PC configuration for professional video editing

Great forum you guys

Like nanodom, I'm a freelance filmmaker too and was looking forward to get some help. After reading all the replies and opinions I was compelled to believe this is the best forum for me to post my questions.

I'm a filmmaker, yes, but far from making anything like an Avatar or a Life of pie, so I don't need a machine which can do all that. All I'm looking forward to do is some color correction and other basic necessities of editing. Moreover, I'm on an extremely tight budget. Here is the configuration I've come up with:

CPU: AMD FX 8350 (tight budget; can't afford intel)

Motherboard: Asus Sabertooth 990fx

Ram: Corsair Vengeance 8gb x 2

Graphic Card: The popular opinion on this forum suggests GTX 650 Ti Boost and it's well within my budget too, so if you think it's going to do well in an AMD setup, I'll buy it. (It's around $225 here in India)

Harddrives: Currently I'm using a WD green and I agree with Mr. Millard when he says the right place for it to be is outdoors, except, I wouldn't bury it in my lawn lest it spoils the ecosystem of the garden too. Currently I'm using the fourth replacement of this Harddrive (I'm serious). DO NOT BUY WD GREEN!

I have a spare seagate 1 TB 7200 RPM. Will that work fine or is it absolutely necessary to install an SSD?

NOTE: (this is going to be embarrassing) This is my current system:

Processor: AMD phenom II X6 1090 t 3.2 Ghz

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-880GM (max memory 8 Gb)

RAM: 1 x Corsair 4 gb + 1 x corsair Vengeance 4 gb

Graphics Card: *hangs head in shame*

Harddrive: WD Barracuda Green 1 TB

With the above configurarion I've been able to edit and render short videos in premiere pro and after effects but only if I don't use any effects. The moment I start using effects esp the third party (like the red giant magic bullet etc) it doesn't render at all. In after effects it just gets stuck after 2 seconds. Could this be happening due to the lack of a graphics card?

Coming back to the question I asked before 'just how imortant are SSDs?' I know they are super fast and all that but they are super costly too. Is it going to be worth spending on an SSD (post production) when I could spend that amount in the production of the film.

Also, I mentioned i'm currently using an AMD Phenom II X6. Can I continue with it and drop the idea of an AMD FX 8350?

Note: I have never overclocked any of the components and never will; Indian summers are too harsh.

So basically four questions:

1. Harddrive VS SSDS and if it's worth spending so much on an SSD when I can spend that amount on the film production

2. Graphics Card: Is the GTX 650 Ti boost the go-to hardware in this setup?

3. Can I continue with my current AMD phenom II processor?

4. Why do you think with my current setup I'm not able to render videos when using too many effects?

And an off-topic question:

5. I'm planning to buy the Black Magic Pocket Cinema Camera. It records in the cinemaDNG raw format. Can those files be directly imported into premiere pro and worked upon?

Thanks a lot for reading. I look forward to some help

Regards,

Kola

Welcome to the Adobe forums!

Which version of Premiere Pro are you going to use? You see, all versions of Premiere Pro up to the current CS6 6.0.3 release do not support any AMD/ATi GPUs at all for GPU acceleration duties. CS5 introduced GPU acceleration that worked only with nVidia GPUs with 896MB or more VRAM. Releases of Premiere Pro since then have added additional nVidia GPUs to the "official" supported list. Currently, with an AMD GPU, Premiere Pro is permanently locked to the MPE software-only mode, which means that your editing performance will be no faster than if that same PC relies solely on integrated or onboard graphics/video (assuming that an equal amount of RAM is available for programs in both setups). AMD GPUs do not support CUDA at all; they support OpenCL instead for GPU accelerated applications. Unfortunately, OpenCL GPU acceleration support is permanently disabled (and cannot be enabled at all without destroying the program's functionality) in all current Windows versions of Premiere Pro CS6. OpenCL support for Windows will be included in the next release of Premiere Pro (which is tentatively called "CS-Next"), whose release date has yet to be definitively determined.

In addition, go for the i7-3770K instead of the plain i7-3770: The plain 3770 is only limited unlocked (this is if you intend to overclock the CPU for potentially greater performance). With all four cores in use, the maximum clock speed that you can attain with the plain 3770 would be 4.1GHz while the 3770K can be theoretically set to as high as 6.3GHz (though the amount of heat that the Ivy Bridge processors give out will limit the maximum practical overclocked speed to around 4.5GHz or so).

Third, if you ever want to install a large, good-performance CPU cooler that overhangs some or all of the memory slots on your selected motherboard, skip the CMZ Vengeance series in favor of memory that doesn't have such tall heat spreaders: The Vengeance's heat spreaders are all of 56mm tall! Unfortunately, good air coolers leave only about 44mm of clearance underneath the CPU heatsink and/or fan. This would result in either you being forced to install the CPU cooler's fan way off-center or the heatsink itself not fitting onto the CPU properly or at all with the DIMM slots occupied with the Vengeance RAM modules.

Fourth, your choice of a round Zalman CPU cooler is less than ideal, especially when overclocking the CPU, because round heatsinks in general are less efficient in conducting heat than square heatsinks are. After all, the CPU's heat spreader and the CPU's core(s) themselves are square for a reason. Furthermore, the Zalman cannot accommodate additional fans due to its proprietary fan design (the fan on that cooler is less than ideally located; it tries to pull air from the front fins but also push air through the rear of the heatsink, resulting in less-than-optimal cooling performance).

And one disk for absolutely everything (including the OS and programs) is not enough. In fact, Adobe strongly recommends that you get at least one additional hard disk to run Premiere Pro at a level of performance that's comfortable to most users (however, more disks are better still).

Finally, I would not recommend a Lite-On BD burner if burn quality on BD-R disks is important. Go for a Pioneer BD burner instead (if that brand is available where you're ordering from).

[moved to hardware forum]