The ideal system to edit on Premiere CS5?

[Vince Becquiot]

I think the ideal system is really what you can afford, accounting for the minimum requirement and things you are willing to put up with (like waiting…)

A fast and solid RAID 5 system if you move a lot of sensitive footage around, or a RAID 0 with a good backup strategy if you are working on more long form projects, or don’t have the budget for the previous option. Separate drives for OS / Cache / footage.

For performance, the usual branded boards (Gigabyte is our favorite at the moment), Core i7 / DDR 3, a real sound card, (no onboard stuff).

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Mikkell Khan]

Good suggestions so far. I saw some editors recommending Asus motherboards as well although I am familiar with Gigabyte from some of our local desktop builders so I’ll look into that. And what about graphics cards? What would you choose now for Premiere CS5? Especially if this is your business.

Mikkell Khan
Director
Diamond Films Ltd. (Trinidad and Tobago)

[Ann Bens]

i7 9xxx, asus mobo, nvidia for MPE (470/480), 12 gig RAM.

[Mikkell Khan]

Ah, thank you Anne. This is what I will consider for my next set of workstations.

Mikkell Khan
Director
Diamond Films Ltd. (Trinidad and Tobago)

[Erik Lindahl]

Depending on what work you’ll be doing 12GB RAM is on the low-end. For pure Premier editing it might work fine, for After Effects compositing it could very much be a bottle-neck.

I use 8GB of RAM on my home-station and 16GB of RAM at work and notice a huge difference in After Effects CS5 (same 8-core 2.8Ghz Xeon CPU).

————————
Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Post Production Services
http://www.freecloud.se

[Jan Janowski]

I had just such a conversation with an associate a few months ago..
Here’s what was purchased….

One 6 core Xeon, with HT
12GB ram (She can upgrade to 24Gb later)
W7-64
GTX 470 card
1Tb SataII Boot
SAS Raid 0 (for speed)
2Tb SataII (for backup)
DVD R/W internal
Firewire (for DV, HDV capture, and BluRay R/W external drive (future))

She’s insanely happy with the system…. Especially so since V5.0.2!

Looking for 1939 Indian Motocycle

[Mikkell Khan]

And I was just about to come in here to ask if I should upgrade my 9GB system to 12GB. Lol.

I’ve seen After Effects eat memory. All 9GB of it. However, it seems to me these Windows machines need a lot of RAM for things to function at its proper performance. Is this the same with the Mac systems?

Mikkell Khan
Director
Diamond Films Ltd. (Trinidad and Tobago)

[Mikkell Khan]

This 12GB seems to be a minimum to consider for serious editing. Right now, this is my rig

i7 920
500GB 7200 RPM
1TB ESATA external
9GB DDR 3 RAM
GTS 250 512MB RAM
Windows 7 64bit

What would you guys suggest would need upgrading if one component needed it?

Mikkell Khan
Director
Diamond Films Ltd. (Trinidad and Tobago)

[Vince Becquiot]

An i7 920 would not need more than 6 gigs for editing HD with Win 7.

As you add cores, you do have to match it up with RAM, so any Dual Quads will require twice as much.

And of course, After Effects will need all you can throw at it for RAM preview, but again, I would say you will get by just fine with a minimum of 6-8 gigs.

See how it goes, upgrade as needed.

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Shawn Miller]

If I were building an edit system today, here is what I would look at putting together:

CPUs: Dual Six Core Xeons @ 2.4 GHz (minimum)

Motherboard: Intel® 5520 (Tylersburg) Chipset with QPI up to 6.4 GT/s – My prefrerred brands are; Intel, Supermicro, Gigabyte, Tyan (all supporting up to 96 GB of RAM and two 1000Mbit lan ports)

Video Card: Nvidia Quadro FX 3800 (minimum)

RAM: 24GB or a MINIMUM of 2 GB per physical CPU core (unless you do 3D rendering, HT doesn’t make that big of a difference)

Hard Drive: A single RAID array (0,1,5 or 10) for your OS (DO NOT BUILD THIS WITH SOLID STATE DRIVES). Note, I prefere to build smaller arrays for the OS and bigger RAID 0 arrays for project work (I do weekly backups of this drive and daily cloning of active projects to a NAS device).

Anyway, that’s my two cents.

Thanks,

Shawn