[Brent Ross]

A bit outdated of a thread but here is the gist

premiere saturates about 8 cpu threads max and benefits more from horsepower and overclocking than additional threads on top of that. Therefore the i7 4770k is your best bet for its clockspeed and overclockability. Remember xeons are not clocked as fast and have locked multiplier

As for GPU
Quadro is a beast for complex geometry and color depth. Great for apps like photoshop (colour depth), maya and autocad (geometry viewport acceleration)

GTX is much better at compute power because games use Cuda and OpenCL for physics. Premiere MPE makes use of this power (but keep in mind the drivers are for games, and ive run into driver issues when updating sometimes)

Tesla is a compute double precision monster, and not worth the price for MPE. More for math, physics simulations or if you are using a high end quadro for a 3d app and want to boost the cuda power.

For me, the apps i use the most are photoshop and premiere so the quadro K600 is best. It drives my 10 bit monitor and the premiere MPE engine very stably even though its not certified for premiere. Remember the MPE doesnt need that beefy a videocard to push it and make a great difference.

HOWEVER! if you are using aftereffect raytace engine like A LOT. Go with a powerful GTX. Quadro WILL dissapoint and the maximus configuration is overkill for video editing.

Also the differences between 8 bit and 10 bit color monitoring are very very subtle to the human eye (I have the proper set up and workflow) Only really useful for photo editing, and realistically i can do without it. I actually did an entire project having forgotten to enable 30 bit editing in PS. it took like 15 photos in before i was like… hey. (also you have to edit in 16 bpc to see an effect, and that means less filters at your disposal)

hope my experiences help people

[Brent Ross]

I agree that converting the 8bit per channel to 12 bits per channel will give you more colour correcting latitude as you will be working in a larger colourspace (your not cleaning anything up, you can’t recover lost data). Of coarse working in a larger colour space lets you more accurately colour your footage so it was as though it was captured on a 10 or 12 bit camera.

However, for me, if it is captured 8bit, and will be displayed on the web or tv which is 8 bit. Having a 12 bit 444 workflow is a waste (of course im assuming that your not trying to salvage individual channels for chroma keying). I totally understand why the movie you mentioned was mastered in 12 bit. It does make a huge difference when viewing on a higher bit display, like a cinema projector.

My analogy was geared toward regular people not making cinema destined product. I actually only use prores codec to get rid of the interframe compression of h.264 when I’m working on a mac without cuda acceleration.

Also, Dark Energy plugin is just a restoration program that gets rid of noise, dust, and compression artifacts.Very handy, but the thread is not about that.

[Brent Ross]

I agree that converting the 8bit per channel to 12 bits per channel will give you more colour correcting latitude as you will be working in a larger colourspace (your not cleaning anything up, you can’t recover lost data). Of coarse working in a larger colour space lets you more accurately colour your footage so it was as though it was captured on a 10 or 12 bit camera. However, for me, if it is captured 8bit, and will be displayed on the web or tv which is 8 bit. Having a 12 bit 444 workflow is a waste (of course im assuming that your not trying to salvage individual channels for chroma keying). I totally understand why the movie you mentioned was mastered in 12 bit. It does make a huge difference when viewing on a higher bit display, like a cinema projector. My analogy was geared toward regular people not making cinema destined product. I actually only use prores codec to get rid of the interframe compression of h.264 when I’m working on a mac without cuda acceleration.

[Brent Ross]

It’s a complete waste to transcode dslr footage to prores 4444! h.264 is 8 bit 4:2:0, and prores 4444 is 12 bit 4:4:4!!! It would be like making a 12 year old wear an adult XXL… your not magically adding bit depth or resolution to your footage, just as the 12 year old doesnt grow 4 feet and gain 100lbs when wearing the giant shirt. prores lt will fit snug on dslr footage