budget build for video, photo, music editing

[ubusboc]

looking to build something that will be effective for video production, scanning old photos, slides and negatives and retouching and transferring and cleaning up vinyl to digital music. sounds like a lot but I think in todays digital world could easily be handled on a budget. Thanks for any insight been awhile since I did a build

 

[PizzaTheHutt]

What would be your software of choice for video production? Premiere? Vegas? EDIUS? Also, what is your budget for this build?

 

[Seamz]

What's your budget as well? Just as cheap as possible or do you have a range in mind?

 

[ubusboc]

mid range and may be over a couple of months so could be upper mid range on the budget. I haven't decided yet on the software most of what I used before is 10 years old

 

[Seamz]

Can you give us a budget amount and what currency you're using? The forums here have international reach and it'd be a waste to put together a build in the wrong currency.

 

[ubusboc]

USD and would like to keep it under 800

 

[PizzaTheHutt]

How does this look?

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i5-4460 3.2GHz Quad-Core Processor ($174.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-H97M-HD3 Micro ATX LGA1150 Motherboard ($70.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Memory: Avexir Core Series 8GB (1 x 8GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($49.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: Samsung 850 EVO-Series 250GB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($77.99 @ Amazon)
Storage: Seagate Barracuda 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($45.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Video Card: Gigabyte Radeon R9 390 8GB Video Card ($299.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Case: Fractal Design Arc Mini R2 MicroATX Mini Tower Case ($96.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Power Supply: XFX XTR 550W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply ($78.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Total: $895.92
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2015-12-02 06:12 EST-0500

 

[Seamz]

If you're not doing any gaming, which you don't mention. Then the build above is not the best for your scenario. He has a 300$ graphics card with a 175$ CPU. Rendering is a CPU intensive task which is performed best by Intel's i7 series. I have thrown together this build. Let me know if you do plan on gaming with this rig as this will not be suited to you. http://pcpartpicker.com/p/xmmc8d

 

[PizzaTheHutt]

Rendering on some software uses the GPU more than the CPU (The adobe suite, the foundry Nuke and Houdini to name a few), as they use OpenCL - hence why I've gone for a more expensive GPU. If the software you are using doesn't use GPU acceleration then I would go for Seamz's build but with more hard drives and a non overclockable CPU, since the most common bottleneck is slow storage when rendering, rather than a GPU or CPU.

 

[Seamz]

If GPU acceleration is a factor with the Adobe Suite it's mostly used for editing and not as much in the rendering. It will be faster with a GPU, but from what I can gather it has to be an nVidia card.

 

[ubusboc]

how would a comparable set up with an amd processor, would there an appreciable price difference?

 

[Seamz]

The price difference on an AMD build for rendering isn't worth it to be honest. At least not for the 8350 which would fall in your budget. The Intel CPU's are going to blow them away so the $$ saved isn't worth the loss of time and performance.

 

[PizzaTheHutt]

If GPU acceleration is a factor with the Adobe Suite it's mostly used for editing and not as much in the rendering. It will be faster with a GPU, but from what I can gather it has to be an nVidia card.

You'd be surprised. I did a couple of tests on my rig and was myself actually quite surprised. I ended up getting a 70% decrease in time with an old AMD card I had lying around and got a 120% decrease using CUDA for the renders in CC2015. YMMV though.

NVIDIA cards are useful for CUDA but Adobe has recently warmed up to AMD and have integrated OpenCL so even if your GPU doesn't have CUDA (and isn't NVIDIA) it will still make use of it and make a large impact on your renders.

 

[PizzaTheHutt]

The price difference on an AMD build for rendering isn't worth it to be honest. At least not for the 8350 which would fall in your budget. The Intel CPU's are going to blow them away so the $$ saved isn't worth the loss of time and performance.

Definitely - the architecture of AMD is quite weak compared to Intel - even hyperthreaded Intel cores blow physical AMD cores out of the water when it comes to VFX and CG based work. I would presume that video editing would have a similar effect.

 

[Seamz]

If GPU acceleration is a factor with the Adobe Suite it's mostly used for editing and not as much in the rendering. It will be faster with a GPU, but from what I can gather it has to be an nVidia card.

You'd be surprised. I did a couple of tests on my rig and was myself actually quite surprised. I ended up getting a 70% decrease in time with an old AMD card I had lying around and got a 120% decrease using CUDA for the renders in CC2015. YMMV though.

NVIDIA cards are useful for CUDA but Adobe has recently warmed up to AMD and have integrated OpenCL so even if your GPU doesn't have CUDA (and isn't NVIDIA) it will still make use of it and make a large impact on your renders.

I learned something new today which is nice

I honestly only ever use the media encoder tool to change file formats for clients. Do you know if it speeds up that process as well?

 

[PizzaTheHutt]

If GPU acceleration is a factor with the Adobe Suite it's mostly used for editing and not as much in the rendering. It will be faster with a GPU, but from what I can gather it has to be an nVidia card.

You'd be surprised. I did a couple of tests on my rig and was myself actually quite surprised. I ended up getting a 70% decrease in time with an old AMD card I had lying around and got a 120% decrease using CUDA for the renders in CC2015. YMMV though.

NVIDIA cards are useful for CUDA but Adobe has recently warmed up to AMD and have integrated OpenCL so even if your GPU doesn't have CUDA (and isn't NVIDIA) it will still make use of it and make a large impact on your renders.

I learned something new today which is nice

I honestly only ever use the media encoder tool to change file formats for clients. Do you know if it speeds up that process as well?

It will do definitely - you have an NVIDIA card with a bunch of CUDA cores. All you need to do is set it to use them:

Add your card to the supported_cuda_cards.txt file in the AME program installation location and then just check the box to use CUDA inside AME.