Video editing computer station.

Dubliners

Member
Probably asked a hundred times but technology advances so hope you don't mind. I want to edit still and moving shots that will be taken with a multi rotor, a handheld gimbal and Lord knows what else. I'll be using a Gopro 3, a Sony nex 7 and a canon d5. I'm very partial to Macs but wonder if a similar PC is as capable, dependable and comparably priced. Haven't jumped into either software platforms for handling the footage so that could be a deciding factor too. I've run parallels ( and even got a virus on the PC side ) so perhaps that influences me too. I found that if I really compared apples to apples the price difference wasn't significant. What do you think? TIA. Dubliner
 

DucktileMedia

Drone Enthusiast
If you are partial to mac, as I am, then stay with mac. the PC will yield the same results, and for the same money you could get a faster computer. But an i7 mac is enough to do what you want. I use premiere pro/after effects and dont ever use FCP primarily due to the fact I have the adobe suite and it does absolutely everything. I also love being able to use dynamic link between AE and PP. Also, I have a mac pro so i am able to utilize the advantage in having a CUDA able card, which on the mac there are only 2 that will work, the gtx 285 which is discontinued and the quadro 4000(perhaps some other quadros work as well). If you are just doing basic editing then that will get you far. My issue is that I do post vfx and keying and the compression of a 4:2:0 camera using H.264 just doesnt cut it. I was seriously thinking of trading in my 7d for the Gh3 but as i dig deeper, even the high data rate of the GH3 doesnt come close to what the Black magic would. but I'm not sure how much horsepower that will take compared to what I have. To do any of this fluidly you need 16Gb ram minimum, 4 core minimum, and as high a processor speed possible. Some programs are designed to utilize multi core machines such as AE and Cinema4d, 3dMax, but typical applications still rely on single processors and will be fastest on a 3ghz core rather than 8 2.66Ghz cores. These files, even from a dslr can get highly render intensive. Even though compressed they actually can take more processing power to deal with the compression than you might think. always buy the most you can afford as technology changes so fast it's hard to keep up.

Hope that helps

Yuri
 

Dubliners

Member
Thanks Yuri, very helpful and unbiased I'd say. I must admit every time I see your name I read Irish Aerial :)
 



cbpagent72

Member
I have two 2010 12 core XEON MacPros and they are incredibly handicapped compared to a custom built Windows PC. Mac has kind of forgot the importance of great video cards which are incredibly important in video and photo editing. The standard video card in the 2010 and 2012 MacPros is the AMD HD 5770, by modern standards that is a very weak card. I recently built a new PC with a LGA 2011 X79 ASUS board and a Core i7 3930K 6 core CPU, 64GB of corsair dominator memory, H100i liquid cooling and a Titan Graphics card. I am using a Samsung 840 Pro SSD for the Boot and a couple other SSD drives in RAID 0 and 8 3TB RED drives and a LSI raid card configured in RAID 5 for redundancy. This PC blows away the MacPros, I find myself hardly using them anymore. BTW OSX gets viruses just like Windows just make sure that you use a good antivirus on both operating systems.
 

SMP

Member
We use a pair of Alienware PC's w GTX 580's linked to a 24TB GSpeed Raid. Iris and Cbpagent have it right. You need CUDA cards, I7 Cores 16gb Ram and a Striped Raid to read from. Otherwise good luck.
 

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