[Mark Laslo]

Hi Bob,

Thanks for replying.

We are working in Adobe Premiere CC 2014 and After Effects CC 2014 primarily.

My questions are

1) Out of the three products, is there one you would recommend above the others? Is there an option that I should be considering instead of these three?

2) Has anybody had any negative experiences with these products. Overall I’ve heard nothing but positive feedback about all of these companies, so I just wanted to see if there were any known bugs or gotcha’s that people have experienced that I should be cautions of.

I understand these are both subjective, but as you are the expert in these areas I value your input.

Thanks!

[Mark Laslo]

Thanks again Ian!

All of the above makes sense to me, just working out some last minute logistics issues if you don’t mind.

The issue I’m now seeing, as I’m sure you’re aware, is it is quite difficult to find new GTX 580’s except for the hydro 4 GB models which is not something I wish to tackle with this build. My company is not too keen on buying used cards so at the moment unless I can persuade them I’m looking at getting one of the GTX Titans since in the benchmark test that was linked earlier in the thread it only slows down the 11.1 test by 30-40 seconds. Any reason I should avoid this besides the fact it is more expensive than I could probably secure two GTX 580’s?

Also if I do secure two GTX 580’s do they need to run in SLI mode, or is it enough to just have them in the box?

My planned build now matches pretty much the specs you sent over

Case: Cooler Master HaF 932
Board: ASUS P9X79 WS LGA 2011
GFX: ASUS GTXTITAN-6GD5 GeForce GTX TITAN
PSU: CORSAIR Professional AX1200 Modular
Processor: Intel Core i7-3930K Six Core 3.2 Ghz
Cooler: Phanteks PH-TC14PE – hoping that will fit in the case, looks like it should
Internal HDDs: Samsung 840 Pro – 128 GB for Cache & 256 GB for Applications
Memory: 2x GSKill Trident X series 32 GB DDR3 2400
Monitor: Dell UltraSharp U2713HM

Let me know your thoughts!
Mark

[Mark Laslo]

Thanks for all of the deep insights Ian!

This looks like quite the machine. My thoughts right now are that at current I’m going to stick with just one GFX card since I’ve been reading that After Effects only pulls from one GFX card for rendering. Can you confirm or deny this?

How much does this rig rely on overclocking – my goal would be to keep everything in as stock a configuration as possible to keep everything running as stable as possible. It looks like if I left everything at default it would work quite well still, but just wanted to be sure.

Thanks!
Mark

[Mark Laslo]

Thanks Walter,

The plan for this machine is to work off of shared storage/SAN – 24 TB Caldigit RAID. A bit more detail on our situation – Right now our animator is working off an iMac hooked up to our shared storage via Ethernet. Our main two boxes run metaSAN and the others just pull from that. My end goal is to have everybody on metaLAN and put this machine on either metaLAN or connect via Fiber through metaSAN.

As for a separate drive for AE cache – that seems like a good idea. Would it also be feasible with a bigger drive to format the drive with two partitions (System files/programs on one and cache on the other) since you said you would not see a performance increase between one or two drives. This is that part of AE that I don’t know because I don’t work in it. Would it make sense to push these cache files to the server – it seems like that would just bog things down.

Any suggestion on a monitor/monitors?

Thanks for your feedback!
Mark

[Mark Laslo]

Thanks John,

64 GB of RAM sounds good, and I will look into the the 580 instead of the 680. Will have to see how the 580 compares in 2D rendering as well.

So you think going with the hex-core Sandy Bridge is better than the quad core Ivy Bridge. Is it even worth the price to look at a Xeon processor/board?

Also any suggestions on monitors, was considering a Dell IPS of some sort.

-Mark

[Mark Laslo]

Hi Kyle,

We ran into a similar issue not too long ago, although it didn’t involve Dynamic Linking. The suggestion I can make is when you first open your project look at the bottom of the timeline, you will see a progress bar showing your media loading – which includes the render files. First premiere loads your original media and then loads the render files. I’ve found if you change/open sequences or move a clip around before this progress bar finishes it sometimes stops loading the render files.

It may be a separate issue because of dynamic linking, but hopefully this helps.

Good luck,
Mark

[Mark Laslo]

If you happen to have two machines available, you could try putting skype on the second machine and using remote desktop of VNC to monitor your edit machine. It would probably decrease performance a bit on the edit machine, but Remote Desktop or VNC should be much more light weight than Skype.

A service like ustream or justin.tv might work as well?

[Mark Laslo]

If you are looking at FTP it may be practical to look at hosting the FTP server internally, that way there is no need for somebody to upload to a server and then you download it. Worst case you set up a server with FTP and then have to move it over your local network which should go significantly faster.

This will tie up your internet bandwidth and if you are using a residential based package you may have a cap on how much data you can transfer each month. I know for me with Cox it is 200 gb a month.

Just a thought as this way once the file is transferred it’s local. Setting up an FTP server is also pretty easy if you have any IT knowhow, it’s a matter of security that can be a bit trickier.

Hope that might help.

[Mark Laslo]

Since they are still images if you have photoshop you could set up an automated task to correct the issue and save as a new file (or the same file). Would save you from having to mask each file and probably cut down on some rendering too. Hope that helps.

[Mark Laslo]

I’ve found that Time Machine is reading off the drive and that causes it to slow down since it’s either when copying to a Time Capsule or when Time Machine runs. What I do is just cancel time machine during the day and then run it during lunch and at night after I’ve finished editing.

My guess is that the drive that is being backed up is busy reading all the data for Time Capsule and can’t keep up with both the backup and reading a video file.

I could be wrong but that’s been my theory and workaround.