your beast in performance 😀

But I am very happy with the PC specs, and had money left over for a Davinci Mini panel + a few other “toys”.

Bottom-line is that we all can only “run as fast” as for what the clients wants to pay us for.

And whether that is expensive hardware, or slower with a “rotating hourglass”, or a “Beachball”, then I like to remember back to the time when there on Dos there was enough time for me to entertain the producer with a Shark race from top right corner to bottom left corner – just for fun, instead of a forced break that so many editors today takes for granted.

For anyone speccing their next computer, it is all about deliverables for your end-client, and how their budgets are worked out? Many broadcast masters are still delivered in HD, even when the source is 4K. And for those who need to deliver 4K, that is a question of brute power, or patience.

Atb
Mads

[Rob Ainscough]

Agree, really depends on the client and how frequently they change their mind. If I can say “sure I can do that quickly” vs. saying “that’s a big deal and will take me longer” … happy client, happy pocket, repeat customer. In the world of YouTube content, delivery schedules can be insanely short.

Depends on what one delivers … proxies to get the “all go” … the only issue I have with lower res/proxies is some FX don’t work as well, especially more subtle depth of view changes.

And I do make mistakes (being human) that can trigger re-rendering – pending where the mistake is in my workflow, it can be a resource cruncher.

But for those with more skill than I and perhaps with more tightly packed and well-organized workflows they may just not need the processing power/resource. But for me, having good processing power is perhaps a little bit of a safety blanket and makes the work a tad less stressful 🙂

[Mads Nybo jørgensen]

Hey Rob,

With you on that one.

I HATE proxies, and always have.
Luckily the only “proxies” that I’ve had to deal with was Producer TimeCode log coming off a VHS tape or a DVD.

I’ve only ever purchased systems that could deliver a Master in the client’s chosen format, and with enough space to store all of the source footage needed for my part of the job.

On top of your timely comment on the difference in VFX applied to proxy and Full-ress master. One should not discount when a system decides to randomly use other frame-rates. Or forget where the Proxy originated from. Suddenly storage, whether purchase or hire, becomes cost-effective.

Atb
Mads