$1000 to spend on a fast video encoding machine "Need Help"

[NDENT2003]

What will you get if you was me ? I need this to be really fast at encoding stuff.I also need it to have a large amount of hd space & a moniter/mouse & keyboard.I'll also like to get everything in a silver color & need it to be able to handle being on about 20hrs aday.

Thanks in advance.

P.S. I'll be buying all my parts from newegg or zipfly or whatever its called lol.

Acouple of other things - i'll not be doing anytype of game playing on this unit so no need for a high end video card.I'm just using this machine to convert files suck as mpeg to dvd & using programs like Ulead & Tmpgenc.

 

[lameaway]

Antec SLK3700AMB silver case with 350W PS - $65
NEC/Mitsubishi FE770 17" Flat CRT - $139
AOpen 865G P4 mobo with integrated video, audio, SATA RAID - $143
1GB (2x512) DDR400 RAM - $160
2x80GB SATA hard drives in RAID 0 - $160
Pentium 4 2.8C - $214
NEC 4x DVD+/-RW drive - $142
AOpen Keyboard and Optical Wheel Mouse - $20

Total: $1000 on Newegg.com

 

[mcveigh]

well start with the HD you want. decidede on the size. 200GB is about $200.
I'd get a radeon 9600 non-pro

do you need a capture card or can you do it all through firewire?
Albatron K8T800-------------------------------$129
200GB WD--------------------------------------$179
AMD Athlon 64 3000+------------------------$215
CONNECT3D RADEON 9600 Video Card---$109
Corsair Valur Select Dual Channel (2x512)--$157
----------------------------------------------------------------
total --------------------------------------------$789

A little tight for a case, power supply, kb, mouse, , dvd burner, etc.

 

[NDENT2003]

AMD over Intel for video encoding ?

I've read everywhere that P4 is the way to go for encoding.I myself haven't try either so i don't know.I'm still on a AMD XP 1700.

 

[bluntman]

I bought a book for Pinnacle Movie Studio 8 and it suggests a Pentium 4 3.06GHz (which was probably the fastest processor at the time of writing), 512MB of RAM, Windows XP Pro, a video card from either ATI, nVidia or Matrox with at least 32MB of RAM, a Direct-X compatible sound card, dual hard drives (one for the system, at least 40GB and the other for video, at least 80GB), a firewire card, a DVD burner and a gigabit ethernet NIC.

The book was written in (early) 2003, so if I were building a video editing machine now go for the fastest P4 "C" CPU that you can afford (forget overclocking the thing because it will most likely crash while rendering - it did with me). I chose a P4 3.0GHz "C", an Asus P4C-800 Deluxe motherboard and 1GB of RAM. Although Pinnacle Movie Studio 8 doesn't support hyperthreading, other, more advanced video editing software might (Adobe Premiere, maybe). As for the hard drives go, SATA is a good choice, SCSI may be overkill, but I personally don't think RAID is worth the hassle. I have two Maxtor Diamond Max 9 160GB drives connected to a Promise TX2-133 controller (along with two 40GB drives - a Maxtor and WD) and I have never had a problem capturing video. Let me rephrase that, I've never had a problem capturing DIGITAL video (no skipped frames). Capturing analog video I lost about 1 frame of video per minute of video, not too bad.

Unfortunately, your hardware can only take you so far. The task that takes up most of your time will be rendering of the video. Depending on the software/codec that is chosen and how complicated your video is, your computer can spend anywhere from 2 hours to 2 days to render, choose your software wisely.

In addition to the computer components, you should also add some sort of video editing software controller. I chose a jogdial called the Shuttle Express (from Contour Designs). The also have a more robust controller called the Shuttle Pro v2, but controllers are supported by the more popular video editing suites (Adobe Premiere, Pinnacle Studio 8, but not the Ulead products). You can also buy keyboards that are strictly used for video editing with colour coded keys for each specific function. Either way, these controllers can only help with your video editing chores.

 

[Ikonomi]

Originally posted by: NDENT2003
AMD over Intel for video encoding ?

I've read everywhere that P4 is the way to go for encoding.I myself haven't try either so i don't know.I'm still on a AMD XP 1700.

I'd say that was true up until the release of AMD's 64 bit CPUs. The Athlon 64s burn at just about everything, and Socket 754 would seem to have a very open future with regards to upgrades. Look up some Athlon 64 encoding benchmarks and see for yourself what you think of the 64/P4 comparisons.

 

[tallman45]

With video editing your disk subsystem is key to your performance. Want it to fly, they get a single drive for your OS/Apps, a large one for archiving your work and a Raid 0 for work in progress

 

[NDENT2003]

TTT

 

[NDENT2003]

TTT

 

[NDENT2003]

Can i get more input on like what's the fastest HD i should get etc.

Thanks

 

[FishTankX]

10KRPM Second Gen raptor would be one of the fastest.

If you don't want to go for that, go for the 250GB hitachi, the newest one. It cooks. Fastest 7200 RPM drive in existance.

You still really need 2 drives for video. One to render from and one to render to, if you're doing that kind of work.

So if I were you I would get 2 IDE drives, one for video being worked on, one for rending to, and an OS drive (first generation raptor is definatley a good pick.)

The WD1200JB's are still the value drive in terms of price/performance/capacity..

 

[NDENT2003]

Originally posted by: FishTankX
10KRPM Second Gen raptor would be one of the fastest.

If you don't want to go for that, go for the 250GB hitachi, the newest one. It cooks. Fastest 7200 RPM drive in existance.

You still really need 2 drives for video. One to render from and one to render to, if you're doing that kind of work.

So if I were you I would get 2 IDE drives, one for video being worked on, one for rending to, and an OS drive (first generation raptor is definatley a good pick.)

The WD1200JB's are still the value drive in terms of price/performance/capacity..

So your saying to get 3 hd's in total ? One that will run my OS system with all my appz,another that my files will be stored on & another to save me files to ?

I'll be encoding mpeg files to mpeg2 dvds.I'm not doing anytype of capturing or stuff like that.

 

[FishTankX]

It'll probably be faster if you keep the source file and the destination file on different drives. But if you're not capturing, a faster CPU will probably be more crucial. In that case, a P4 2.6C or 2.8C will probably give you the best/performance because the P4's have superior SSE2 implementation (The Athlon64 gains far less when activating SSE2) and most if not all encoding software is P4 optimized.

 

[FishTankX]

P.S. If you can afford it, you can run 2 P4 Xeon's on some POS 14 inch monitor, and run 2 encode jobs at once. Each encode job will fall on a CPU, so you'll have 2 encode jobs running at full speed.

Also: The title of the thread is minorly misleading. You're doing video transcoding, probably not too much editing.

 

[NDENT2003]

Originally posted by: FishTankX
P.S. If you can afford it, you can run 2 P4 Xeon's on some POS 14 inch monitor, and run 2 encode jobs at once. Each encode job will fall on a CPU, so you'll have 2 encode jobs running at full speed.

Also: The title of the thread is minorly misleading. You're doing video transcoding, probably not too much editing.

If you was me lets say with a $1000 budget what machine will you build ?

CPU
RAM
MOBO
HD
CASE & other stuff needed.

I haven't gotting as much help on which parts to get as i thought i would.

 

[NDENT2003]

P.S. I might up my budget to get get some speakers like these -

http://www.newegg.com/app/Showimage.asp?image=36-119-104-02.jpg

& a LCD with a tv tuner such as the new ones they sell at Dell.

So right now here's what i'm gonna get -

P4 2.6C or P4 2.8C onless i find a used P4 3.0C + on fs setcion.Also i'm gonna go with 2 Pioneer DVD burners if i can use both at the same time.

 

[NDENT2003]

TTT

 

[bob4432]

2 dvd burners? are you going to rip/sell movies? honestly i would get pioneer burners. i have a a06 burner and 106 rom and both are drives but they are slow as hell at everything else. seek time is slow, transfer is slow. i would look into liteon.

 

[bluntman]

OK, my bad, I think I know what you want to do now.

Might I suggest a P4 2.8C Northwood CPU (best bang for the buck right now and supposedly highly overclockable), an Asus P4P-800 mobo or any 865 chipset based motherboard, 2x256MB OCZ PC-3200 RAM, the Pioneer DVD burners are a good choice (for media compatibility) but you'd have to see if the burning software will allow you to burn to both drives at the same time - I know previous versions Nero allowed this for CD burning. You'd also need a good fast DVD-ROM drive, something like a Lite-On 1165 (I believe). Two 80GB SATA drives, I personally would put them in a RAID configuration or a couple of the newest Raptor drives.

 

[FishTankX]

Also.. if you want dual... I would get the

Asus PC-DL Deluxe (Avaliable at new egg for about 215$) (Serial ATA RAID gigabit LAN...)
2 Xeon 2.66's HT's (280$ each at new egg)
512MB of RAM (2X DDR 266 would match the buss perfectly, you could get 2XDDR333, even better. Or just go for 400.)
Probably a diamond max 160 or a WD1200JBSE (Still the best value in the industry. )
Whatever videocard/soundcard you want

And... whatever case you want.

This'll let you run 2 encode jobs at the same time, both going full speed. And on 2.66's, I imagine they'll go pretty damn fast. With 4 virtual CPU's I imagine the workload will be split pretty evenly.

P.S. You might need Windows XP Pro to pull this off...

(If you're going LCD, a Geforce4MX 420 would be sufficent.. if you can find one with DVI.)

 

[FishTankX]

Originally posted by: bluntman
OK, my bad, I think I know what you want to do now.

Might I suggest a P4 2.8C Northwood CPU (best bang for the buck right now and supposedly highly overclockable), an Asus P4P-800 mobo or any 865 chipset based motherboard, 2x256MB OCZ PC-3200 RAM, the Pioneer DVD burners are a good choice (for media compatibility) but you'd have to see if the burning software will allow you to burn to both drives at the same time - I know previous versions Nero allowed this for CD burning. You'd also need a good fast DVD-ROM drive, something like a Lite-On 1165 (I believe). Two 80GB SATA drives, I personally would put them in a RAID configuration or a couple of the newest Raptor drives.

For just transcoding videos, RAID is a little extreme, no?

RAID 0 makes no sense. RAID1 eats up space.

 

[NDENT2003]

Now the ideas are coming along.

Thanks guys

 

[Vette73]

For a CPU I think the Athlon 64+ would be the best bang for your buck.
As for a board I would get a Albatron K8X800. It has everthing you will need and a TRUE hardware soundcard onboard, VIA Envy
And of course has built in SATA Raid. Pair up a couple Raptor's (or even a pair of 160gig drives)

 

[beatle]

Yes, transcoding has very little to do with disk speed. You really only need disk speed when demuxing/remuxing or editing. Other than that, it's all on the CPU. You don't even need a lot of ram to transcode. 512 megs is more than enough for that.

 

[FishTankX]

Do me a favor.

Go to tomshardware and look at their Athlon64 benchmarks. It shows the P4 2.6C only a *little* behind the Athlon64 3200+ in DV to MPEG-2 encoding.. Do yourself a favor and get a P4 or 2 Xeon's for simultaneous encodes.