Buying a video-encoding rig...

[Entity]

Background Info:

About a month ago I launched a company that distributes videos over the web (screencasts) in a multitude of formats. We use Camtasia to record screencasts and, from there, produce to WMV, MP4, and iPod (also MP4 but smaller resolution) using MediaCoder.

For a variety of reasons we're looking to host a Windows server in a location that will be remote to me, though I won't entirely be removed from being able to maintain it (it's going to be hosted at a friend's house on his lucky-ass FIOS 20mb/20mb connection), and the computer will be responsible for the bulk of our transcoding and uploading to Amazon's S3.

Basically, I'm looking for what can give me the most bang for the buck in terms of this sort of setup. My friend has room for one computer, for now, so I can't build two computers and distribute the jobs across them. We're looking to spend around $3k or less and have something that will be a viable solution for a while, at the very least; the computer will run Camtasia (to load project files and produce them in WMV) and MediaCoder (to transcode the WMVs into MP4/x264 and iPod formats).

From what I can tell, Video transcoding seems to put a lot of stress on CPU, then HD performance (??), then memory, so I've been looking at buying a refurb dell 5400 workstation for $2700 and putting another $300 worth of storage (1tb) into it, configuring it as such:

Precision T5400
Quad-Core Xeon 3000
4gb RAM
160 GB SATA Hard Drive DataBurst(10K RPM) - main encoding drive
Secondary Drive - Unknown, probably 750GB-1TB "backup" storage drive.
Video - 256MB PCIe x16 nVidia Quadro FX570, Dual Monitor DVI Capable
MiniTower Chassis

The video card doesn't seem particularly important to me here, though I'm not 100% certain of this. The total for this setup is $2639 + the cost of the secondary HD which I'd add on my own.

It'd be nice to get up and running soon and I like that this comes with a 3yr warranty, but I'm wondering if for this sort of setup I'm spending some $$ in the wrong places and not emphasizing enough in other areas. The computer will be running Windows XP, probably just 32-bit since I've never had a ton of luck with lots of programs on the 64-bit version...

Anyone have advice/comments on this? I'd really appreciate it since I feel like I'm a bit in the dark when it comes to encoding speeds.

Rob

 

[bendixG15]

ttt

 

[krnmastersgt]

Isn't a lot of the money being wasted on the quadro? It's a card designed for CAD and 3D rendering and the like, costs quite a bit too.

 

[Entity]

Originally posted by: krnmastersgt
Isn't a lot of the money being wasted on the quadro? It's a card designed for CAD and 3D rendering and the like, costs quite a bit too.

It's one of their pre-built refurb machines, so I don't get a choice of the video card, but you very well might be right.

Rob

 

[Ika]

I honestly don't think the computer's worth half it's price in specs. If you're willing to build your own machine, you could save at least a thousand bucks. Is that an option?

 

[DSF]

Are you comfortable building a computer yourself? It doesn't seem to me like this is a machine you need to spend that kind of money on.

 

[Entity]

Originally posted by: DSF
Are you comfortable building a computer yourself? It doesn't seem to me like this is a machine you need to spend that kind of money on.

Yeah, I've every computer I've owned, sans-one. Just that building it adds a lot of time and concerns over maintenance because I have to ship it from Seattle to NY (shipping it to one of my less tech-savvy business partner's offices) where it will run full time, so reliability is a HUGE concern. Speed and savings are also concerns, though.

Rob

 

[ForumMaster]

get a standard Mac Pro. they start at $2800 with 8 cores. you can lower it down to four, then use the money for more RAM and HDD. although i'd advise doing it by yourself. apple overcharges for upgrades. i know PC Magazine does this for their podcast i used to watch (DLTV) and it was succesful.

 

[Entity]

Originally posted by: ForumMaster
get a standard Mac Pro. they start at $2800 with 8 cores. you can lower it down to four, then use the money for more RAM and HDD. although i'd advise doing it by yourself. apple overcharges for upgrades. i know PC Magazine does this for their podcast i used to watch (DLTV) and it was succesful.

As much as I'd love a Mac Pro it's a bit of a waste in this instance because the machine is running Windows all the time, and I'm running it remotely.

K so definitely convinced that the Dell isn't the route to go, now I've got to figure out what to do in terms of building this up myself. $3k as a price tag...Dual Dual core Xeons? Dual quad core? Gah, so much to learn (again), so little time.

Rob

 

[ForumMaster]

Originally posted by: Entity

Originally posted by: ForumMaster
get a standard Mac Pro. they start at $2800 with 8 cores. you can lower it down to four, then use the money for more RAM and HDD. although i'd advise doing it by yourself. apple overcharges for upgrades. i know PC Magazine does this for their podcast i used to watch (DLTV) and it was succesful.

As much as I'd love a Mac Pro it's a bit of a waste in this instance because the machine is running Windows all the time, and I'm running it remotely.

K so definitely convinced that the Dell isn't the route to go, now I've got to figure out what to do in terms of building this up myself. $3k as a price tag...Dual Dual core Xeons? Dual quad core? Gah, so much to learn (again), so little time.

Rob

ahh, you do know that you can run windows on a mac, right?

 

[Entity]

Originally posted by: ForumMaster

Originally posted by: Entity

Originally posted by: ForumMaster
get a standard Mac Pro. they start at $2800 with 8 cores. you can lower it down to four, then use the money for more RAM and HDD. although i'd advise doing it by yourself. apple overcharges for upgrades. i know PC Magazine does this for their podcast i used to watch (DLTV) and it was succesful.

As much as I'd love a Mac Pro it's a bit of a waste in this instance because the machine is running Windows all the time, and I'm running it remotely.

K so definitely convinced that the Dell isn't the route to go, now I've got to figure out what to do in terms of building this up myself. $3k as a price tag...Dual Dual core Xeons? Dual quad core? Gah, so much to learn (again), so little time.

Rob

ahh, you do know that you can run windows on a mac, right?

Yeah, I have a MBP and love it, but I also know that their price is usually reflected in the fact that you can run Leopard and that you pay a little for awesome design. Since this is a more budget-operated initiative I'd rather let the company buy me a MBP that I can proudly use in my house, and spend less now on the server in a remote loc. Thx tho.

I'm looking at building a Dual quad-core Xeon right now -- I haven't found a ton but am trying to figure out how much performance increase I'll get with it on mediacoder vs. a single quad core.

Rob

 

[jkresh]

you should look at the recent skulltrail benchmarks to get an idea of dual quadcores vs single quad's. I suspect that you wont get that much of a performance boosting going to dual quads (unless you are transcoding more then 1 video at a time), but it will give you a little future proofing. If you are recoding screencasts in raw avi (ie no compression) then a raid array might be useful (depending on how you are recording it). If you do go raid, have a raid 0 just for what is currenlty being recorded (move it to another disk for transcoding), as the speed will be helpful but you don't want to risk loosing your data.

How long are the screencasts on average and what is the filesize before transcoding?

 

[Entity]

How long are the screencasts on average and what is the filesize before transcoding?

50-60 minutes at resolutions ranging from 800x600 to 1600x1200. We record in Camtasia which records in AVI using its screen capture codec (lossless), then convert to WMV. Then we batch the file into two conversions, one to MP4 and the other (for 800x600 videos) to Ipod. This is currently done about 10x/week.

Rob

 

[jkresh]

A raid 0 array for recording probably wouldn't hurt (but if you give a filesize and length for 1 example it might help with an exact calculation (figure out how many megs a second and you will know how taxing it is on a single drive), and I guess you could always use 1 quad core for the mp4 conversion and the other for the video ipod batch.

 

[gsellis]

You do not necessarily need RAID 0, but it can help with editing multiple tracks.

It is all processor, and some of the latest versions of transcoders/encoders do really well with many CPUs. I did see a Skulltrail review at Tom's (I know - I was just curious what they had screwed up - it was like a car crash curiousity) that showed Skulltrial really only kicked serious butt with encoders. But expect the CPUs for such to be $1k each and by the time you build one, it will be in the $4k range.

There are a couple server boards that do dual Xeon and with 2 quads, you can probably get in at $1.5k range for a good box. You can add a SCSI, eSATA, or Firewire 800 card for an external store too if so required.

If you are planning on buying some more software, you can probably get Gary at Videoguys to give you some recommendations that they have tested or have customers running.

At worst, you could get the Dell and eBay/Craigslist/AT deals the video card.

 

[drebo]

Here's a build using an ASUS Server Chassis that I've used before in a few servers and have had huge success with.

8 Core Workstation

$2501.89 as specced, which includes a nice, high-end Adaptec RAID card. The Adaptec RAID card will substantially increase disk performance over using the motherboard's onboard RAID, though it is not necessary to do RAID. I've also specced 4 500gb hard disks for a total of 1.5TB space in a RAID 5. The chassis has hot swappable drive bays for ease of management.

4gb RAM and 2x Xeon E5335 2.0ghz Quad Core processors.

May be out of your budget, but you're not going to find an 8-core workstation any cheaper.

 

[Entity]

Originally posted by: drebo
Here's a build using an ASUS Server Chassis that I've used before in a few servers and have had huge success with.

8 Core Workstation

$2501.89 as specced, which includes a nice, high-end Adaptec RAID card. The Adaptec RAID card will substantially increase disk performance over using the motherboard's onboard RAID, though it is not necessary to do RAID. I've also specced 4 500gb hard disks for a total of 1.5TB space in a RAID 5. The chassis has hot swappable drive bays for ease of management.

4gb RAM and 2x Xeon E5335 2.0ghz Quad Core processors.

May be out of your budget, but you're not going to find an 8-core workstation any cheaper.

Wow, thanks. I'm making a post in FS/T to see if anyone wants to part with a rig that would be comparable to this right now (it sucks but I'm busy enough that I'm not sure I want to build here in Seattle, test, then ship to NYC given how much time I have). But I'm saving this wishlist...very much appreciated.

Rob

 

[Entity]

Originally posted by: drebo
Here's a build using an ASUS Server Chassis that I've used before in a few servers and have had huge success with.

8 Core Workstation

$2501.89 as specced, which includes a nice, high-end Adaptec RAID card. The Adaptec RAID card will substantially increase disk performance over using the motherboard's onboard RAID, though it is not necessary to do RAID. I've also specced 4 500gb hard disks for a total of 1.5TB space in a RAID 5. The chassis has hot swappable drive bays for ease of management.

4gb RAM and 2x Xeon E5335 2.0ghz Quad Core processors.

May be out of your budget, but you're not going to find an 8-core workstation any cheaper.

Hey brebo,

I'm just about to buy more or less this whole rig (bumping up to 2.33ghz procs). Building right away, so getting the whole thing shipped overnight -- just curious from reading around in it, I couldn't tell if it came with necessary fans/etc., or if there were any other things I'd need to purchase to get it up and running (mostly fans stood out). I see that a video card is included in the server package, and I'm drawing blanks for anything else I'd need since it mostly seems included in the barebones server.

Anything that stands out, or just purchase, ship overnight, and gogogogogo?

thanks again for all the help
Rob

 

[heyheybooboo]

Does MediaCoder use all those (4 or 8?) cores ???

 

[Entity]

Originally posted by: heyheybooboo
Does MediaCoder use all those (4 or 8?) cores ???

Sure seems like it. Right now I seem to max it out when I run two instances of mediacoder x64 -- encoding one batch of MP4s and another of M4Vs at the same time.

Thanks for all the help guys. The system is rocking so far.

Rob