New PC or Upgrade?

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BenSwindon

New Member
Good evening all, I’m so confused looking at what I need for video editing so have come here hoping some experts can help me. So I have a Mavic Air drone that shoots in 4K and a go pro Hero 7. I’m planning on editing the video from both. I’m finding that playback on my current desktop is slow and jittery and that importing video is very very slow.

I have a 2 year old desktop with Intel i7 4790 @ 3.6GHz. It has a 2tb HDD. The ram is 16gb ddr3. The system is telling me that 2 of 4 slots are being used. Graphics card is NVIDIA GeForce GTX 745.

So my dilemma. Do I buy new components to upgrade or buy a new PC. As is always the case, I want to keep costs as low as possible, but was looking at 16gb DDR4 and an intel i7 9700 as well as a new SSD. Not really sure about graphics card. Should I consider an AMD processor instead? Pretty confident that I can put it all together, but do I also need to upgrade the motherboard?

Very grateful for any advice you can all offer.

Ben.
 
AlienMenace

AlienMenace

Well-Known Member
If you wanted to go with AMD, this is what might go with. https://pcpartpicker.com/list/B8vM7W
a little less expensive than a Threadripper.
But your system isn't really that bad. Do you have you're OS on that 2tb HD? If so, I would put a 500gb SSD (like a Samsung 960 EVO) in it to use your OS and your video software, and all else would go on to your 2tb HD. Boost your ram to 32gb and maybe a little better video card. You really want to use 6 cores and above tho.
 
Shlouski

Shlouski

VIP Member
The reason for your poor 4k playback is due a lack of hardware acceleration, so your cpu is having to decode the video the hard way. A cpu upgrade is not needed, upgrade your gpu to a 10 series or later Nvidia card, or a rx series or later AMD card, this will give you h.265 and 4k hardware acceleration.

Heres my old AMD phenom playing 4k, it can do so because of the rx460:
 
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diypartsjoy

diypartsjoy

Member
mtb211

mtb211

Active Member
That CPU is pretty beefy. I think the issue might be with your graphics card. I would upgrade that and you should see a good performance upgrade. I would try that first before putting money into an entire build. If you upgrade to a newer graphics card and you do not get the performance you want then you would not be wasting the upgrade and you can put it into a new rig.

Hope that helps. Have a great day
 
C

creatoer

New Member
Agreed with mtb211, upgrading your graphic card will probably make some very good results for you for a relatively low price
 
ssal

ssal

Active Member
BenSwindon said:
Good evening all, I’m so confused looking at what I need for video editing so have come here hoping some experts can help me. So I have a Mavic Air drone that shoots in 4K and a go pro Hero 7. I’m planning on editing the video from both. I’m finding that playback on my current desktop is slow and jittery and that importing video is very very slow.

I have a 2 year old desktop with Intel i7 4790 @ 3.6GHz. It has a 2tb HDD. The ram is 16gb ddr3. The system is telling me that 2 of 4 slots are being used. Graphics card is NVIDIA GeForce GTX 745.

So my dilemma. Do I buy new components to upgrade or buy a new PC. As is always the case, I want to keep costs as low as possible, but was looking at 16gb DDR4 and an intel i7 9700 as well as a new SSD. Not really sure about graphics card. Should I consider an AMD processor instead? Pretty confident that I can put it all together, but do I also need to upgrade the motherboard?

Very grateful for any advice you can all offer.

Ben.
Click to expand...
I myself am a serious video hobbyist shooting 4K videos. I have two i7 3rd generation Quad core laptops which I run Premiere Pro to edit my video. I was very frustrated with the playback (in the source, and timeline monitors) because it kept dropping frame and was very choppy. The JKL functions was close to useless. I could not get a precision point to trim my clips.

I lurked around here and in another video forum about building a desktop to edit my video. I came very close to pulling the trigger. But as I learned more about building my own machine, I was educated on some elements of video editing that I was not familiar with. Before I learned that, I was under the impression that what matter most in video editing is the graphic card, the cpu and the speed of the ram (DDR4). Then I learned about the problem with H.264 which most of the DSLR or pro/consumer grade video camera use. I learned that in playback (in editing), it is the read speed of the storage media that trumps it all. GPU and CPU matters not as much. The DDR4, as long as there is 12 to 16 gb, matters less. The most important part is your drive which the computer needs to access extensively frequent to get the data. I also learned that SATA SSD is about 5x faster than HHD. And PCIe SSD is another 6-7x faster SATA SSD. The singular element that would improve playback is, yes, you guess it, the PCIe SSD. So I changed my spec to the new build to a 500 gb PCIe SSD (I avoid the 1 gb because I don't want the image of the system to be too large. I just want to have a temporary active Premiere Pro project folder.)

Unfortunately, my laptops are too old to accommodate the PCIe. But along that same line of thinking, I freed up 300 gb of space on my SSD and experiment with the active Premiere Pro project from there. It was a big improvement. I can now playback smoothly in the source and timeline monitors and the JKL works the way it should. I have put my build on hold for now.

Long story short, I would suggest trying a 500gb or 1tb PCIe SSD (get a fast read one) first before doing anything drastic. Maybe that's all you'd need.

Do come back here and post some follow up so we know.
 
Shlouski

Shlouski

VIP Member
The last time I tried editing a few 4k videos was with Premiere Pro 2017 and playback was choppy even with a gpu that supported 4k h.265 hardware acceleration, so I ended up using my gaming pc with a cpu that could handle it. From what I understand Premiere Pro can only use hardware accerleration for a few things and playback doesn't seem to be one of them, I even ran the Mercury Playback test files to confirm that the gpu hardware acceleration was working correctly, which it was.

ssal said:
I myself am a serious video hobbyist shooting 4K videos. I have two i7 3rd generation Quad core laptops which I run Premiere Pro to edit my video. I was very frustrated with the playback (in the source, and timeline monitors) because it kept dropping frame and was very choppy. The JKL functions was close to useless. I could not get a precision point to trim my clips.

I lurked around here and in another video forum about building a desktop to edit my video. I came very close to pulling the trigger. But as I learned more about building my own machine, I was educated on some elements of video editing that I was not familiar with. Before I learned that, I was under the impression that what matter most in video editing is the graphic card, the cpu and the speed of the ram (DDR4). Then I learned about the problem with H.264 which most of the DSLR or pro/consumer grade video camera use. I learned that in playback (in editing), it is the read speed of the storage media that trumps it all. GPU and CPU matters not as much. The DDR4, as long as there is 12 to 16 gb, matters less. The most important part is your drive which the computer needs to access extensively frequent to get the data. I also learned that SATA SSD is about 5x faster than HHD. And PCIe SSD is another 6-7x faster SATA SSD. The singular element that would improve playback is, yes, you guess it, the PCIe SSD. So I changed my spec to the new build to a 500 gb PCIe SSD (I avoid the 1 gb because I don't want the image of the system to be too large. I just want to have a temporary active Premiere Pro project folder.)

Unfortunately, my laptops are too old to accommodate the PCIe. But along that same line of thinking, I freed up 300 gb of space on my SSD and experiment with the active Premiere Pro project from there. It was a big improvement. I can now playback smoothly in the source and timeline monitors and the JKL works the way it should. I have put my build on hold for now.

Long story short, I would suggest trying a 500gb or 1tb PCIe SSD (get a fast read one) first before doing anything drastic. Maybe that's all you'd need.

Do come back here and post some follow up so we know.
Click to expand...

I think I need to clear up a few things here.

Most modern HDD's can read at 100+ megabytes per second, which is way faster than most 4k content would need to play correctly, personally I can play 4k hdr h.265 files over a 5ghz wireless connection from a file server using usb external hdd's. I do know there is a workaround in premiere pro where by you can create proxies, is this what you are doing Ssal? maybe they require faster reads to work correctly, I don't know as I have never used this feature, but I'm guessing the main reason why people choose to use faster ssd's or nvme's is simply due to the large file sizes.
If you are unable to use hardware accerleration, from either the cpu or gpu, this means the task of decoding the video will fall to the cpu and 4k videos require a lot number crunching and lag for any cpu that can't handle it.
 
ssal

ssal

Active Member
Shlouski said:
The last time I tried editing a few 4k videos was with Premiere Pro 2017 and playback was choppy even with a gpu that supported 4k h.265 hardware acceleration, so I ended up using my gaming pc with a cpu that could handle it. From what I understand Premiere Pro can only use hardware accerleration for a few things and playback doesn't seem to be one of them, I even ran the Mercury Playback test files to confirm that the gpu hardware acceleration was working correctly, which it was.



I think I need to clear up a few things here.

Most modern HDD's can read at 100+ megabytes per second, which is way faster than most 4k content would need to play correctly, personally I can play 4k hdr h.265 files over a 5ghz wireless connection from a file server using usb external hdd's. I do know there is a workaround in premiere pro where by you can create proxies, is this what you are doing Ssal? maybe they require faster reads to work correctly, I don't know as I have never used this feature, but I'm guessing the main reason why people choose to use faster ssd's or nvme's is simply due to the large file sizes.
If you are unable to use hardware accerleration, from either the cpu or gpu, this means the task of decoding the video will fall to the cpu and 4k videos require a lot number crunching and lag for any cpu that can't handle it.
Click to expand...
Playing a 4K video with a media player like VLC or PotPlayer is one thing. Editing 4K H.264 clips in Premiere Pro involves constant scrubbing the video in either source or timeline windows. My 5 year old laptop with 3rd generation QM Quadcore cpu has no problem playing back video with Potplayer for my enjoyment. My machine has a very low end Intel HD4000 which I can not modify. My 7200 rpm HHD has a test read speed of 90 Mbps. Again, I have no problem playing the video.
But editing the H.264 footage is another thing. Even when I transcoded and edited in proxy, it was still unbearable choppy. The drop frame indicator is yellow. I couldn't get smooth scrubbing or JKL.
I recently moved the active project to my SSD which tested at 520 Mbps and did a few 4K H.264 project. I was able to edit without using proxy. But I was limited in playback and reverse at 1x speed. There is some drop frame when I scrub faster, but it is workable. The choppiness is gone.
 
Shlouski

Shlouski

VIP Member
ssal said:
Playing a 4K video with a media player like VLC or PotPlayer is one thing. Editing 4K H.264 clips in Premiere Pro involves constant scrubbing the video in either source or timeline windows. My 5 year old laptop with 3rd generation QM Quadcore cpu has no problem playing back video with Potplayer for my enjoyment. My machine has a very low end Intel HD4000 which I can not modify. My 7200 rpm HHD has a test read speed of 90 Mbps. Again, I have no problem playing the video.
But editing the H.264 footage is another thing. Even when I transcoded and edited in proxy, it was still unbearable choppy. The drop frame indicator is yellow. I couldn't get smooth scrubbing or JKL.
I recently moved the active project to my SSD which tested at 520 Mbps and did a few 4K H.264 project. I was able to edit without using proxy. But I was limited in playback and reverse at 1x speed. There is some drop frame when I scrub faster, but it is workable. The choppiness is gone.
Click to expand...
​

The HD4000 igpu has hardware acceleration for 4k h.264 built in, so this is why media players like vlc which support gpu hardware acceleration can playback your 4k videos without a problem. If you were to download a 4k h.265 sample video (which are easy to get), and try playing that with Potplayer you would find that the playback would stutter like crazy, this is because the hd400 doesn't support h.265 acceleration.
I have used other editing software which unlike Premiere Pro do support gpu hardware acceleration and are able to playback and edit 4k videos without a problem, I'm sure adobe have their reasons for not being able to use gpu hardware acceleration in the playback and this is the reason why your videos are choppy and why you are having to make proxies. As I stated I don't know the ins and outs about how the proxies work, it might be that they need faster drives, but instead I changed to a PC with a cpu which could handle 4k decoding so I didn't need to use proxies.
I wanted to clear this up because you where saying that cpu and gpu performance didn't matter as much as drive performance which isn't true, the reason you are having to use this workaround is because your cpu cant handle 4k decoding. If I were to build a PC around Premiere Pro then cpu would be number 1, a new ryzen would be a great choice, then a gpu would be second and third would be storage, as long as you have enough ram.

How large are these files? I would imagine that Premiere Pro would load as much as possible into your ram anyway, which would also take a lot of pressure off the drive. I will test a file larger than my ram capacity can and see if this has any impact on performance.
 
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ssal

ssal

Active Member
I don't have any problem playing back 4K video in potplayer or VLC. I am talking about JKL and scrubbing 4K H.264 footages in Premiere Pro.
I was having real problem when I loaded the project from my 7200 rpm HHD. Choppy as hell which made it no fun.
After learning more about H.264 and the way NLE works, I load my project from the SSD. I am able to have fun editing the video even without transcoding to proxy.
The OP seems to have a decent machine. Instead of rebuilding it with faster CPU, GPU and DR4, I'd suggest trying out an internal SSD. If the machine can accommodate a PCIe, that would be even better. That's a lot less painful than building a new machine.
My comment is based on Premiere Pro. I have a hell of a time with Davinci Resolve because it is a lot more graphic and cpu demanding.
 
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Shlouski

Shlouski

VIP Member
ssal said:
I don't have any problem playing back 4K video in potplayer or VLC.
Click to expand...

As I explained this is because of hardware acceleration, you can playback h.264 4k just fine with little cpu usage, but you wouldn't be able to playback h.265 4k because the hd4000 doesn't support it, I have a few computers with the hd4000 igpu so I know. I'm just trying to show you how hardware acceleration is working on your computer.

ssal said:
I am talking about JKL and scrubbing 4K H.264 footages in Premiere Pro.
Click to expand...

This is my internet PC: i3 7100, 16gb ram, 2x samsung ssd's in raid with 1000+ megabytes per second read speeds, RX 470 8gb. This PC struggles and stutters with 4k footage in Premiere Pro.

My Retired gaming PC: i7 3770k, 32gb ram, 7200 hdd, gtx 980ti. This PC can playback 4k as smooth as butter in Premiere Pro without any issues.

Last night I used ramdisk on my retired gaming PC to eat up 28gb of that ram and windows was using another 2gb+, this left the PC with just under 2gb of ram free. I imported a 8gb 4k h.264 video into Premiere Pro from my server and I saw 31.9gb usage and an increase in paging file size, so the ram was max out and now the PC is using the hdd as ram, even in this situation when the hdd is being hit hard the playback in Premiere Pro was still as smooth as silk. After this I tested the computer with around 16gb of ram available and made a ramdisk out of the rest with faster than ssd read speeds, but I underclocked the cpu, this resulted in stuttering 4k playback in Premiere Pro. This proves that Premiere Pro only cares about raw cpu performance when it comes to playback.

ssal said:
I was having real problem when I loaded the project from my 7200 rpm HHD
Click to expand...

Is this drive almost full and have you tried defraging it? or maybe there is something wrong with it. I ask this because a normally functioning 7200 hdd is clear capable of delivering 4k media to Premiere Pro without issues.
 
ssal

ssal

Active Member
The HHD was about 2/3 full with 350gb free space.
Have you tried strictly using a high speed SSD and see if stutter with H.264 in Premiere Pro?

Since I made the change, I have edited 3 4K videos in the SSD. The last one I didn't even bother to transcode because I was able to do JKL an scrubbing smoothly.
 
ssal

ssal

Active Member
I also find using the global effect mute when playing back the timeline is a good practice. It allows me to see the movement without the effect burdening it.
 
Shlouski

Shlouski

VIP Member
ssal said:
Have you tried strictly using a high speed SSD and see if stutter with H.264 in Premiere Pro?
Click to expand...

No, on the i7 3770k pc I was using a ramdisk and not an ssd to save time, but the ramdisk should perform much better than an ssd.

I will run some benchmarks now and upload the results.

What I cant do is hevc h.265 4k hdr playback, just for the hell of it I tried playing back such a video in Premiere Pro and my cpu was hitting 100%, but it does smooth out a little over time, it seems even a i7 8700k @ 5.1, an nvme, 64gb ram and a 1080 isn't enough :eek:, I bet a ryzen 2700x would just be able to do it.
 
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