[Roy Foliente]

I agree with your comments, Teddy. I think they are spot on. I, too, am in the process of evaluating my next hardware platform for both Premiere Pro CC and AE CC work. Coming from the Windows side, I thought it was a forgone conclusion I would get another Windows box. My only complaint with most Windows boxes are they very noisy and typical of most serious workstations, they pay no heed to energy efficiency, which is a shame. This is the strength of the new Mac Pro to me. I just returned from the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) meeting in Las Vegas last week and spent a lot of time in the Adobe booth. I can tell you Adobe is now very “bullish” on the new Mac Pro. They were previewing their next release of Premiere Pro and AE and their booth was littered with Mac Pro machines. They were using Mac Pros for almost of of their presentations and as they showcased some of their new features, they ran very briskly. Apparently, their new release (due out next month?) will fully leverage the new Mac Pro hardware including the dual AMD gpus. While only a single CPU workstation and limited in its expansion capabilities, it might be premature to completely dismiss the Mac Pro for serious CC work. I hope your benchmark can be modified to include the new CC release when it comes out.

Roy

[Roy Foliente]

Here are my results:

AE CS6 Version 11.0.1.12
i7 3960X OC 4.4GHz
64GB 1600MHz RAM
GTX 680 2GB (MSI Lightning OC 1176MHz) with driver ver 306.23 WHQL
Time: 6 minutes and 26 seconds

[Roy Foliente]

Is it the amount of RAM that makes a difference? I wonder how a Maximus combo with a Quadro card and Tesla C2075 with 6GB of RAM would fare?

[Roy Foliente]

Sorry I’m late to this thread as I just came upon it (I am new to Creative Cow Vegas). I cannot tell you how pleased I am to have found it as it has been challenging to find detailed info on the optimal hardware configuration for video editing, especially with Vegas Pro. I’ve received varying bits of info geared mainly for Premiere Pro but was never sure if most of it was applicable to Vegas as well.

John, I am so impressed with all the practical info you provide on this forum that I’ve gone ahead and ordered a copy of your Absolute Training for Vegas+DVD. I figured it was the least I could do for you based on everything I’ve learned from your posts on Creative Cow already. My background is in still photography although I’ve been forced to dabble in video on and off over the years and this interest has grown steadily, especially with the introduction of Canon’s 5d Mark ii. I’ve owned Vegas pro since version 7. I took a liking to Vegas Pro as it was fairly easy to get going with it and am pleased with its evolution, especially with version 10’s ability to handle my Canon’s .mov files natively.

With that said, if I wasn’t limited to a laptop for video editing and had a more generous budget, what would the ideal setup be for editing 1080-24p files from my DSLR? I’m not averse to spending the money, if it makes sense!

I have a colleague who uses Premiere Pro CS5 and After Effects and he has me almost convinced I should purchase a 12-core Xeon setup with Windows 7 (64-bit), overclocked to at least 4GHz with 48GB of RAM and a Quadro 4000 video card. He uses an SSD for his OS, a dedicated 1-TB hard drive for a scratch disk/temp files, a dedicated 1-TB hard drive for rendering, and an external RAID 5 array (8 x 2TB) for his workspace/file storage. While I understand that a Quadro 4000 video card would largely go underutilized by Vegas Pro 10 as this is a CPU-based program, does the rest of this setup make sense? Specifically:

1) Can Vegas Pro 10 (64-bit) take advantage of 12-cores? As you’ve stated, it is the CPU that is often the bottleneck with Vegas Pro when dealing with hi-def content and so it would make sense to not skimp on this detail of the machine. It would also seem to make sense to get the fastest clock speed you can afford and even overclock, if possible.

2) Can Vegas Pro 10 take advantage of 24 or 48 GB of RAM? I realize that the 64-bit version can see this much RAM but will it take advantage of it? Is there a sweet spot?

3) If Vegas Pro can benefit from 12-cores and overclocking and lots of fast memory, at what point do the hard drives become the bottleneck with hi-def content? Does it then make sense to have 4 separate drives (OS, swap/temp files, workspace, render)?

I know what Sony’s minimum recommendations are but I’m not interested in just getting by although I also want to feel confident that my software is taking full advantage of my hardware.

Thanks!