-
Minimum System Requirements for 4K editing
I could not find a suitable place for asking about 4K editing hardware requirements. Please forgive if I just overlooked it. I edit in Adobe PP CC 2017 on a Mac but am looking to move to 4k sometime soon. I understand that the answer is probably not one single answer due to what type of editing, how much footage, etc, but nonetheless I am looking for some basic information on minimum system requirements (CPU, Cores, Memory, VCard, etc) to begin looking for a suitable machine to make the upgrade. Again, my apologies if this post is wrongly placed.
-
7 Replies
-
Hi Aaron,
Do you wish to stay with Mac, or considering a PC? Will get more bang for less buck on the PC side these days.
Thanks
Jeff
-
4K is a very wide term and depending on what format that 4K is in it can be cheap or it can be very expensive.
Is the 4K:
-Uncompressed? TIFF, DPX, EXR. You’ll need insanely fast drives to work with these.
-RAW? R3D, Arri, CinemaDNG, etc. You’ll need a combination of fast CPU and GPU to work with these. Depending on the compression you’ll probably need SSDs for media drives.
-Nicely compressed? Prores, DNxHD, other “visually lossless” pro formats. These work pretty nicely with basic hardware up until you want to put effects on them.
-Heavily compressed? H264, H265 usually from DSLRs or cheapo cameras. These are usually really, really intensive to decode even on faster hardware and I would suggest to transcode these to better codecs like DNxHD or Prores.Also do you need to run these in full res or can you work in half/quarter/eighth quality? Do you want to use proxies? This can bring the requirements down a bit.
-
I suppose I could go with a PC, as I have been learning more about custom builds recently. But this is for my job. And I need reliability and support. Im not claiming either has better or worse. I just know I have seen unrivaled support from Apple.
-
I have a Sony FS5 and am not working with terribly junkie 4k. This is not a DSLR, as you know :). I als like to edit in Pro Res and even output my Masters in Pro Res. So I hope that gives some clarity.
-
I am using the Sony FS5 with pretty decent 4k. I also like to edit in Pro Res and even output in Pro Res for my master files. I prefer not to work with proxies. I dont like the process in Adobe PP. FCPX has quite a nice easy process, but I am using PP.
-
Jeff makes an excellent point about bang for buck. I was all in on Apple machines for years until this year when I decided to get a new one. I switched to a custom PC from Puget Systems.
https://www.pugetsystems.com/recommended/Recommended-Systems-for-Adobe-Premiere-Pro-143
They have great support – you call them and they answer the phone and are extremely helpful. One year on-site service included with the machine.
I shoot and edit mostly 4K from C300MK2. For me it was definitely worth the switch.
Good luck.Neal Broffman
One Production Place, Atlanta, GA
http://www.oneproductionplace.com
Current FIlm:
Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi
http://www.HelpUsFindSunilTripathi.com -
I’d advocate that you give the Premiere Proxy option another try.
It took a bit of research since it wasn’t very intuitive, but eventually I figured out that you can customize proxy presets instead of just using the defaults. You have to build your custom ingest preset in Encoder and then export that preset out to your desktop or other location so that you can import it when prompted in your ingest settings in premiere. Once you have the proxies set correctly, it’s really a very simple process to create proxies on import.
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up