Premiere Pro advice

[Alex Gerulaitis]

Congrats Phil!

[Gary Bettan]

nice recommendation and system.

I’m still not ready to recommend Sandy Bridge or the Asus P8Z68-V Pro motherboard yet for our more advanced editors. If you think you are going to be using one of our advanced NLEs such as Avid or Adobe or Edius or Vegas with hardware I/O and /or a RAID, stick with our DIY8 Core i7 Hex core.
However:

* If you plan on using one of these NLEs for DV, HDV or tapeless workflows like AVCH or DSLR footage; and you do not plan on adding an I/O card, then Sandy Bridge is worth considering.

* If you use consumer level video editing apps like Pinnacle Studio, Sony Vegas Movie Studio or Premiere Elements then Sandy Bridge is a very good choice for you.

* We are going to keep watching Sandy Bridge and the newest chipset, if it meets our expectations, we will begin our DIY9 build around it. That said, I really want to see a Sandy Bridge motherboard with integrated Thunderbolt!

We’ve updated our DIY artcle to now include a Sandy bridge build. See the new matrix at the end.

https://www.videoguys.com/Guide/E/Videoguys+DIY8+Hex+Core/0x094b1737e0a06c495e5178a167fbdbd7.aspx

Gary

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https://www.videoguys.com 800 323-2325 | We are the video editing and production experts!

[Alex Gerulaitis]

[Gary Bettan] “If you think you are going to be using one of our advanced NLEs such as Avid or Adobe or Edius or Vegas with hardware I/O and /or a RAID, stick with our DIY8 Core i7 Hex core.”

There is a very interesting (and heated) discussion between Scott and Eric of ADK Systems, and Harm Millaard of the PPBM fame. Harm claims Sandy Bridge systems are mostly inferior to X58 ones for PP purposes, and specifically, that you can’t use decent I/O and RAID cards together with discrete graphics, on Z68 Sandy Bridge systems.

https://forums.adobe.com/thread/853238?tstart=0

My 2 cents:

1. Harm is definitely having a bit of grandstanding here: the vast majority of Premiere Pro usage scenarios need less than 100MB/s bandwidth to storage and I/O, which is served by Sandy Bridge systems just fine – and then some. After all, 1-lane PCIe 2.0 is 500MB/s, enough for several uncompressed HD tracks. Uncompressed HD and 20-track multicam and compositing workflows – safely land in the 5% of PP usage. Everything else – 2-5 tracks of SD, AVCHD, HDV, H264, MPEG, etc. – easily falls under 100MB/s of required bandwidth to storage.

2. On top of it, Harm makes several assumptions in his very well written (and very funny) write-up about KISS and LOVE systems. Those assumptions just fall flat on their face however:
– an assumption that you need an add-on high-speed high-power RAID controller for redundancy. The assumption is wrong: there are RAID1 and RAID10, both of which offer redundancy, and well served by onboard controllers. There are storage boxes with onboard RAID controllers that connect to the host via eSATA, USB 3.0 or even Thunderbolt – those do NOT need add-on PCIe RAID controllers.
– an assumption that decent I/O cards eat a lot of bandwidth. Well they don’t: MXO2 uses a single lane. So does Intensity Pro. Uncompressed cards such as Decklinks, Extremes, Konas, etc. – do use 4- or 8-lane slots – and may require an X58 or a 5500 series motherboard – yet maybe it’s a non-issue: MPE hardware acceleration is mostly used when I/O isn’t. So it’s entirely possible there actually isn’t much of a disadvantage to Z68 systems in real world scenarios even with a Kona 3 card.

Bottom line:

Scott and Eric of ADK systems swear by Sandy Bridge (Z68 chipset) and say that in the vast majority of usage scenarios, it’s a clear winner on value and often – on performance.

Food for thought, eh?

Alex (DV411)

[Gary Bettan]

I’m very aware of these discussion and I’ve participated in several debates with the guys over at ADK as well. Harm knows his stuff and while we disagree at times, we more often then not we recommend very similar hardware.

There can be a big difference between buying a tweaked out system from an integrator and building it yourself. These guys know how to tweak performance, what slots to use, what order to install and what patches or updates to install.

I would go back to the old AMD Dual Athlon days. System integrators made fantastic whitebox turnkeys that ran Canopus, Avid,Pinnacle and Matrox hardware. For DIYers AMD was a nightmare. Some integrators chose to stick with the more expensive HP workstations. Installing updates or patches or new drivers could create all kinds of havoc for AMD systems that were running great before. While the integrators who built these Athlon systems could tech support the users through it, for anyone else to support them was a crapshoot.

I’ve softened my take on Sandy Bridge, but I still issue caution. If you’re going to run an I/O card and a hardware RAID card, stick with X58 for now. Put an i7 hex core in it, and pay the premium for stability and peace of mind.

Gary

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