Discussion
Hi,
I do some video editing for my little you tube channel. It’s a hobby but as you know those cheap hobbies end up costing more and more. I currently video from a Sony camcorder and take photos at the same time with my Nikon z8 but I’m trying to getting into taking a wide angle video with the camcorder and using the z8 for close up video. Problem is the z8 files take a lot more editing.
My current pc which I’ve had for many years manages the camcorder video but the z8 needs a bit more software to edit. I’ve ended up looking at davinci resolve or adobe premiere. Problem is my current pc is way too old for these.
I’m no pc expert and building my own is not an option as I have neither the time or patience. Any one recommend a PC which would capably run the software. I’ve had a look about but there’s so many online business its hard to know what’s good or not. I just need the base unit as In have a screen etc.
I do some video editing for my little you tube channel. It’s a hobby but as you know those cheap hobbies end up costing more and more. I currently video from a Sony camcorder and take photos at the same time with my Nikon z8 but I’m trying to getting into taking a wide angle video with the camcorder and using the z8 for close up video. Problem is the z8 files take a lot more editing.
My current pc which I’ve had for many years manages the camcorder video but the z8 needs a bit more software to edit. I’ve ended up looking at davinci resolve or adobe premiere. Problem is my current pc is way too old for these.
I’m no pc expert and building my own is not an option as I have neither the time or patience. Any one recommend a PC which would capably run the software. I’ve had a look about but there’s so many online business its hard to know what’s good or not. I just need the base unit as In have a screen etc.
GoodDoc said:
What are the details of the video your cameras produce (resolution, bit rate, CODEC), and what are the specs of the PC you currently use to edit those videos?
The cameras I use are the Nikon z8 details in screen shot and camcorder Sony FDR AX53. I use adobe premier rush to edit the Sony videos but apparently this program is going later this year. It manages these ok, sometime a little jerky but it’s doable. I would want to edit to anything higher than 4 k I wouldn’t imagine as it’s not needed. I just downloaded davinci resolve the free version but trying to edit even the basic z8 video it really stutters and has long pauses. It looks like you have two disks: one SSD (quick) and one big HDD (slow). Editing video is tough on disks, so editing files on on SSDs is helpful.
I assume your video files are on the HDD: if you move some video files to the SSD and edit them there, does it feel smoother/faster?
If so, you may be able to just add a big SSD and be done.
I assume your video files are on the HDD: if you move some video files to the SSD and edit them there, does it feel smoother/faster?
If so, you may be able to just add a big SSD and be done.
biggiles said:
It looks like you have two disks: one SSD (quick) and one big HDD (slow). Editing video is tough on disks, so editing files on on SSDs is helpful.
I assume your video files are on the HDD: if you move some video files to the SSD and edit them there, does it feel smoother/faster?
If so, you may be able to just add a big SSD and be done.
I spotted that. The HDD will be the major bottleneck when atually editing.I assume your video files are on the HDD: if you move some video files to the SSD and edit them there, does it feel smoother/faster?
If so, you may be able to just add a big SSD and be done.
When producing/encoding its down to the CPU (and GPU with most editing software).
Really, nobody should be using an HDD now for anythng other than long term/cheaper storage or PVRs (I generalise but you get the drift)
Hi,
Yes it has two hard drives. The faster one has not a lot of space and is used mainly for startup programs I think. It's nearly full and I've removed everything I can that's been put on it by me. The computer boots up in seconds and I think that's why they used the fast hard drive for that.
The problem with the HP, PC I have is from googling it, it's not really that upgradable. I'm not that knowledgeable on PCs,I turn it on and it works or it doesn't so wouldnt know where to start.
Ive had it a good few years but not sure what exactly I'd need to buy to make video editing easier as mine is constantly pausing when editing. When I watch task manager it seems to be the GPU maxes out when it's pausing.
Yes it has two hard drives. The faster one has not a lot of space and is used mainly for startup programs I think. It's nearly full and I've removed everything I can that's been put on it by me. The computer boots up in seconds and I think that's why they used the fast hard drive for that.
The problem with the HP, PC I have is from googling it, it's not really that upgradable. I'm not that knowledgeable on PCs,I turn it on and it works or it doesn't so wouldnt know where to start.
Ive had it a good few years but not sure what exactly I'd need to buy to make video editing easier as mine is constantly pausing when editing. When I watch task manager it seems to be the GPU maxes out when it's pausing.
I would just look at a Mac Mini for the price you can't really go wrong and Apple Silicon makes everything a breeze.
Or you could look at a custom PC. But with RAM prices these days it's going to translate into the major components. You might be looking at £1.5k minimum
My friend is a videographer and uses Da Vinci Resolve. He's just bought a new PC monster but it cost £5k and pretty sure the GPU was half of that.
But I edit the ocassional video on my Macbook and have been impressed how well it handles everything and if you're prepared to wait for renders to complete then it's 'good enough' for hobbyists.
Or you could look at a custom PC. But with RAM prices these days it's going to translate into the major components. You might be looking at £1.5k minimum
My friend is a videographer and uses Da Vinci Resolve. He's just bought a new PC monster but it cost £5k and pretty sure the GPU was half of that.
But I edit the ocassional video on my Macbook and have been impressed how well it handles everything and if you're prepared to wait for renders to complete then it's 'good enough' for hobbyists.
I can't be sure but were 6700s running SATA SSD, and not the NVME type, so quite slow but still tons better than HDD?
Also the camera is shooting in up to 8k, do you shoot in full quality etc?
In general video editors would use 'intermediates' to do all their editing and possibly colour grading work etc, and then swap out the intermediates for the full quality to encode the final video from.
The intermediates are basically low-res lower quality video files that stand in for the full quality ones. You create these and store them alongside the full quality.
Depending on your software etc there maybe certain ways of doing this or automatic ways etc. It's about 15 years since I worked with Prem/AE and video cameras in anger.
Also depending on what res you deploy to YT, and if you have subs/super high quality videos, 1080 30p might be sufficient quality for the YT upload, so you can probably save a lot of overhead in your entire workflow there.
Will the latest Prem or Davinci not even install on your system? What OS is it running? They may well be migrating to Win11 now which is the issue due to the TPM nonsense etc on the older CPUs.
In practice that CPU should be fine for editing videos and doing intermediates etc. It might not like it or be super fast but it should do it.
I still do loads of video stuff on an i7 4770k (rendering/transcoding/trimming etc of BR and 1080p HDTV stuff for my media centre stuff) and it's fine.
Also the camera is shooting in up to 8k, do you shoot in full quality etc?
In general video editors would use 'intermediates' to do all their editing and possibly colour grading work etc, and then swap out the intermediates for the full quality to encode the final video from.
The intermediates are basically low-res lower quality video files that stand in for the full quality ones. You create these and store them alongside the full quality.
Depending on your software etc there maybe certain ways of doing this or automatic ways etc. It's about 15 years since I worked with Prem/AE and video cameras in anger.
Also depending on what res you deploy to YT, and if you have subs/super high quality videos, 1080 30p might be sufficient quality for the YT upload, so you can probably save a lot of overhead in your entire workflow there.
Will the latest Prem or Davinci not even install on your system? What OS is it running? They may well be migrating to Win11 now which is the issue due to the TPM nonsense etc on the older CPUs.
In practice that CPU should be fine for editing videos and doing intermediates etc. It might not like it or be super fast but it should do it.
I still do loads of video stuff on an i7 4770k (rendering/transcoding/trimming etc of BR and 1080p HDTV stuff for my media centre stuff) and it's fine.
Edited by Mr Whippy on Tuesday 17th March 00:20
Mr Whippy said:
I can't be sure but were 6700s running SATA SSD, and not the NVME type, so quite slow but still tons better than HDD?
SATA SSDs are not "quite slow" - "Tons better than HDD", yes,Edited by Mr Whippy on Tuesday 17th March 00:20
On the specs NVME is faster , but most day to day random file access and writing you'd never notice. SATA SSD is night and day faster than HDD.
I run x2 Sata SSDs and x2 NVME drives, one of which is faster than the other in terms of specs. I just can't tell the difference between any of them - working and gaming.
Edited by Griffith4ever on Tuesday 17th March 08:21
Griffith4ever said:
Mr Whippy said:
I can't be sure but were 6700s running SATA SSD, and not the NVME type, so quite slow but still tons better than HDD?
SATA SSDs are not "quite slow" - "Tons better than HDD", yes,Edited by Mr Whippy on Tuesday 17th March 00:20
On the specs NVME is faster , but most day to day random file access and writing you'd never notice. SATA SSD is night and day faster than HDD.
I run x2 Sata SSDs and x2 NVME drives, one of which is faster than the other in terms of specs. I just can't tell the difference between any of them - working and gaming.
Edited by Griffith4ever on Tuesday 17th March 08:21
In my experience my best HDD (Iron Wolf Pro) are about 200mb/s sustained.
Iirc sata ssd is about 600mb/s tops.
Whereas nvme are 1.5gb/s > 14gb/s.
But yes, the jump to SSD even on SATA is properly decent for random/small file IO access and all that stuff. But mostly video is the opposite end and just big fast sustained transfers.
And with 10+ year old SATA running 'modern' 8k footage in high bitrate you're gonna be using up all that SSD speed I'd think.
Wrt good PC builders, I used PCSpecialist in November for a build and I'm entirely happy with it, and their subsequent customer service when I needed them (phone call support was quick and sensible over a few technical issues etc)
I normally build my own PCs so wasn't keen on using a builder, but this has been satisfactory enough for me.
OP - would suggest looking at adding a NVMe drive to your setup to use for the files you're working on.
Something like this might be overkill (2TB), or you could get a smaller drive and move files on and off it as you work with them and then finish with them?
https://www.scan.co.uk/products/2tb-kingston-nv3-s...
Something like this might be overkill (2TB), or you could get a smaller drive and move files on and off it as you work with them and then finish with them?
https://www.scan.co.uk/products/2tb-kingston-nv3-s...
Mr Whippy said:
Wrt good PC builders, I used PCSpecialist in November for a build and I'm entirely happy with it, and their subsequent customer service when I needed them (phone call support was quick and sensible over a few technical issues etc)
I normally build my own PCs so wasn't keen on using a builder, but this has been satisfactory enough for me.
Very much the same for me. I have built my own PCs, upgrading biannually, since Win94 but went for PCSpecialist last time. As you say, support is great. I chatted to one of their staff and she suggested a cost-saving option when I told her I used the PC for video and image editing in the main. I normally build my own PCs so wasn't keen on using a builder, but this has been satisfactory enough for me.
I've the GPU, added an M.2 SSD and a couple of HDDs, and, as promised, the system copes well. I use Resolve Studio with problems.
Recommended.
If you do go down the Mac Mini route, you can get an 'as new' refurb for £509 vs £599 new (for a 10-core, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD model), keep the small internal SSD for OS/apps and add a 2TB USB3/USB4/Thunderbolt SSD for your working projects (2000MB/s+).
https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/product/fu9d3b/a/Ref...
If you want something with a screen (and integrated speakers/webcam), then the similarly specced 24" iMac can be had for £1269...
https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/product/fwuu3b/a/ref...
But it'd be cheaper to go with Mac Mini and stay your current screen.
https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/product/fu9d3b/a/Ref...
If you want something with a screen (and integrated speakers/webcam), then the similarly specced 24" iMac can be had for £1269...
https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/product/fwuu3b/a/ref...
But it'd be cheaper to go with Mac Mini and stay your current screen.
mmm-five said:
But it'd be cheaper to go with Mac Mini and stay your current screen.
OP, what is your current screen?Unless you're doing a lot of cropping in post, there's likely little point in shooting in 4K if your audience is watching highly compressed stuff from youtube on phones.
Hi,
I'm not shooting 4 k off the sony camcorder just hd and if I just use that and don't bother with the nikon it's fine (which I may still do) I currently have the camcorder attached on top of the camera lens so I take photo and video but I was trying to decide wether to just go full film. So camcorder for wide angle and using the nikon to film but allowing me to zoom in and out as well.
On the nikon I was using the h.265 bit (mov) option. Only because in the little reading I have done it said this option isn't the worst but allows you to play with the highlights etc a bit more which when panning action can be needed as you don't always get it right.
I have davinci the free version on the PC and it does run but it very slow and laggy when I've tried editing the nikon files after putting the. Through handbrake to allow the. To open in davinci.
I do like have the photos as well and it's hard to move away from it so I'll see. I need to look at Apple as it's not something I'd thought of much to be honest and being more portable could be a good idea.
If anyone is interested the you tube page is The Cumbrian Moo Tuber. It's an aviation based page. The title doesn't really fit the page but I chose it before I started doing jet stuff. I started with just a mobile phone which was really bad so my video knowledge is slim to nothing really.
Thanks for all the replies though I need to have a real long think about where I need to go with it.
I'm not shooting 4 k off the sony camcorder just hd and if I just use that and don't bother with the nikon it's fine (which I may still do) I currently have the camcorder attached on top of the camera lens so I take photo and video but I was trying to decide wether to just go full film. So camcorder for wide angle and using the nikon to film but allowing me to zoom in and out as well.
On the nikon I was using the h.265 bit (mov) option. Only because in the little reading I have done it said this option isn't the worst but allows you to play with the highlights etc a bit more which when panning action can be needed as you don't always get it right.
I have davinci the free version on the PC and it does run but it very slow and laggy when I've tried editing the nikon files after putting the. Through handbrake to allow the. To open in davinci.
I do like have the photos as well and it's hard to move away from it so I'll see. I need to look at Apple as it's not something I'd thought of much to be honest and being more portable could be a good idea.
If anyone is interested the you tube page is The Cumbrian Moo Tuber. It's an aviation based page. The title doesn't really fit the page but I chose it before I started doing jet stuff. I started with just a mobile phone which was really bad so my video knowledge is slim to nothing really.
Thanks for all the replies though I need to have a real long think about where I need to go with it.
If you want to see the potential speed up of newer CPU/GPUs, then you can use Puget Systems Davinci, After Effects, Premier, Final Cut benchmarks to see what sort of gains you may see in specific processing tasks.
For example, an Intel i7-6700 vs basic Apple Silicon M4 - and that's just using the CPU cores of the M4...if you can take advantage of the GPU cores then that will speed things up even more (although there is some hardware acceleration in the Intel iGPU and AMD GPU of your current machine).
I'd take note of the average scores (the dotted vertical lines) as there will always be some errors in reporting from mis-identified CPUs/GPUs, power consumption, or multi-tasking giving extreme values.
CPU comparison - i7-6700 vs entry-level M4:
https://www.pugetsystems.com/pugetbench/results/co...
GPU comparison - Radeon 780M (which was the lowest I could find - but is about 4x the performance of an R7 360) vs entry-level M4:
https://www.pugetsystems.com/pugetbench/results/co...
If you want a proper comparison, then you can download the Davinci benchmark (or the complete suite) to test your current PC from here...
https://www.pugetsystems.com/pugetbench/creators/
For example, an Intel i7-6700 vs basic Apple Silicon M4 - and that's just using the CPU cores of the M4...if you can take advantage of the GPU cores then that will speed things up even more (although there is some hardware acceleration in the Intel iGPU and AMD GPU of your current machine).
I'd take note of the average scores (the dotted vertical lines) as there will always be some errors in reporting from mis-identified CPUs/GPUs, power consumption, or multi-tasking giving extreme values.
CPU comparison - i7-6700 vs entry-level M4:
https://www.pugetsystems.com/pugetbench/results/co...
GPU comparison - Radeon 780M (which was the lowest I could find - but is about 4x the performance of an R7 360) vs entry-level M4:
https://www.pugetsystems.com/pugetbench/results/co...
If you want a proper comparison, then you can download the Davinci benchmark (or the complete suite) to test your current PC from here...
https://www.pugetsystems.com/pugetbench/creators/
Edited by mmm-five on Tuesday 17th March 15:46
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