spec suggestions for new premiere CS5 PC

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi David,

An i7 machine with 12GB and an nVidia display card will work fine with AVCHD footage. Adobe requires certain card models for use with Mercury Playback Engine, and the GTX 470 would be the least expensive (though you may hear of a hack that will work with additional nVidia cards). You WILL want the nVidia card to get the full CS5 performance.

Right-click in the Program Monitor window and check the “Playback Resolution” – I’ve seen blockiness in AVCHD footage until I change to FULL from the default HALF, at least when running Matrox hardware.

Regarding hard drives, for AVCHD you don’t need a huge array or anything – you can set up two internal SATA drives in a Windows RAID 0 stripe set for performance.

As for Matrox – the MXO2 Mini is an external device/breakout box that connects via the PCI-e bus with included adapter card. It provides analog and HDMI capture and playback with CS5. Features 10-bit hardware up-down-cross conversion on capture AND playback. Includes Matrox plug-in effects for Color Correction and Keying in realtime.

With AVCHD, of course capture is not needed, but Matrox provides full-quality, full-frame rate HD monitoring to an LCD, as well as cross and down-conversion capability without render. Provides a better realtime preview than Premiere alone (connected to a second PC display).

MXO2 Mini can also be ordered with the MAX option which offers hardware, realtime encoding of H.264 formats like Blu-ray output.

If you have any questions, look me up

Thank you

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[David Payne]

Thanks so much Jeff.

I’ll consider a matrox if I want to use an output LCD but presumably I can add that afterwards so I may just go for the system with i7, 12mb, 1x1tb and 1x250gb HD (unless you can recommend a better configuration… should I have programs on one and video files on another?) and the geforce card you recommend.

I’ll also try that half res thing tonight and see if it makes a difference. Thanks again!

[David Payne]

‘Right-click in the Program Monitor window and check the “Playback Resolution” – I’ve seen blockiness in AVCHD footage until I change to FULL from the default HALF, at least when running Matrox hardware.’

how strange… i was already by default on half.. i changed it to full and it seemed to sort it out! Perhaps its the action of actually changing the resolution that somehow refreshes it and fixes it. Still to test this for any length of time but this seems to be a solution…

[Jeff Pulera]

With any edit system, you should always have a dedicated video drive. Your OS and programs go on C: drive, then all video files, projects, scratch disks are set to one or more fast, dedicated drives. Turn off INDEXING on the video drive for better performance

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor

[David Payne]

hi Jeff,

Do you think this drive would be fast enough for the video drive? And then i could add a 320gb system drive on top?

Connectivity SATA2.0
Transfer Rate 3Gb/S
Rotational Speed 7,200 RPM
Cache Size 16MB Cache

[Jeff Pulera]

Any SATA drive would provide “adequate” performance for video, but a RAID 0 with 2 drives is preferred since performance is basically doubled, or another way to look at it is each drive has to work only half as hard then.

If you decide to stick with a single SATA video drive, spend a few extra dollars and get the “Enterprise” or pro version with 64mb cache, and avoid “Green” drives (energy savers), these are not high performance.

While I normally edit with RAID 0, I just did a large, multi-camera HDV project with a single SATA drive and I could hear the heads banging around – it had to work very hard for scrubbing layers!

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[David Payne]

Jeff, hopefully you see this message soon as I have a PC finishing on ebay tonight which seems doable.. the only issue is it doesnt have a Nvidia card it has a HD5770 which apparently is not CUDA enabled.

I do not know what this means… Is this going to be a huge problem relying on the standard MPE?

It only has 6GB of ram but I’m sure I can add another 12gb afterwards. Everything else is hopefully ok…

Core i7 930 2.8 Ghz
6GB Corsair DDR3 1600MHz Memory
Gigabyte GA-X58-UD3R Mother Board (2 x USB 3.0 and SATA 3, 6Gbps)
ATI Radeon 5770 1GB Graphics Card (2 x DVI out and 1 x HDMI out)
2 x 500GB drives in RAID 0 (1TB total)
Antec 300 case
650w PSU (modified with Akasa AK-FN057 Apache Super Silent Fan)
Scythe SCZP-1000 CPU Cooler

Would love to hear your thoughts!

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi David,

The GPU means a great deal to the performance on CS5. The Adobe Mercury Playback Engine relies on the nVidia GPU to perform many effects without needing to render first, and the GPU also accelerates encoding of H.264 output using the CUDA cores of the nVidia card.

If you use the ATI card, CS5 will be greatly handicapped, relying on your CPU alone to do all the work.

Regarding the RAID – is that the only hard drive available in the system? If so, this is not good, since Windows would be installed on this drive. The video drive MUST be a physically separate drive in the system, apart from the OS. A single SATA drive would be great for the OS and programs, then the RAID can be used for video.

Safe Harbor builds certified Adobe systems specifically for video editing if you wanted to get any comparison pricing.

Thank you

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[David Payne]

thanks very much again Jeff, I’ll ditch the ATI card idea and pay the double price tag for a brand new geforce system.

Do you think this will be ok?

NTEL I7 950 QUAD CORE, 12GB RAM, GTX 460,2x 1tb and 1x 320gb sata drives (RAID 0)

The GeForce card over the AVI really makes all the difference then?

[Jeff Pulera]

ATI has great cards…for gaming. The Adobe MPE exclusively uses nVidia cards, so no matter how powerful the ATI card, it will not help Adobe one bit, and it doesn’t make sense to spec a new system for CS5 and cripple it without MPE support, it DOES make a HUGE difference in performance.

I did tests with a 1920×1080 sequence, using two AVCHD clips sized as PIPs over a JPEG background with Adobe Color Correction added to each clip, with one title also. In “software only” mode, playback was a couple frames per second on the full-screen secondary display output, total choke! Turned on hardware acceleration, and playback was nearly perfect (slight choppiness). Adding Matrox MXO2 Mini provided the ultimate playback smoothness and quality via HDMI.

Can I ask what kind of price range said system is on eBay?

Thanks

Jeff