Non certified system

[David Roth weiss]

[Paul Rozon] “For the price he has done a great job but I am experiencing some bottlenecks on playback.

He was convinced the speed of one SSD drive would be sufficient to run the operating system, premiere and media. In fact it does run pretty well but there is the occasional bottleneck that I would like to resolve.”

He was convinced, but he is simply misinformed – your SSD boot drive is working hard enough running your Adobe apps, playing back video seamlessly at a sustained rate simultaneously is causing you to drop frames. That’s what happens when you involve computer and IT pros who know little about the sustained throughput requirements of video post-production.

[Paul Rozon] “The motherboard does not have a physical raid controller. I am wondering if adding one additional SSD and dedicating it to media, previews and cache would give me a significant boost in performance on playback. “

If all you’re editing is p2 DVCProHD, you don’t need an SSD or a RAID, you only need a single SATA drive – DVCProHD was very first highly compressed HD codec, and it was designed for easy playback – hard drives were extremely expensive a decade ago when the HVX 200 was released, and Panasonic was first to market with a hi-performance acquisition and editing codec, long before Apple ProRes and Avid DNX were released.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los Angeles

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[Paul Rozon]

Thanks David for your input.

The person who did the build is young and a little overconfident. I knew that when I got on board but the price was right. My home system doesn’t need to be the biggest, fastest machine. I already have that at work. He’s done a good job with the knowledge he had. Currently it works fine with the occasional dropped frame.

My experience with certified systems was telling me the single drive wouldn’t cut it but I was willing to give it a shot knowing that I could add an additional drive if required.

So I will opt for an additional SSD (because I love the quiet operation and the speed). Hopefully that will sort out the occasional dropped frames. I am Considering the drive configuration below. Does that make sense?

SSD 1 C: drive will be operating system and programs. (Indexing is off)
SSD 2 D: drive for all media and preview files (indexing is off)

Thanks again, any input is greatly appreciated.

[Walter Soyka]

A couple of point-by-point remarks follow.

[Paul Rozon] “CS6 production premium with windows 7”

There have been significant improvements in Premiere Pro since CS6.

[Paul Rozon] “Intel i5-4690 Haswell 4 core CPU 3.5Ghz Processor”

An i7 would have outperformed the i5. I assume this is a budgetary compromise. We can try to make up for that elsewhere.

[Paul Rozon] “Intel 730 Series 240GB SSD”

Honestly, I doubt you’re saturating the drive just playing back P2 media. OS and app disk access will be pretty infrequent, except for…

[Paul Rozon] “Mushkin Blackline (1x8GB) 1600mhz DDR3 Memory Module(s)”

This is too little RAM. There’s not all that much left for Premiere after the OS takes its share, and any time the system has to swap RAM out to virtual memory on the SSD, you can expect a performance hiccup.

I wouldn’t be surprised if doubling this made the frame-dropping go away in your case.

I do still think you’d benefit from another drive, too. You could get a second SSD if you wanted.

[Paul Rozon] “nVidia Quadro FX 4800 384-bit 1.5GB Workstation PCI-E 16x GPU”

This card was a bad choice: relatively pricey, but old and not a modern performer. Unless you absolutely need the Quadro for a specific reason (10-bit monitor output?), I think you should sell it and replace it with a GeForce card. It will have significantly better performance per unit cost.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Paul Rozon]

Thanks for your input

It is all budgetary consideration. I paid a total of 1400 dollars and the system is holding up well enough. Would like to tweek a bit to resolve dropped frames. That being said…

Fx4800 was a leftover from an older system that had been shelved. Do you have a specific GeForce suggestion considering my limited budget.

Doubling ram is easy so I will do that and I need additional drive space so I would think seperating media for os couldn’t hurt.

Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[Walter Soyka]

[Paul Rozon] “Doubling ram is easy so I will do that and I need additional drive space so I would think seperating media for os couldn’t hurt. “

Sounds good. A couple hundred bucks here will make a big difference.

[Paul Rozon] “Fx4800 was a leftover from an older system that had been shelved. Do you have a specific GeForce suggestion considering my limited budget. “

How much are you looking to spend? It might be worth starting a new thread with GPU in the title to try to attract some other opinions, too,

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]