4K editing on the cheap

[finnjaeger]

So I am a Video editor/Color grader/ and I also do a lot of compositing in Nuke.

 

Currently my main Workstation is a Laptop, not a regular one but the beefies Lenovo W530 you can possibly buy. 

 

For HD Material, this fine but in 4K its a different story.

 

For a normal project in Premiere in HD I get realtime playback in 60 FPS easily, even with a bunch of effects, thanks to GPU acceleration.  In 4K that drops down to around 15 FPS, with the limiting factor beign the CPU, storage is on an external USB 3.0 RAID which is fine even for 4K Raw. In Resolve I am getting only 5 FPS.. with the limiting factor beign the GPU.

4K Playback in Avid MC 8 works totally fine when converted to DHxHR (or whtever their 4K codec is called), even with plenty of effects and Colorgrading. But I Really like working straigt with the Raw files (mostly RED and Alexa Footage with some FS7 / FS700 recoreded with the Odyssey 7Q, to have faster turnaround time and less hassle relinking the files after.

 

 

So I figured I need at least twice the CPU and a lot more GPU Power. As a baseline score I benched my current CPU at around 12K Points in Geekbench, so for my 4K workstation I would need a score of at least 25K, So I shopped around and found Used Dual X5680 (Xeon) based Workstations (Dell T7500) with 24Gig of Ram for around 1000€,  They have two 6 Core Cpus and according to geekbench that system should clock in at around 30K Points.  Do you think anything New(er) would get me the same performance at the same price?  

 

The whole system is actually cheaper then buying the parts seperatly, (CPUs @ 450€ Motherboard @ 250€ , Case 100€ PSU 100€, Ram ....)  I would still need to upgrade the Ram to at least 32GB.

 

For Storage, I have a whole shelf full of Harddrives and a bunch of SSDs. the Workstation mainboard actually has a RAID controller, so I could put my external 16TB Storage in the case.

 

For the GPU I need something Resolve likes, I could not find any good 4K davinci resolve benchmarks so maybe you can help me out here to find a good GPU for the system.

I think for a really awesome 4K workflow would require a GTX Titan with 6Gb VRAM  or 2 780ti with 3Gb Vram, both go for around 500€  What do you think is the better option? 

 

Thank you for your help

 

 

[madscientist56]

why not consider nvidia quadros? do you game on your pc as well as edit?

[Mattrixx]

For the GPU I need something Resolve likes, I could not find any good 4K davinci resolve benchmarks so maybe you can help me out here to find a good GPU for the system.

I think for a really awesome 4K workflow would require a GTX Titan with 6Gb VRAM  or 2 780ti with 3Gb Vram, both go for around 500€  What do you think is the better option? 

 

Thank you for your help

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSP1ASkVO0o The performance you'll expect from a k4000 GPU w/ x99 when rendering. Depending on the amount you have to spend, go for a k2200 or k4200 (or more than one).

 

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