Buying a new computer.

Jerry K wrote on 5/28/2010, 7:45 PM
Buying a new computer for editing with Sony Vegas Pro 9e. Most of my work requires video FX, filters, 2 or 3 layers of video. My projects are usually 1 to 2 hours long. Will be editing native AVCHD 1920 x 1080 60i
I want to stay under $2,000 dollars and already own Vegas Pro 9e. I'm thing of a computer with the following parts.

Intel i7-960 water cooled,
12gb of ram,
NVIDIA GeForce GTX260 2-DVI,
800 Watts Power Supplies,
System drives 1TB SATA-III 6.0Gb/s 64MB Cache 7200RPM HDD,
2tb external sata drive for video files.
LG WH10-LS30K 10X Internal Super Multi Blu-Ray Rewriter,
LG 22X DVD±/±RW + CD-R/RW
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

My questions are:

#1 will I still need to proxy the AVCHD files for smooth playback in my preview monitor?

#2 how much better would this system be with a Intel i7-980X extreme Processor?

#3 if Sony comes out tomorrow with Vegas 10 and it uses gpu cuda power for editing will my NVIDIA GeForce GTX260 card be powerful enough?

Any feedback is appreciated.

JK

Comments

PerroneFord wrote on 5/28/2010, 10:07 PM
#1. Yes
#2 Not sure how anyone could give a quantitative answer.
#3 Probably Not

You are looking at a pretty powerful system, with a low end graphics card. I can get a single layer of AVCHD to play back just fine on my 8-core machine. On an i7 it should be trivial. However, expand that to multiple tracks and things will go downhill quickly. Start adding effects, and all bets are off.

Why people are insistent on editing native footage, especially when they intend to do effects is absolutely beyond me. Edit proxies, or transcode to a solid 4:2:2 or 4:4:4 codec and be done with it. You'll have a better editing experience all around.
kkolbo wrote on 5/29/2010, 7:32 PM
I am building the identical system with the following differences:
I am using the 980X because I am planning on overclocking it to 3.8 or 4GHz.
I added the Corsair Obsidian 8000D case for the hot swapable drive bays.
I bought my GTX260 video card directly from PNY to save a little money.
I don't have an internal BluRay drive.

My system will be another $700 on top of your budget.

As for power between a 980X system instead of a 960. The cost of the 980X is not for the faint of heart. While it does deliver a little more power for Vegas (which does a great job of multi-threaded processing on the six core, 12 thread 980X) , I can't say if it is worth the extra cost. We can compare systems later and see. For money making jobs it doesn't take much to justify the extra $500, but for hobby use, that is a lot of date nights with your wife.

The 260 video card is the best price point I found for a CUDA capable card without going more than $200 more. Because of the low price on the card, I was not worried about future support. I will change cards later if I need it. Since Vegas does not currently use the GPU I just couldn't justify buying a high end card now.

Even with all of the power this system should have, I am still going to use Cineform DI's. Other than quick slice and dice for news, the quality and ease are worth using the DI's.

A note for Vegas fans...
During my research into the 980X processor and overclocking, when the reviewers and enthusiasts were testing to see how multi-threaded applications for video performed, Vegas was the application they used. It appeared that Vegas is getting more and more notice. The other thing is that they showed how much Vegas benefits from the ever improving 64 bit CPU development. The couple that showed other NLE's against Vegas didn't benefit near as much. I still like this approach over GPU dependency.

KK