THE EQUIPMENT THREAD

[TEKnician]

I feel this is a nice place to put this thread.


Here, you can:
--Post questions on hardware suggestions for your computer rig.

--State what you have and compare your setup with another member.

--Gather intel on anything of interest or if you don't want to sift through google searches, this is the place.

--Create a Wishlist of hardware and Dream Rig (because I know we all do)


MAC AND PC WELCOME!

[TEKnician]

I guess I'll do the kickoff and say I wish I had 2.5TB+ worth of SSDs and 128GB of DDR3 RAM and AMDs new graphics card in a 12-core Mac Pro and 2 Thunderbolt Displays. Goodnight...

[Knowname]

Looking at a graph and it said SSDs don't actually help premiere any (and I'd assume Vegas and other editing s/w as well...) it's all just loading and shutting down is this true?

I could go for a 6 cor (HTT) LGA2011 16gb monster, heck I'll even take the i5 4 core version!

[Kariudo]

SSDs would help out any time the bitrate of your source is greater than the transfer rate of your HDD.

I don't really have any decent samples of lossless HD footage, but the sample I do have came in at around 58 Mbps (well within the realm of HDD transfer rates). You'd only really start to see an improvement if you were editing with uncompressed HD footage.

An SSD might help with previews and exporting/rendering, depending on how fast the encoder can encode. It'd have to run at something like 8x realtime (~200fps) before it couldn't fill the frame buffer fast enough with an HDD, but reading frames may (or may not) consume a significant amount of time well before that point.

[BasharOfTheAges]

Lots of layers and doing fun things with nested compositions could get you up to bit-rates that high... But if you're dealing with that much HD footage, you'd need multiple SSDs to even hold it all. With prices at around $1200/TB, it probably isn't quite worth it yet.

[Mister Hatt]

Not that I make amvs but:

Intel Xeon X5560 (2x)
24GB ECC RAM
20TB RAID60 (2x 10TB RAID6)
NVIDIA Quadro FX3800 (2x)
NVIDIA 285 GTX
MacBook Air i7 256GB w/ custom kernel
Creek Audio OBH-21SE amplifier
FiiO E7 amplifier/DAC
Audio-Technica AD900 (W1000X pads, and loosened driver)
AKG K242HD
Ultrasone PRO550
Shure SE310
VSonic R02Pro2
Grisoft control wheel (eta wireless edition…)
Elecom Scope Node Wireless

Soon to buy:
Beyerdynamic T50P
Audez'e LCD-3
Meier Audio Corda Classic
Meier Audio StageDAC
Novation Dicer

The dicer is to use as a controller for YATTA because it's a pain to do on a keyboard. I use the Grisoft wheel for cycling footage but kinda wish I had a 3D mouse. The Scope Node is godly for accurate mouse usage and I wish I didn't break it a while back. Audio gear listed because I can't work without music.

New machine depends on how nice the Intel Haswell chips are but it'll probably be two of the higher end Xeons, or otherwise two E7-2875 chips for glorious 20 cores. New HDD rig is currently slated at 40TB for storage (4x 10TB RAID6 in RAID0) and a 2TB SSD RAID0 for working footage. Graphics card is the lower end NVIDIA PLEX unit. Most likely going to have 96GB of ECC RAM I think.

I'm starting to do less and less video work but I've got some professional encodes going this year so may need a decent machine again, it's killing my wallet.