Do you find Youtube Content creators overstate how much power you need for video editing?

[gonvres]

I've noticed watching most youtube tech channels, you'd swear you need a top of the line 8 core I7 to do basic video editing. Especially for channels that produce maybe a few Youtube videos per week.

 

Now I've run a youtube channel of my own for a couple of years now, and do all the editing on a 4 year old i5 quad core CPU.. which handles the task perfectly fine. Export times aren't outrageous, I run just a standard Intel HSF on it and that keeps temperatures at an acceptable level. I could easily produce 10 videos a day on hardware of this nature. 

 

And I know many run their youtube stations on far far less. Even doing the bulk of their editing on mobile workstations like a MacBook with a Core M5 CPU. 

 

I've just always found it strange how tech stations say you need a $1000 i7 to edit video. Maybe if you're producing daily 4k content yes, but for 1080P 60FPS any quad core intel CPU made this decade should be fine.

[Guest]

Yeah. I do a lot of vide editing on my old laptop's i3 and it was fine

[Thisunami]

might be because they're spoiled. Having the latest and greatest is always a joy to work with. I used to have a 5930K for my rig and moving to a 6700K in my current there is definitely a difference. it's not to big of a deal to me because I only post league of legend videos every now and then but when you are doing youtube as a full time job instead of a hobby then I could see you wanting to streamline the process as much as possible. especially if you were going from something like an I5 to lets say a 6850K. Even then unless you were someone like linus himself i'd say the 6900 + 6950K is overkill. 

[vanished]

This may beg to differ: 

 

 

For reference, the video is only about 15 minutes long ಠ_ಠ

 

4770k @ stock, BTW

[Dargenfire]

I know what you mean. I've been doing video editing and effects compositing in the Adobe CC Suite for a couple of years now, and performance is perfectly acceptable running off a 1st Gen Lynnfield i5 750 @ 3.20GHz.

 

But then again if Youtube's your main job, you might have a bit more money to spend and want to save some time.

[Dargenfire]

12 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

This may beg to differ: 

 

 

For reference, the video is only about 15 minutes long ಠ_ಠ

 

4770k @ stock, BTW

Okay, but this lacks a lot of context.

 

What are you exporting? Premiere or After Effects? Is it 4K, or 1080? what codec and bitrate?

[AlTech]

10 minutes ago, gonvres said:

I've noticed watching most youtube tech channels, you'd swear you need a top of the line 8 core I7 to do basic video editing. Especially for channels that produce maybe a few Youtube videos per week.

 

Now I've run a youtube channel of my own for a couple of years now, and do all the editing on a 4 year old i5 quad core CPU.. which handles the task perfectly fine. Export times aren't outrageous, I run just a standard Intel HSF on it and that keeps temperatures at an acceptable level. I could easily produce 10 videos a day on hardware of this nature. 

 

And I know many run their youtube stations on far far less. Even doing the bulk of their editing on mobile workstations like a MacBook with a Core M5 CPU. 

 

I've just always found it strange how tech stations say you need a $1000 i7 to edit video. Maybe if you're producing daily 4k content yes, but for 1080P 60FPS any quad core intel CPU made this decade should be fine.

Depends on the software.

 

But no, you don't need a $1000 i7. Any Quad core i5/i7 should be fine for 1080p60. Just don't expect lightning fast render times.

 

EDIT: When content creators say you need a $1000 i7, it's because they need one to efficiently render things. For them, time is money. And so they need whatever product will make rendering faster.

[vanished]

1 minute ago, Dargenfire said:

Okay, but this lacks a lot of context.

 

What are you exporting? Premiere or After Effects? Is it 4K, or 1080? what codec and bitrate?

 

1 minute ago, wrathoftheturkey said:

Res?

 

Premier, 1080p 60 fps, H.264 @ 50 Mbit, the only intense effect in the scene is a warp stabilizer. 

[Dargenfire]

13 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

 

 

Premier, 1080p 60 fps, H.264 @ 50 Mbit, the only intense effect in the scene is a warp stabilizer. 

That doesn't sound right to me. And that bitrate is way too high if that's a YouTube video.

 

Are you running anything else in the background?

[vanished]

Just now, Dargenfire said:

That doesn't sound right to me. And that bitrate is way too high if that's a YouTube video.

It's not for youtube  

[Starelementpoke]

13 minutes ago, gonvres said:

I've noticed watching most youtube tech channels, you'd swear you need a top of the line 8 core I7 to do basic video editing. Especially for channels that produce maybe a few Youtube videos per week.

 

Now I've run a youtube channel of my own for a couple of years now, and do all the editing on a 4 year old i5 quad core CPU.. which handles the task perfectly fine. Export times aren't outrageous, I run just a standard Intel HSF on it and that keeps temperatures at an acceptable level. I could easily produce 10 videos a day on hardware of this nature. 

 

And I know many run their youtube stations on far far less. Even doing the bulk of their editing on mobile workstations like a MacBook with a Core M5 CPU. 

 

I've just always found it strange how tech stations say you need a $1000 i7 to edit video. Maybe if you're producing daily 4k content yes, but for 1080P 60FPS any quad core intel CPU made this decade should be fine.

They're saying that because time is money for them. They have to do it efficiently, they don't have the same amount of time to render.

[Dargenfire]

11 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

It's not for youtube  

What does task manager have to say? Is there anything else running in the background?

[vanished]

1 minute ago, Dargenfire said:

What does task manager have to say? Is there anything else running in the background?

CPUs is pinned at 100%, Premier is taking most of it, and I'm hijacking this thread by accident >_<

[Dargenfire]

11 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

CPUs is pinned at 100%, Premier is taking most of it, and I'm hijacking this thread by accident >_<

Hmm. That's definitely some anomalous behaviour right there. Have you tried sending the job to Media Encoder instead?

[TheKDub]

20 minutes ago, gonvres said:

I've noticed watching most youtube tech channels, you'd swear you need a top of the line 8 core I7 to do basic video editing. Especially for channels that produce maybe a few Youtube videos per week.

 

Now I've run a youtube channel of my own for a couple of years now, and do all the editing on a 4 year old i5 quad core CPU.. which handles the task perfectly fine. Export times aren't outrageous, I run just a standard Intel HSF on it and that keeps temperatures at an acceptable level. I could easily produce 10 videos a day on hardware of this nature. 

 

And I know many run their youtube stations on far far less. Even doing the bulk of their editing on mobile workstations like a MacBook with a Core M5 CPU. 

 

I've just always found it strange how tech stations say you need a $1000 i7 to edit video. Maybe if you're producing daily 4k content yes, but for 1080P 60FPS any quad core intel CPU made this decade should be fine.

 

It really depends on the content they're producing.

 

If there are a ton of different video clips, effects, audio sources, etc... and they're outputting high res video, you're going to need some pretty beefy hardware if you don't want to be waiting for who knows how long just for the video to render.

 

Also, while a video is being rendered, it typically leaves the PC rendering the video near useless since the CPU is being fully utilized by the video rendering software, so the faster the video renders, the more time they'll have to work on other videos or get other work done on that PC.

 

 

Now, if it's some lower grade simple video type stuff, then usually a less powerful machine is perfectly fine, especially for short low res videos. (Less than around 6 mins long)

[vanished]

1 minute ago, Dargenfire said:

Hmm. That's definitely some anomalous behaviour right there. Have you tried sending the job to Media Encoder instead?

In fact just saving the project took like over 10 minutes and for the entire duration it was working a core or 2 to 100% and not causing any disk activity   Very strange.

 

I think I'm going to cancel this and reboot and try again since A) this isn't even going to be my final render anyway, and B) it just started so I'm not going to be out much, which, if I can save some time, will be worth it.

[PaintChips]

Some YouTube creators are using software which may take advantage of Intel QuickSync or dGPU acceleration which can spank older systems by a noticeable margin.  Keep in mind there are also high-end YTers who use effects/audio leveling or plug-ins which requires more CPU power so they want CPU level performance than a lossy Intel QuickSync encoded video.

 

Short videos(5-10 minutes) at >720p at 24-30 FPS can be done with most computers as old as a Core 2 Duo/PowerPC but once you start pushing the bit-rate, codec and 1080p you'll need at least an Ivy Bridge system if you expect 60 FPS.  (I've done video editing on PowerPC G4 & G5 systems before, even used acceleration cards and USB H.264 dongles)

 

...I upgraded my HTPC from an i3 6100 to an i7 6700 to process stuff during the workday, while I rarely post stuff on YT/Vimeo or co-produce stuff that extra boost helps than tying down my workstation.

[ARikozuM]

Yes and no.

 

Recently had to upgrade the wife's rig to a 6850K for her graphic and interior design work. It seems to have helped her rendering and CAD work, though I'm just a husband who thinks she wanted X99 for the hell of it.

[gonvres]

11 minutes ago, Starelementpoke said:

They're saying that because time is money for them. They have to do it efficiently, they don't have the same amount of time to render.

To an extent, yes, but even if you put out daily content, a render of a moderate bitrate 1080p 20-30 minute video takes my system 30 minutes or less. 

 

If you're working with 4k, then everything gets a bit different. 

[Dargenfire]

13 minutes ago, PaintChips said:

Short videos(5-10 minutes) at >720p at 24-30 FPS can be done with most computers as old as a Core 2 Duo/PowerPC but once you start pushing the bit-rate, codec and 1080p you'll need at least an Ivy Bridge system if you expect 60 FPS.

Uhhh, that's not how rendering a video works.

 

An old Core 2 Duo will still be able to Render a 4K 60 FPS 1 Hour video with Cineform as the export codec, but it would take days to render.

 

Video rendering doesn't happen in real-time like games. The performance of a CPU doesn't determine how many FPS you can export your video at.

[PaintChips]

I'm not comparing FPS to games, in my experience once you start piling on higher quality codecs or aim at a certain frame-rate you'll need a faster processor or it'll take hours/days.

[AlTech]

10 minutes ago, PaintChips said:

Some YouTube creators are using software which may take advantage of Intel QuickSync or dGPU acceleration which can spank older systems by a noticeable margin.  Keep in mind there are also high-end YTers who use effects/audio leveling or plug-ins which requires more CPU power so they want CPU level performance than a lossy Intel QuickSync encoded video.

 

Short videos(5-10 minutes) at >720p at 24-30 FPS can be done with most computers as old as a Core 2 Duo/PowerPC but once you start pushing the bit-rate, codec and 1080p you'll need at least an Ivy Bridge system if you expect 60 FPS.  (I've done video editing on PowerPC G4 & G5 systems before, even used acceleration cards and USB H.264 dongles)

 

...I upgraded my HTPC from an i3 6100 to an i7 6700 to process stuff during the workday, while I rarely post stuff on YT/Vimeo or co-produce stuff that extra boost helps than tying down my workstation.

I'm using my Haswell Quad Core i5 and usually do 1080p60.

 

But I've recently noticed that when recording the video above 7Mbit, the preview skips frames and the final video looks bad.

 

Is there a way to fix that?

[Clanscorpia]

8 minutes ago, PaintChips said:

I'm not comparing FPS to games, in my experience once you start piling on higher quality codecs or aim at a certain frame-rate you'll need a faster processor or it'll take hours/days.

That doesnt mean it wont do it

[vanished]

1 hour ago, Dargenfire said:

Hmm. That's definitely some anomalous behaviour right there. Have you tried sending the job to Media Encoder instead?

You were really on to something with this... I tried again in Premiere with settings that should have been a walk in the park compared to by initial config, and yet, it didn't seem to be going much faster.  I'm now trying again with Media Encoder with something still resembling my original settings and it's moving at a much higher speed... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Dargenfire]

14 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

You were really on to something with this... I tried again in Premiere with settings that should have been a walk in the park compared to by initial config, and yet, it didn't seem to be going much faster.  I'm now trying again with Media Encoder with something still resembling my original settings and it's moving at a much higher speed... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Despite Premiere, After Effects and Media Encoder all using the same rendering engine, I've found Premiere and After Effects to do some weird things in the past with oddly corrupted exports or bad colour distortion (albeit very infrequently).

 

I've never had a problem with Media Encoder and I suspect that more effort has been put into its stability, since it's sole purpose is being a transcoding program.