Suggestions for video editing computer

by philg

Folks:

After four years of daily use, my 2006 Dell XPS 400 has finally become obsolete. It has been running 32-bit Windows XP and I want to use Adobe Premiere Pro with my new Sony camcorder. The hardware engineers who built what turned out to be a flawless Dell were no match for the world’s software engineers, who have created video editing software that will run only on 64-bit operating systems.

Here are my requirements:

  • drive old Dell 30″ display (2560×1600 pixels through single DVI cable)
  • be nearly silent
  • be no taller or deeper than 18″ (the biggest current Dells are 19.4″ high)
  • run Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Pro
  • be fast at converting RAW photos to JPEG (I must admit that my old computer seems a bit pokey when dealing with HD video or the latest 20+MB camera RAW files)
  • be responsive for video editing and reasonably fast for format conversion (the Sony captures in AVCHD, which cannot be used anywhere)
  • run Windows 7/latest Microsoft Internet Explorer so that I can use FAA Web sites to sign off students
  • run cygwin and PuTTY so that I can connect to and maintain some Linux-based servers
  • run OpenVPN
  • run software included with various peripherals, including Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner and a couple of printers
  • hold a fair amount of data (1.5 TB hard drive? Possibly with a mirror so that a drive failure does not inconvenience me, though actually I cannot remember the last time that I had a home computer drive failure)
  • burn a Blu-Ray disk for distribution of HD video

Due to all of the software that has been freighted onto this machine over the years, some of which requires license keys that I have surely forgotten, moving to a new computer is going to be painful and time-consuming. So I’d rather not do it too often and would be willing to spend some extra money now to delay the next replacement.

My actual current needs could probably be handled reasonably well by a $750 desktop PC, but in light of the labor involved in configuring the new computer as my daily desktop I am thinking of treating myself to a monster fast machine. I think that I could spend $2000 without feeling embarrassed.

The latest and greatest Intel Core i7 processor is available only on Dell’s XPS 9000, a machine that is physically too large, and the option costs $1000 extra. A 6-core AMD seems to be available. And then there are the Dell “workstations” with Xeon CPUs. I can’t figure out any of the differences among these CPUs. Is it too much to ask Intel to label their desktop CPUs “slow, medium, fast, super” instead of “Core i7-975 Bloomfield” (the complete list is daunting and it is just for one variant of “Intel Core”; Dell also sells “Core i3” and “Core i5”)? Or how about just give them numbers that correspond to performance benchmarks? That way I could know how much faster a new machine should accomplish a task such as video encoding.

My inclination is to stick with Dell, but I would be open to other brands as long as the acoustic engineering is good.

Ideas? Suggestions? What CPU? How much RAM?

31 thoughts on “Suggestions for video editing computer”

  1. Pick up a silent ThinkStation e20, add a passive video card that supports badaboom + RAM & disks to suit, and call it a day. You’re better off spending $800* now and $1000 in 1Q2011 when Intel/nvidia/ATI’s next platforms and SSDs come, all designed for editing HD video.

    *Assumes order of RAM, disks, video card from newegg and a few minutes of labor or $20 for neighborhood nerd.

  3. John: Thanks for the solid-state disk idea. I hadn’t thought about that. It makes a lot of sense, though. I don’t think that I’ll ever be working with more than 32 GB of video at a time, so even a small SSD might provide a huge performance boost, no?

    Dave: I am opposed to building my own PC. I tried building a “silent PC” with the help of a specialty shop on the west coast. It cost a fortune and ended up being noisier than a standard Dell. The XPS 400 is way quieter than the silent PC ever was.

  5. Phil: with two z-drive SSDs (~1.4TB/s) HD edits become almost pleasant, but the cost is still impractical unless you’re being paid for it. New flash fabs are coming online early next year.

  6. John: $1800 for a hard drive? That is painful. Why would I need 512GB of SSD, though? Hollywood is not clamoring for my next feature-length film. The camcorder itself has only 32 GB of memory for its AVCHD format movies. I think that my biggest project might be taking 20 minutes of footage down to 5 minutes and a typical project would be taking 5 minutes of footage down to 1.5 minutes. How much space will the intermediate files take up?

    (p.s. I looked at the Lenovo prices; they have some nice features such as ECC RAM, but the price seems to be 50 percent more than Dell. I can’t figure out why it is worth it given that my 4-year-old Dell has performed flawlessly (as have the other Dells in the house and the ones that I’ve given away to friends and family).

  7. But yes, with <32GB of video you should absolutely get two cheap, fast SSDs and run in RAID0. That's only 30 minutes of ProRes 422; maybe you're speaking of compressed video?

  8. John: I was thinking of compressed (I think the camcorder puts about 2 hours into its 32 GB). Is “ProRes 422” what Premiere uses for its intermediate HD files? I would like to be about to do 1080p. But really no individual project is likely to be more than a few minutes long.

  9. Phil: I mentioned a particular model (e20) because at <$450 it retains the sound engineering of the $2000 models, and gives you a $400 budget to plug in upgrades. I haven't yet found any Dell workstations that were "is it on?" quiet under load.

  10. John: It doesn’t have to be quiet under load. Most of the time I’m just using a Web browser or ssh client. And aren’t the Intel consumer chips a better deal per unit of CPU power? I see “Xeon” and think “overpriced”.

  11. I think your best bet would be to build one yourself – how knows it could be quite liberating! Get a 64-bit OS, minimum 8 GB RAM, and if you can get a six core AMD or a high GHz quad core.

  13. Seriously, consider a Macintosh. Yes, they are expensive, but there are some very good reasons why Macintoshes dominate video and music editing.

    FAA web sites require you to use Microsoft products? How did Microsoft get that particular monopoly? Well, you can run Windows under emulation in the Macintosh.

    Consider a MacBook Pro if it’s compatible with Adobe C5. Get an external disk drive connected through FireWire. You’d be surprised at how powerful a laptop can be. Add your Dell display and you’ve got a two-monitor system — you’ll also be surprised at how two monitors can improve your productivity.

  14. Mark: Thanks for the suggestion. At age 46 I would say that I’m too old to learn a new operating system unless it offers some important new capability, e.g., it can run an application that Windows can’t or is vastly simpler. So I’m interested in using Google Chrome OS, but Unix-with-a-nose-job (Mac OS) does not appeal. Keep in mind that I can’t recall having a single problem with the Dell hardware or Microsoft software during four years of daily use.

    Use a laptop? The ergonomics of a laptop don’t work for me. The keyboard needs to be much lower than the screen and I like a split keyboard, e.g., Microsoft Natural. Can a laptop really be comparable in speed for video coding? That is tough to believe. http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html shows that the fastest Intel mobile chip is about half the speed of the company’s fastest consumer desktop chip. There is also the question of acceleration via a high-end video card (as John suggests above). Finally I wonder if a laptop can run at full speed for hours without overheating and having to throttle back.

  15. What @Mark said. At my day job I use a Mac Pro as my primary Windows workstation (Win 7/64). A Mac Pro would score very well on your acoustic, capacity and performance requirements, maybe not so well on your physical size issues. The overall quality / fit / finish of the Mac Pros is excellent. I’ve had three of these machines over the past half decade (PPC, one Intel running Mac OS X and the other running Windows) and have had no reliability issues.

    At the time it was acquired (maybe 2 years ago), the Mac Pro was a great value in comparison to Dell; for an extra 10% cost, you got 2x the CPU cores, 2x the RAM and 2x the disk space of the Dell. This may have had more to do with the magic of corporate purchasing than actual street prices, though.

  16. Before spending a lot of money on hardware, I urge you to try editing a video or two using Corel VideoStudio Pro X3.

    Try before you buy it at 80$.

    Corel over Adobe? Yes.

    I use it at work and it answers all my needs for basic video editing tasks.

  17. Our sturdy Dell desktop finally died after 6+ years — so I just went through the shopping phase. Giant pain, but just remember – if you were doing OK with your prior Dell, then pretty much any upper-end current chip will be great for you. If you want to dig into technical trivia, this website is pretty great — here’s a comparison of some of the top end chips out right now.
    http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-phenom-ii-x6-1090t-890fx,2613-7.html

    From a cost/power comparison, it’s sounds like it’s pretty hard to beat an AMD x6 setup (Inspiron 570 or XPS 7100). Though a top-end i5 would probably work pretty well, too (Inspiron 580 or XPS 8100).

    For us, I found a refurbished XPS 9000 with an i7-960 in the Dell Outlet at a $700 discount to brand new. That will work great for the next 6 years, thx!
    http://www.dell.com/content/products/category.aspx/desktops?c=us&cs=22&l=en&s=dfh&dgc=IR&cid=11343&lid=543238

  18. I’m surprised you have problems with Dell – they usually offer small form factor models in most of their product lines. Perhaps you were looking in the home section, where the faster machines are indeed grossly obese (something to do with gamer psychology, I guess). In the Large Enterprise section, you can get workstations that are more reasonably sized, like the 17″ Precision Workstation T1500.

    If you need compact, another option to consider is Shuttle, who uses liquid cooling for relatively low noise, but you pay a premium for compactness. One model that has been getting favorable reviews is the HP Z400 (or the Z600 if you want more expandability). Hey, they even had BMW design the case for them.

    SSDs are great for random I/O, but not better than hard rives for sequential I/O, such as most video editing. You should get a smallish SSD (64GB) to run OS and apps, and a fast 10K or 15K rpm drive for data. Be wary of SSDs – they provide a block device emulation of a hard disk drive but the underlying NAND flash behaves very differently (rewriting a block means erasing it first, an operation that can take 100ms). The flash controller and firmware is responsible for masking the complexities of flash, but many controllers are poorly written and performance degrades over time as fragmentation takes hold. At the very least, make sure you get one that supports the TRIM command, preferably one with a Sandforce controller. The best you could get is a 64GB Intel X25-E with faster and more reliable SLC flash (unfortunately much more expensive than the inferior MLC most SSDs use).

    The main benefit from going Xeon over i7 is ECC memory (more reliable, but more expensive) and support for dual processors. Adobe software is notoriously bad at exploiting multiple cores, however, so it’s better to get fewer, faster cores than many slower ones. Make sure you get memory in multiples of 3, as that’s how you get optimum memory bandwidth on Nehalem processors.

    As for laptop vs. desktop, the mobile i7 is onlu dual core vs. quad-core for the equivalent desktop part, hence the speed disparity. There’s no way a laptop is even remotely competitive with a desktop – everything is compromised to reduce power draw, from bus speed to hard drive speed to memory capacity and so on.

    Accelerated video cards are good for 3D, but mostly pointless for video, apart from hardware-accelerated HD H.264 playback. I wouldn’t waste money on a premium video card.

    Finally, have a look at B&H. They carry a number of reasonably configured video and photo editing workstations, ready-to-ship so you don’t have to incur the delay of a build-to-order configuration (B&H did it for you). The HP Pavilion Elite HPE-270f for $1200 is a great deal, for instance (2.8GHz i7, 8GB RAM).

  19. Whatever hardware you go with, I strongly recommend running a virtual machine environment. Set up one VM for video, another for flight, etc. This way you can cage obnoxious software that pesters you with updates, limit interference of conflicts, and suspend any programs that don’t need to stay loaded. Best of all, your future migration will be so much easier as you can move VMs around, or if necessary install a VM onto bare hardware. Create a file share on the base OS to share content. Both VMware and Microsoft HyperV have improved a lot.

  20. The Dell Precision T1500 looks really nice:

    http://www1.euro.dell.com/uk/en/business/Workstations/precision-t1500/pd.aspx?refid=precision-t1500&s=bsd&cs=ukbsdt1

    Mini-Tower – Dimensions: (W x H x D): 6.69″ x 14.58″ x 17.08″
    Core i7-860 (2.8GHz, 8MB L3 Cache, Quad Core)
    8GB RAM
    250GB 7200RPM HDD
    £815 (USD $1,180)

    That’s a very good base spec (the i7 processor is amazing by all accounts), and you can order additional hard drives off the web (buying them from Dell will cost a lot more).

    I’m a huge fan of Dell hardware. For the price it can’t be beaten, and their under-the-desk kit is really quiet (I have no personal experience with the T1500, but have no reason to believe it would be any different from all previous models).

    I’m in the UK but, if anything, you’ll get better pricing on the US website. Check if it’s worth adding the 3 yr next-business-day warranty (just gives you that extra peace of mind).

    Disk speed is the bottleneck for video editing, so order a 10,000 RPM hard drive and keep that separate just for video (i.e. Windows and all the software are running on the base 250GB 7200 RPM drive).

    Western Digital Velociraptor 3.5″ drives:
    http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=821
    http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=822

    They’re not cheap (over $300 for the 600GB model), but you’ll get lots of bang for your buck.

    On the matter of transferring data from the old computer to the new, all versions of Windows since at least XP have a REALLY good wizard for transferring all data and software settings from one computer to another. In XP it’s called the Files and Settings Transfer Wizard. You create a backup on the XP box (to e.g. an external hard drive) and then import this backup into your new Windows 7 machine. I’ve used this a few times recently, and it has worked flawlessly. It’s quite cool to e.g. run Office on your new machine and have *everything* exactly as it was configured on the old computer. You still have to reinstall the software (it can’t do this for you), but all your data and settings transfer across very well.

    http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/expert/crawford_november12.mspx

    On Windows 7 it’s called Windows Easy Transfer.
    http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/features/easy-transfer.aspx

  21. Another “build it”.- Don’t let one bad experience blind you. You will get the best config possible and it’s satisfying/fun. See MaximumPC (etc.) or spend 30 min on a few sites (including Newegg reviews).

  22. Ok, you won’t want to custom build it, and more over it’s probably noiser than what you want, but this is the kind of machine that would make dream any power user. Of course, you would then have to rewrite in cuda the programs you want to use (which would be easier if they were opensource in the first place). Imagine how fast your video and graphic conversions would be on that machine! 🙂

  23. I went through the same exercise recently (for Photoshop/Lightroom) and ended up with an HP Workstation z400 – Xenon 3530 chipset (sweet spot of price/ performance) and an Nvidia Quadro FX 1800 graphics card and 12G of memory (2 Gig DIMMs are the way to go in terms of price!). I just ended up with 2 320G drives – one for boot/OS, the other for scratch and I just ordered some more internal HDs from Newegg for my photos and backup.

    Hard to go wrong with these workstations – built well, very very quiet, and they have a full range (from desktop to totally big monsters).

    Video editing is even more intense that photography – get a big enough system.

  25. I second Paul Beiser’s recommendation. As a 15+ year Dell diehard, i believe HP has bested Dell in both value and economy, esp. in their Pavilion vs Dimension XPS line. All the one-off upgrades from Dell starts to add up. HP simply includes extra memory, HD upgrades, memory card readers, etc. etc at a much less comparable price compared to Dell.

  26. Thanks, Jae. Philip, my last 2 (home) computers were Dell, and I looked at them, but after seeing the comparisons, I went with HP (and I also happen to know some of the designers and how hard they worked to make it very quiet :-).

  27. Hi Phil,
    in a recent edition of a German computer magazine called c´t was a nice idea about moving your old pc to a virtual machine on your new “real” machine.
    So you can actually migrate it slowly or even not at all and STILL use all the old programms.
    If you are intrested drop me a line and i my get you more on it.

    Best from Germany

    Michael

  29. I have never bought a bad Dell computer. For over a decade, every computer from Dell has lasted several years until software engineers made them obsolete, and some have traveled all over the country. I can’t say the same for Apple computers, two out of five of which have been crappers. Dell computers are like my Hondas.

  30. Re: Lenovo Workstations

    We have some of them at work. I’ve heard quieter jet engines. We had to build a room to house them and have everyone use remote desktop.

    Granted, sample size of 1 model, but still…

  31. My son has a 2-year-old Dell. It sounds like a vacuum cleaner is running under his desk!

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