Looking for advice – Purchasing a tower for an editing bay

[Joseph W. bourke]

I guess it’s a question of how much configuration you want and are capable of doing. You could buy the parts and components and assemble a killer system on the cheap (for less than a thousand), or buy into a turnkey system for a lot more.

Here are Adobe’s system requirements:

https://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/production/tech-specs.html

This will lead you to a worksheet which will give you suggestions on systems that will do the trick:

https://www.intelsalestraining.com/adobe/demo.htm

Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com

[Al Bergstein]

I found after many years of building my own that it was much better to buy pre-built for video editing. The issue of dealing with various third party mother board upgrade problems is really an iceberg waiting to trip up the unwary and unexperienced. Companies like Dell and HP spend a lot of engineering time working through issues with ROM upgrades for issues that crop up on various hardware configurations. They do test their machines pretty extensively for compatibility issues. Things can go wrong, but by and large I’ve had good results getting my machines fixed quickly by Dell, for example. Add to that making sure that you don’t accidentally create a static electricity charge into a mother board as you are installing it in a dry part of the US. Having worked in a manufacturing plant that produced medical devices that were essentially computers, I can tell you that static electricity is a real concern, and can lead to flakey issues in your system. It doesn’t always kill on contact. So I try and stay out of my internals and always use a static mat, grounding myself.

I have found that I prefer Dell over HP, as I’ve had better experiences of long life with Dell, and their on site repairs (I’ve had to use them in the last year for a monitor on a laptop and a DVD that died on the same laptop) have been excellent. Pretty fast and always fixed it on the first try. My last HP tower lasted one year and a few days. Mother board died. That has never happened with my two last Dell towers (which span a total of 6 years of work). But I would be tempted to look at the high end HP towers if I was buying today. They are engineered differently than than the lower end models.

Ultimately, it likely will be a better value long term to buy the workstations rather than home towers. In the Apple world, you only have that choice, which is why people complain that they are ‘high priced’. But my MacPro is still chugging away well and it’s about four years old. No complaints on that front.

Al

[John Frey]

I carefully built the last 4 edit workstations for our studios and they continue to work just fine. Selecting the correct components is the key. If you are not able to put it together yourself, find someone that can – meaning, they have the experience, will follow your plan and will not insist on supplying the components. Go online and begin to line up the components that you will need. Don’t skimp on the case, power supply and cooling. Make sure you do your homework and check for compatibility issues. Buy a copy of the 2012 January issue of Maximum PC magazine. Very good illustrated articles on building your own powerhouse PC system. You can save a huge amount of money this way which lets you spend more on better software. Windows 7 is rock solid and Adobe’s Creative Production Suite is great. Do your homework and go for it!

John D. Frey
25 Year owner/operator of two California-based production studios.

Digital West Video Productions of San Luis Obispo and Inland Images of Lake Elsinore

[Steve Brame]

If you would like to build your own machine, a good place to start is at videoguys.com. They have been listing configs for editing systems that they have tested extensively for years now. I think they’re on their 8th or 9th build recommendations, and the last 2 I built followed their specs to the letter, and I’ve not had a single issue due to incompatibility.

Steve Brame
creative illusions Productions