Need PC Recommendations ASAP

[Dennis Radeke]

There’s really a lot of good stuff in our Performance Whitepaper which you can find at this blog: Optimizing for performance

In a nutshell, it’s about balance. You’re only as good as your weakest link. CPU, GPU, RAM, drive systems all play a role.

If you want a name brand manufacturer HP, Dell and Lenovo are all making good boxes that would fit your goal. The one thing you didn’t specify is budget. You can spend $2k or 10k, you need to give a ball park.

Dennis – Adobe guy

[Herb Sevush]

HP 820 or 620 workstations if you have the money. The new Dell workstations are also excellent, though previous Dell workstations have left a bad impression on many people.

There are smaller companies that make editing computers specifically for Ppro editing – ADK is well respected and makes excellent editing computers for less money than the general workstation manufacturers.
https://www.adkvideoediting.com/

Also ProMax in LA makes a very high end editing computer the ProMax One
https://www.promax.com/s-210-promax-one-plus.aspx

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Alex Udell]

Hi…

Back in the CS4 days, I swore by HP.
But a mid year expansion with a limited budget made me to look at Dells. (I don’t know how competitive the pricing is these days).

They worked fine.

But I’d also consider how you would be supporting them?

I did a lot myself at that time, or at least I was a conduit to our local integrator and could be hands on frontline. But we had a very specific fibre workgroup SAN.

It’s always good to have a relationship with a local firm that specialized in VIDEO oriented workflows. It is becoming more general technology these days. but the video mindset is very important IMHO.

So you may look to a local reseller selling brand named boxes to give you the best of both worlds.

Honestly it makes your job easier and the reseller’s easier too. Many times they can have a spare on Deck to swap during a repair cycle to minimize your down time.

my .02…

hth…

Alex Udell
Editing, Motion Graphics, and Visual FX

[Warren Morningstar]

Also take a look at BOXX. They specialize in Windows graphics workstations, so their machines can handle Premiere and AE with ease. Support is also very good. My previous experience with a major computer builder (Dell) is the finger pointing game. You have a problem, they say, “not a fault with our machine, must be software.” And then the software folks say, “must be the machine.” BOXX support will help you solve the problem, regardless of where the fault lies.

[Herb Sevush]

[Warren Morningstar] “Also take a look at BOXX.”

If you need a beast for GFX and animation, Boxx has a great reputation but they are a bit of overkill for editing, and it shows in the pricing.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Warren Morningstar]

At he time I bought my machine from Boxx, it actually cost less than one of equivalent horsepower from Dell. For me, even if it had cost more, it was worth it because of the support.

[Peter Tours]

Alex – I see your shop has been advertising again for the position I didn’t win a few years back. The ads are everywhere!

I thought you were a Mac and Motion guy…??

If you have some regional suggestions I’d be happy to have them.

Cheers, peter

Peter Tours
TnT Video Services, Inc.
Fort Lauderdale, FL

TRI EA5 1974-1977
Convergence ECS1B 1977-1979
Sony BVE 500 1979 – 1984
Datatron Vanguard 1984 – 1993
GVG VPE141 1993 – 1998
Media 100 1995 – 2006
Final Cut Pro 2005 2012
Adobe Creative Cloud

[Alex Udell]

Hey Peter…

When I advanced to Assistant Prod Mgr. I finally had the influence needed to convince them that looking for Motion artists was a dead end.

This obviously opened the door to a lot more candidates. So last round of tech upgrades I pushed them to CC. We bought everyone seats of Motion 5 as well. Since it’s all such a great value proposition it was really a no brainer.

We are majority After Effects now. It’s nice to be with the industry standard. And so much easier to support.

As for ppl I deal with, I’d rather not play favorites here in the forum. Feel free to drop me a line: audell999 at ya who dot com

cheers mate,

Alex Udell
Editing, Motion Graphics, and Visual FX

[Mike Cohen]

Hi – late to the party here.

Forgive me, but I am using a Core2 Quad machine (home built (not by me)), Q9300 @2.50Ghz – Windows 7, 8 gigs ram, GeForce 9600 GT, with USB3 non-RAID storage. System was built for DVCAM editing, and did ok with HDV.

Works great with 2 tracks of XDCAM or any AVCHD format for that matter.
But once I have more than 2 tracks of video, realtime playback gets sluggish to almost unwatchable, and AME exporting takes a dog’s age for just about anything other than straight cuts.

Obviously this configuration is past its prime.

1 – is the current system beyond help?

1a – would a USB3 RAID help, or is the processor/RAM/video card still going to be a bottleneck?

2 – What can I do for under $3,000 to improve performance?
HP or Dell seem to have some entry level workstations in that range. Would the modern processor and Adobe-certified video card make a noticeable improvement?

Understand there is some subjectivity in these questions.

Cheers

Mike Cohen

2a –