Yes I don't doubt that my videocard will suffice for my needs, I have had it for around 4yrs so far and I've never seen the GPU go over 20% except during performance tests, I did a lot of research before picking that specific card and in my opinion it still has the best price to performance ratio. If it ever shows up as the bottleneck I will replace it. I just did a complete project on my new setup and it worked great. I had mixed 4K footage from the GH5 and 4K footage from the P4P and was able to complete the project with transitions, color grades, etc. without proxies. None of it was 60FPS though so not sure yet if it will hold up to that. Also, on export the export speeds were actually faster than 1:1 maybe even as high as 120% which was great. The sequence was set to 1080P and I enabled CUDA hardware acceleration since I had installed the 980ti.  Below is my complete hardware setup in case anyone decides to replicate my setup. The only thing I have left to do is upgrade the memory to 64GB of memory (HP wanted almost 2x the price for their memory): Processor / Platform HP Z4 with Core i9-7940X (singe socket 14 cores) Video Card NVIDIA GTX 980ti Memory 16GB of DDR-2666 memory Storage Layout 256GB NVME drive (OS) 4 x NVME drives combined into a single 2TB Storage Spaces RAID5 volume (Current Projects) Dell Ultraspeed drive Quad (4 port NVME PCIe x16 card) 2 x 10TB Seagate Ironwolf drives combined into a single 10TB Storage Spaces RAID1 Volume (90 day Archive/Library/Stock Footage) 1 x 1TB Sandisk SSD (Cache drive) 1 x Lexar Workflow Professional H1 (Media Reader) To get the Dell Ultraspeed card to work you will need to enable PCIe bifurcation in the BIOS. The Dell Ultraspeed card is way cheaper than the HP equivalent, does the same thing, and worked just fine in the HP. The Ironwolf drives are great, they completely spin down when not in use; saving power and heat. I know plenty of people like to build their own systems, but I have a 4yr warranty, and same day business service, not to mention everything just works; I'll take that any day over a custom build. ... View more

You can see some of the struggles I have been having which closely mirror both of yours: Dell 7910 Rackmount Workstation https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2487936 HP Z4 https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2564395 I do think my new Z4 will at least meet my needs. I love the new Davinci Resolve, if only it was more intuitive to use. I'm going to give it another try on my Z4. Simple tasks are so counter intuitive in Resolve, but playback is buttery smooth when you have a good video card. ... View more

I just thought I would relay my findings so far. The Z4 arrived with 16GB of memory, the 14 core I9 and a single OS NVME drive, I added a video card I had laying around (NVS 510) and I loaded Win10, PP, and Davinci Resolve. I added some 4K 100MBs 30FPS and 60 FPS Panasonic GH5 Long GOP footage and P4P 4K 60FPS P4P footage to the timeline. I also configured PP to render previews using CPU only since the video card is trash. PP was able to play the footage at 1/8 and 1/4 resolution without dropping a frame. I then added some cross fade transitions and it still worked flawlessly. I color graded one of the clips and still no problems. I then added an adjustment layer and a color grade to the adjustment layer; no problems. Scrubbing through the timeline is pretty jumpy, and at 1/1 playback resolution there was some stutter, but that's it. Exports speeds were nearly 1:1. I did not try adding 4K footage to a 1080P timeline. My conclusion so far is that this setup is borderline acceptable. Definitely a big step up from my previous configuration but I don't think it can handle a multi-cam sequence or nested clips, or a completed project with full color grading and still maintain playback even at 1/8. BTW Davinci Resolve could not play any of the media without crashing. I'm sure its due to the trash video card that I was testing with. My next step is to finish up my open projects on my current system, then migrate the archived and pending projects to the new system. I'll also move over my real video card (GTX 980ti) my quad NVME RAID card, add 48GB of memory, and add a dedicated SSD drive for PP cache files. When all of that is done, and PP is properly tuned, I think I'll finally be able to work with 4K Long GOP footage in realtime. This should serve me well for the next 5yrs until 8K comes along. ... View more

Thanks Neil, I did a lot of research on the Puget Systems site prior to ordering the Z4 and their test results are how I picked the CPU. I think the Z4 is so new the only way to see if it will work for me and my workflow is to try it firsthand. Hopefully I do not have to send it back. My workflow probably needs work, but right now I import everything into Windows Explorer from the source media, pick the "keeper" clips, number them in the order I will use them on the timeline then start importing them into PP. By this point I mentally know the whole flow of the video and want to start working on the project right away; not wait for proxy files. And contrary to Adobe's statement "you can continue working while the proxy files are created in the background" this never works for me. PP is unusable while it is creating proxy files. ... View more

I thought about upgrading the card, but when I check taskmgr in Windows 10 the GPU always seems below 10% no matter what PP is doing. I went ahead and ordered the Z4, I will report back if I still need to create proxies. Honestly, if I still do, then I'm going to send it back, since HP gives me 30 days to do so. If I need to create proxies anyway I might as well stick with my current setup. I use the GH5 for most of my video and it does have an All-I option, but it uses so much more storage over Long GOP that so far I have stuck with Long GOP. I did just order some 128GB SD cards that were on sale for Black Friday, so I'm going to do some All-I tests with 4K 60FPS media on the Z4, if anything involving the Z4 will get me to 50% playback resolution at 100%FPS with no dropped frames then that will be my setup going forward and compression strategy going forward. It is just so annoying and time consuming waiting for proxy files. Also, with my workflow I like to only import clips into PP that I will use in the timeline, so I organize everything in Windows Explorer, synch the audio, then start importing clips as I need them, this means that midway through the timeline I'm always waiting on some proxy job to complete; frustrating to say the least. I may need to change my workflow. ... View more

Cross Aerial, it would be helpful to know your hardware setup instead of just knowing that it works for you. ... View more

Neil,  I would be curious to see if Final Cut Pro found a way to improve their handling. I've seen reports that Long GOP media works better on their platform. Of course Apple makes all of their hardware so they can highly optimize their software for their hardware. ... View more

Bill, All,   Thank you for your attempts to help. I have a somewhat usable configuration that lets me playback 4K 60FPS Long GOP media from the DJI P4P and GH5 without proxies. Each change below brought slight improvements, I think I'm now at the best it will get. 1) I upgraded to the April 2018 update for Windows 10 2) I do not add my color adjustment layer until all other editing is done 3) I do not color grade any individual clips until all other editing is done 4) (This gave me the biggest improvement) when creating the project I right click a clip that is 4K at 60FPS and tell it to create a new sequence using that clip's settings. Even if most of my media is 30FPS, I use the 60FPS clip for the sequence settings. 5) I upgraded my memory to 144GB of RAM With all of those changes in place and playback resolution set at 1/4 or 1/8 I can edit the media without having to create proxy files. It still drops frames, and sometimes I have to move the playhead back a few times until it stops stuttering, but it is marginally tolerable. The painful part is when a customer wants changes after the color grades are in place. If I had to do this over I would have gone with a custom build, 4U rackmount chassis and i9 CPU; but I love the stability of my Xeons. My previous editing workstation was an HP Z800 and in 5 years of use Premier Pro, Photoshop, Lightroom, and After Effects maybe crashed 3 times between them. Most people do not realize a lot of crashes they get is from unstable HW or loading up 3rd party codecs. I hope that the industry releases some kind of dedicated H.264/265 rendering add in card sometime soon. The fact that these cameras can record and playback this media so flawlessly tells me that a highly customized dedicated decoder board would make a world of difference. ... View more

Bill, then I'm not sure there is much I can do about that score. PassMark says my disk is running as it should, if the PPBM score is accurate then for some reason Premier is not using the full potential of the drive so possibly there's a bug in Premier or a driver that is not working properly between Premier and the disk. Either way, I never see any of the drives utilization go over 10-15% so I don't think that's the bottleneck. My 128GB RAM upgrade arrived today, if that does not fix it then I'll just have to use proxies at times. ... View more

Bill, I'm not sure your test is accurate. The test was not run from the Storage Spaces array, it was ran from the C:\ drive which is a single dedicated NVME drive. According to PassMark my NVME drive is performing within it's expected range, so I'm not sure if your test scripts are accurately measuring the disk performance as the following screen shot shows. I am running Premier Pro CC 2018, not sure if that makes a difference. I think I am just stuck with CPUs that cannot keep up like ECBowen said. I probably should have done a custom build with an Intel i9 using a custom rackmount chassis.  My only hope is that the inbound RAM will make a difference. PiterSpb, I cannot use QSV because my CPUs do not support it. I did try both enabling and disabling H.264 acceleration and it did not seem to make much difference. ... View more

Thanks, definitely not what I wanted to hear though. I wanted a 2U rackmount workstation and the Dell was the only one that seemed to provide that without doing a custom build from scratch, it still seems odd that the performance monitoring tools do not show the CPUs as pegged; I guess the tools I am using aren't showing the actual latency within the clock cycles. I wonder why Premier does not offload that processing power to the GPU, I would think if it did that then the CPU would not be as important. I know Davinci Resolve uses the GPU a lot more than the CPU, it would be great if Premier did more with the GPU. Bill, I'm confused by your reply, I'm not sure if you are saying the test results are good or bad. ... View more

Bill, hopefully you can tell me if the numbers are good or bad, I checked the results against the ones on your website but did not see a way to match up the numbers in the results to the ones I got.I bumped up my RAM order to 128GB, so I should know by this weekend if RAM is holding me back. ... View more

Bill, I just ran your benchmarking tool, below is a screen shot of the results. I did take into consideration that RAID 5 is not the best for performance, but this is not ordinary RAID 5, this is an NVME storage spaces array using Windows 10, so the slight performance hit I took on the stripes I knew the NVMI RW throughput would easily be able to overcome for video editing. ... View more

Yes this is a clean install, I started with blank hard drives and built it from there. Not a single Dell utility is installed on this workstation.  I've also tuned it for performance in the BIOS, I've dedicated 13GB of memory to Premier Pro within its settings, I have verified that NVIDIA CUDA is set for playback rendering, I have dedicated an NVME drive for the cache media, and I have the absolute latest firmware and drivers for every hardware component. I also tested creating a new sequence from the source media - nothing helps. Anything from the GH5 or P4Pro at 4K resolution stutters badly. I've got RAM on the way, if that does not fix it then I may order the x16 riser and rebuild the whole thing again. The chassis is so crowded though the VC may be throttled due to temperature problems but I still do not think that is it since the GPU never goes over 10%. ... View more

I ran Novabench to check my system and it gave my GPU a pretty terrible score (14%). I think it is because my video card is in the PCIe x8 slot instead of in a PCIe x16 riser which means it's only got half the bandwidth it can use. I knew this would be a problem during the system build but I did not want to wait for the riser to come in. Now it would take a complete rebuild to install the riser and move the video card to the x16 riser since the Windows OS is installed to an NVME RAM drive in the other slot. I still do not think it is the GPU though since the GPU never goes over 10%. I think it's more likely that the RAM will make a difference. ... View more

Neil, actually I am not ignoring the media at all. I have studied I frames, All-I, compression, bitrates, resolution, DI, etc, etc. I know more about how consumer/prosumer grade cameras record, store, and compress their recorded footage than I ever thought possible. I am fully aware of how this type of media completely trashes CPU, RAM, and GPU; my problem is my system does not SHOW me that any of that is going on. The only place I seem to run low sometimes is RAM which is why I am throwing more of that at the problem. I have no problem throwing more hardware at the problem, but I need the system performance tools to just tell me what I need more of. I can run 1080P 8bit at 30FPS from these same cameras in real time all day long within AP; warp stabilizer, transitions, adjustment layers, you name it it's buttery smooth; so I feel like I'm close to being able to do the same thing in 4K, I just need to figure out what the weak link is. I have also not overclocked anything, I have been very careful to not install any additional codecs, this whole workstation was built from the ground up just for video editing. Below you can see what I mean. Task Manager shows that absolutely nothing in the HW is being taxed, CPU, RAM, GPU, and HD IOPS are not even 50%, yet the video at this exact point in time is dropping about 20 frames at a time. redmodel: I checked the priority of the PP executable and it is set to normal. ... View more

Meg, you are a genius, I was trying to update my reply after checking the camera settings but you replied too quickly. But you are correct, while trying to learn all of the menus and settings, I turned on variable frame rate; somehow though it even cranked out the footage at 60FPS. I'm coming from a Canon world where these settings did not exist and I had no idea I had accidentally set it up that way. It looks like I'm going to have to stick with 200% speed and hope optical flow will hide any choppiness. Thank you so much for your help. I will definitely never use that setting again, it completely ruins post processing flexibility. ... View more

It was recorded natively at 60FPS, below is a screen shot of the codec information. ... View more