Building a $1,500 PC For Video Editing

If you are considering the DIY approach to building yourself a PC workstation that can handle your modern video editing needs, take a look at the article below. From soup to nuts, this article will help you sort out every piece of the DIY process. It's a big task, but worth a read even if you are not planning a do-it-yourself build and just want guidance on what to look for in 2018. From editstock.com

CPU Needs

Like it or not a lot of software including Adobe Premiere, doesn’t scale well with dual CPUs (not to be confused with a single CPU’s core count). With modern CPUs reaching high core counts (like the 7900x) while keeping respectable clock speeds, dual CPUs aren’t always advantageous for video editing tasks. This is true even for 4K workflows as this article explains.

Intel Xeon CPUs are often marketed to support two things: dual CPUs and ECC Memory. As we’ve mentioned Dual CPUs aren’t necessary, but what about ECC Memory? ECC Memory is short for Error Correcting Code Memory. In appearance and most functions this is the same RAM any computer uses, however ECC Memory is designed to detect and correct data corruption, really cool stuff. It sounds great on paper, but the type of errors we are dealing with only affect programs related to financial computing, or precise instruments for scientific research, not video editing. For this reason, ECC Memory is unnecessary for Video Editing, not to mention expensive. Using Xeon CPU’s severely limits your motherboard options, and consequently RAM choices.

RAM Needs

If you’re editing mostly 1080p footage promos with little to no compositing effects work you can easily work with 16GB of RAM. However, if you work on longer videos (feature length films for example), or create a lot of visual effects, I would recommend a minimum of 32GB. If you’re editing and compositing 4K footage then 32GB will be enough most of the time. If you're working exclusively with 4K or even larger frame sizes then I recommend at least 64GB of RAM....[continue reading]