Building an HDV Editing Rig
-FOR PRODUCERS- In our business there is nothing worse than a computer that can't keep up with you (or won't hold all of your data), and so we recently went about the process of building a new HDV editing workstation from the ground up. Our previous rig was VERY modest by industry standards, namely an Athlon XP 2000+; ok, let's be honest, it was just plain slow. As such, this was a welcome upgrade.
Our goals were to achieve true full-framerate editing performance in Vegas at "preview" quality, and to cut our rendering times in half. A secondary goal was to allow for a simple yet cheap upgrade path 6 - 12 months down the road. Finally, we wanted to stay under $750.
The first question was whether to buy or build. Being an IT Consultant in my other life, I know the headaches that can be caused by "home-brew" PC's. However, for specialized applications like video editing it is hard to get the exact mix of components you need from an OEM computer, aside from spending a ton of cash. Thus, we decided to build our own.
The components involved in building your own editing workstation include:
-Case
-Power Supply
-Motherboard
-CPU
-Case Fans
-Memory
-Storage
-Video Card
-DVD Burner
-Other
CASE -- You don't need to spend a lot of money to get a decent case ($30 - $50). The key requirement for video editing is the number of internal drive bays, the more the merrier.
POWER SUPPLY -- This is VERY important, maybe the most important and overlooked component in your entire system. Most home-made PC's suffer from inadequate power (usually the power supply that came with the case), which results in random instability. Our personal suggestion is the Antec TruePower True430 ($100 street) or higher. Not only does it provide stable power at full load, but it also regulates the fans in your system so your rig becomes whisper quiet.
MOTHERBOARD -- Choosing a motherboard is the hardest part of building your computer because the remainder of your components will be largely dictated by your motherboard. Be aware that some of the newest Intel motherboards (925X, 925EX, etc.) require brand new memory, video cards, etc. Thus, we needed a "hybrid" motherboard, one that supports the new socket LGA775 CPU's, but that still supports dual channel DDR memory and AGP 8x video cards. That allowed us to re-use our memory (1 GB DDR266) and video card (ATI Radeon 9200SE, dual-head) from our old computer. Supporting the socket LGA775 CPU's was very important to us because it allows us to perform a "drop-in" CPU upgrade 6 to 12 months down the road (up to 3.8 GHZ). We also wanted built-in Gigabit ethernet and SATA. We already had a cheap firewire card, and decided to wait on RAID, so those features were not important to us. Our final requirement was that the motherboard had to be from a proven company with a USA website, free downloadable drivers and upgrades, and on-line support. Thus, we settled on the Gigabyte GA-8IPE775-G ($90 street).
CPU -- The Intel vs AMD wars aside, it is hard to ignore the fact that a lot of new video editing software is optimized for the Pentium IV. Benchmarks pretty much show that while AMD CPU's are indeed faster for a large number of applications, Intel still maintains a sizeable lead in the content creation and rendering benchmarks (at equivalent price levels). Thus, we went with the new socket LGA775 Intel Pentium 4 530, 3.0 GHZ. We highly recommend getting the retail box version ($180 street), especially for this processor. The retail box version comes with a huge "orb" heatsink and fan, along with a thermal strip, and anything short of this will burn up your CPU fast.
CASE FANS -- It is wise to add a couple of case fans to your system. The new high capacity, high speed hard-drives run very hot, so we suggest putting one or two fans at the front of the case blowing inward over the hard-drives. Then have at least one fan on the back blowing air out of the case. If you went with the power supply we suggested above, your system will still run quiet, even with all of these fans.
MEMORY -- The key here is dual channel, and then as fast as you can afford. Although we have relatively slow memory (DDR266), we use two 512MB modules in a dual channel configuration, which means the memory bandwidth is still plenty fast. The new DDR400 memory would have been great, but two 512MB DDR266 modules in a dual channel configuration is actually faster than one 1GB DDR400 module (which has to run single-channel). Of course, we already had two 512MB modules on hand, which made the decision a lot easier.
STORAGE -- The speed and size of the boot-drive is not terribly important, but the speed and size of the video drive is critical. We already had a 160GB IDE drive to use for a boot-drive, so we focused on buying a new video drive. Maxtor has a new 250GB SATA DiamondMax 10 series with a 16MB buffer (6B250S0 OEM, $180 street), which consistently tests as the fastest 7200RPM drive on the market. Later on we plan on buying a PCI RAID card and adding a 2nd Maxtor for a 500GB RAID 0 configuration, but for now the average and burst data rates (55MB/s and 135MB/s respectively) of the single Maxtor was fast enough for us. The drive also supports the new features of "SATA 2", including Native Command Queuing, so this drive has a lot of performance headroom. Finally, we have an existing Maxtor One Touch 250GB external firewire drive that works great for archiving and backup.
VIDEO CARD -- This is where you can save your money. A decent AGP 8x video card with 128MB of memory and dual-display capability is all that is required. We already had an ATI Radeon 9200SE card that works just fine, so we decided to stick with that.
DVD BURNER -- There are some great new 16x dual-format, dual-layer DVD burners available for cheap, but alas that wasn't in our upgrade budget. Thus, we re-used our Lite-On 4x DVD+R burner, not the greatest thing in the world, but it gets the job done.
OTHER -- We opted for a motherboard without built-in firewire, so we popped in an inexpensive 3-port firewire card. We also wanted the capability to capture low-quality analog video (from VCR or TV, for example), so we re-used our old AverTV card.
CONCLUSION
After a couple of days of building the computer, re-installing software, and moving files, we were finally ready to edit again. Here are the results:
1) Cineform .avi playback -- On our Athlon XP 2000+ machine we could not playback Cineform files in windows media player without stuttering, the only way we could play them back was from within Vegas in a small window. On our new workstation Cineform files played back with ease, only taking up 30% of the CPU cycles at full screen.
2) Vegas editing -- We were excited to see consistent 29.97 fps playback in the preview window within Vegas, even with huge projects. This is with the preview window set to "preview-auto" and at half size (640x360), plenty big enough to work with. This was not possible on our old machine, even with a tiny window (we were lucky to get 10 fps on most projects).
3) Rendering speed -- The easiest way to measure this is with VirtualDub. Our chroma-noise removal pass in VirtualDub used to run at no higher than 4.0 fps. Now we consistently get between 7.0 and 8.0 fps, satisfying our requirement to cut rendering times in half.
In the end we are extremely pleased with our upgrade, and we only had to spend roughly $600.00. Of course, we had the advantage of re-using some existing components, but I'm sure most people will be in the same situation.
by Ben Buie
Our goals were to achieve true full-framerate editing performance in Vegas at "preview" quality, and to cut our rendering times in half. A secondary goal was to allow for a simple yet cheap upgrade path 6 - 12 months down the road. Finally, we wanted to stay under $750.
The first question was whether to buy or build. Being an IT Consultant in my other life, I know the headaches that can be caused by "home-brew" PC's. However, for specialized applications like video editing it is hard to get the exact mix of components you need from an OEM computer, aside from spending a ton of cash. Thus, we decided to build our own.
The components involved in building your own editing workstation include:
-Case
-Power Supply
-Motherboard
-CPU
-Case Fans
-Memory
-Storage
-Video Card
-DVD Burner
-Other
CASE -- You don't need to spend a lot of money to get a decent case ($30 - $50). The key requirement for video editing is the number of internal drive bays, the more the merrier.
POWER SUPPLY -- This is VERY important, maybe the most important and overlooked component in your entire system. Most home-made PC's suffer from inadequate power (usually the power supply that came with the case), which results in random instability. Our personal suggestion is the Antec TruePower True430 ($100 street) or higher. Not only does it provide stable power at full load, but it also regulates the fans in your system so your rig becomes whisper quiet.
MOTHERBOARD -- Choosing a motherboard is the hardest part of building your computer because the remainder of your components will be largely dictated by your motherboard. Be aware that some of the newest Intel motherboards (925X, 925EX, etc.) require brand new memory, video cards, etc. Thus, we needed a "hybrid" motherboard, one that supports the new socket LGA775 CPU's, but that still supports dual channel DDR memory and AGP 8x video cards. That allowed us to re-use our memory (1 GB DDR266) and video card (ATI Radeon 9200SE, dual-head) from our old computer. Supporting the socket LGA775 CPU's was very important to us because it allows us to perform a "drop-in" CPU upgrade 6 to 12 months down the road (up to 3.8 GHZ). We also wanted built-in Gigabit ethernet and SATA. We already had a cheap firewire card, and decided to wait on RAID, so those features were not important to us. Our final requirement was that the motherboard had to be from a proven company with a USA website, free downloadable drivers and upgrades, and on-line support. Thus, we settled on the Gigabyte GA-8IPE775-G ($90 street).
CPU -- The Intel vs AMD wars aside, it is hard to ignore the fact that a lot of new video editing software is optimized for the Pentium IV. Benchmarks pretty much show that while AMD CPU's are indeed faster for a large number of applications, Intel still maintains a sizeable lead in the content creation and rendering benchmarks (at equivalent price levels). Thus, we went with the new socket LGA775 Intel Pentium 4 530, 3.0 GHZ. We highly recommend getting the retail box version ($180 street), especially for this processor. The retail box version comes with a huge "orb" heatsink and fan, along with a thermal strip, and anything short of this will burn up your CPU fast.
CASE FANS -- It is wise to add a couple of case fans to your system. The new high capacity, high speed hard-drives run very hot, so we suggest putting one or two fans at the front of the case blowing inward over the hard-drives. Then have at least one fan on the back blowing air out of the case. If you went with the power supply we suggested above, your system will still run quiet, even with all of these fans.
MEMORY -- The key here is dual channel, and then as fast as you can afford. Although we have relatively slow memory (DDR266), we use two 512MB modules in a dual channel configuration, which means the memory bandwidth is still plenty fast. The new DDR400 memory would have been great, but two 512MB DDR266 modules in a dual channel configuration is actually faster than one 1GB DDR400 module (which has to run single-channel). Of course, we already had two 512MB modules on hand, which made the decision a lot easier.
STORAGE -- The speed and size of the boot-drive is not terribly important, but the speed and size of the video drive is critical. We already had a 160GB IDE drive to use for a boot-drive, so we focused on buying a new video drive. Maxtor has a new 250GB SATA DiamondMax 10 series with a 16MB buffer (6B250S0 OEM, $180 street), which consistently tests as the fastest 7200RPM drive on the market. Later on we plan on buying a PCI RAID card and adding a 2nd Maxtor for a 500GB RAID 0 configuration, but for now the average and burst data rates (55MB/s and 135MB/s respectively) of the single Maxtor was fast enough for us. The drive also supports the new features of "SATA 2", including Native Command Queuing, so this drive has a lot of performance headroom. Finally, we have an existing Maxtor One Touch 250GB external firewire drive that works great for archiving and backup.
VIDEO CARD -- This is where you can save your money. A decent AGP 8x video card with 128MB of memory and dual-display capability is all that is required. We already had an ATI Radeon 9200SE card that works just fine, so we decided to stick with that.
DVD BURNER -- There are some great new 16x dual-format, dual-layer DVD burners available for cheap, but alas that wasn't in our upgrade budget. Thus, we re-used our Lite-On 4x DVD+R burner, not the greatest thing in the world, but it gets the job done.
OTHER -- We opted for a motherboard without built-in firewire, so we popped in an inexpensive 3-port firewire card. We also wanted the capability to capture low-quality analog video (from VCR or TV, for example), so we re-used our old AverTV card.
CONCLUSION
After a couple of days of building the computer, re-installing software, and moving files, we were finally ready to edit again. Here are the results:
1) Cineform .avi playback -- On our Athlon XP 2000+ machine we could not playback Cineform files in windows media player without stuttering, the only way we could play them back was from within Vegas in a small window. On our new workstation Cineform files played back with ease, only taking up 30% of the CPU cycles at full screen.
2) Vegas editing -- We were excited to see consistent 29.97 fps playback in the preview window within Vegas, even with huge projects. This is with the preview window set to "preview-auto" and at half size (640x360), plenty big enough to work with. This was not possible on our old machine, even with a tiny window (we were lucky to get 10 fps on most projects).
3) Rendering speed -- The easiest way to measure this is with VirtualDub. Our chroma-noise removal pass in VirtualDub used to run at no higher than 4.0 fps. Now we consistently get between 7.0 and 8.0 fps, satisfying our requirement to cut rendering times in half.
In the end we are extremely pleased with our upgrade, and we only had to spend roughly $600.00. Of course, we had the advantage of re-using some existing components, but I'm sure most people will be in the same situation.
by Ben Buie
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