What computer for cutting 4k footage? (no color grading, no effects)

Report · Apr 05, 2017

Hey guys,

I'm about to shoot my first feature film and trying to figure out post production costs. We're gonna shoot in 4k and I'm gonna cut the movie myself but that's where it ends for me, I'm gonna hire a professional editor to do color grading, effects etc. So my question is what is the most budget friendly option of a computer I can get in order to cut 4k footage and then export it for my editor to do the rest. I do not care whether it's desktop or laptop, mac or windows. I'm of course gonna edit in Premiere Pro.

This is the current computer I'm using, but it's really struggling with 4k even on short projects.

I'd appreciate any advice on this.

[Moderator note: moved to best forum]

Report · Apr 05, 2017

Give us an idea of your "budget friendly" cost.

What 4K media/camera?

Are you talking Premiere Pro CC or earlier CS6 etc?

Report · Apr 05, 2017

Hey Bill,

The ideal would be something up to $1000.

We're gonna shoot with two Lumix G7 cameras.

And yes I'm talking Premiere pro CC.

Report · Apr 05, 2017

Well I do not know much about Panasonic's 4K 100 Mbits/second MP4 media but I am going to call in Rjl who just recently put together a new ~$1000 system to see what he thinks.

Can anyone comment on the difficulty or ease on just cutting this media. My only experience is with Sony 4K 100 Mbit/second XAVC-S and his $1000 system would have no problems with that.

Report · Apr 16, 2017

I have a GH4 and I have the following system:

AMD FX-8120 8 cores running at 3.7Ghz

AMD R9-285 2GB Video Card.

16GB Ram

250GB SSD boot drive for Win 10 with Premiere on the boot drive.

128GB SSD cache drive.

2TB Segate Mechanical drive for main storage.

200GB mechanical to hold finished edits.

Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2017

With this system, I can edit 4K without many issues. I use 50% for previews and use around 4 to 5 video layers. When using Lumetri color correction on footage I get stutters on playback, especially my V-Log graded footage.

But I am really not happy with my rendering performance in 4K, but it's even worse if I render resized 4K to 1080p or 2K. I did a wedding video composed of 10 edited sequences which each had color correction applied. The video was approximately 42 minutes long and it took +18 hours to render!!! The pain in the rear is when I use Neat Video for any noise reduction. That kicks my render time up triple or quadruple vs. footage with no noise reduction. You really have to use Neat Video in very select spots, or remove temporal noise reduction in order not to wait days to render.

I'm building a new system in a few months with a AMD R7-1700X, 32GB Ram (upgrade to 64GB in future) and a Vega GPU card. My budget is $1200, but I'm reusing my case and hard drives.

I left $400 in the budget for the graphics card because it ain't available yet.