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Competent computer for extraction, processing, etc.

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Peoples-Exec

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My apologies if this is covered somewhere and I missed it.

In the past everything to do with video and audio seemed to be depending on the computers ability to accurately capture and process everything to start with. If you wanted synced audio it was a challenge to get it without an interruption etc. Today it seems everything is focused on the software. I am presuming this means that current coding for buffering is considerably smarter?

Anyway, if you have a recommendation on min power I am all about it. I had a more powerful PC but it rekt itself and now I may have to look at what can replace it if my current baby NUC computer is insufficient.

Let me have it, how do I get where I need to be to pull from my own personal physical copy to make my personal edit for myself.
 
I use an i7 8th gen Windows PC with 16gb of RAM an SSD for the OS and external USB 3.0 drives for files. It runs things really smoothly. I use Vegas Pro Edit 18 for software and rip using MakeMKV, and prep files using tsMuxer and Audacity.
 
That is a big step up in CPU from my N5105 Celeron, but good to know that something that is not SOTA does well.
 
Peoples-Exec said:
That is a big step up in CPU from my N5105 Celeron, but good to know that something that is not SOTA does well.
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My previous rig was a 4th gen i7 with 16gb of ram and it struggled with full HD video. You'll most likely need at least a 6th Gen i7 or equivalent and 16gb of ram to edit smoothly. You can find used rigs for a couple hundred dollars on good days in the states.
 
I suspect that the part you'll want to focus on most is the graphics card, depending on what format you want to encode. For me if I'm doing x264 it's quite fast since my card supports that, but if I do x265 or something else that my card doesn't support it takes 6-12x longer for the same file. It can be the difference between encoding a 1.5hr file at 2x (45 minutes) or 0.15x (10 hours). And I have a decent cpu and plenty of ram, so I put it all down to whether it can use the graphics card to encode or not.

Edit: oh and cards also have specific resolutions they support for encoding, so you might support x264 at 1080p but not 4k, so make sure if you want 4k your card supports that in the codec you want too.
 
I am glad I was able to hang onto my A770 then as I've read it is pretty good at encoding.

However I am not sure if it does 4k, so I guess I will have to figure that out.
 
unfair said:
I suspect that the part you'll want to focus on most is the graphics card, depending on what format you want to encode. For me if I'm doing x264 it's quite fast since my card supports that, but if I do x265 or something else that my card doesn't support it takes 6-12x longer for the same file. It can be the difference between encoding a 1.5hr file at 2x (45 minutes) or 0.15x (10 hours). And I have a decent cpu and plenty of ram, so I put it all down to whether it can use the graphics card to encode or not.

Edit: oh and cards also have specific resolutions they support for encoding, so you might support x264 at 1080p but not 4k, so make sure if you want 4k your card supports that in the codec you want too.
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I would not recommend a graphics card. Nvenc is not as good as CPU encoding. The output quality is inferior. The intended use case for nvenc is streaming, snce it can be very fast and efficient, but it is not intended for high quality encodes that is our typical use case.

it may be the best option for your current hardware but if building a new machine and buying new components, a good CPU is the priority without a doubt. Large, fast hard drives is a bonus.
 
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tremault said:
Nvenc is not as good as CPU encoding. The output quality is inferior. The intended use case for nvenc is streaming
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The speeds I cited above are using the libx264 and libx265 codecs in ffmpeg, not the nvenc codec variants. I had assumed they were offloading to the gpu based on the speed difference but I did some tests and apparently that's not the case (the _nvenc variants obviously do use the gpu as expected, and are 8x speed for 264 rather than the 2x I cited above).

It looks like ffmpeg x265 does use all my cores at 100% but must just be a far slower algorithm since it runs at 0.8x rather than 2x, but the VP9 is so slow because it doesn't even max out the CPU, although if you're doing a TV series you could run four VP9 encodes simultaneously to speed up the process.

Not sure if Premiere gpu encoding uses nvenc or not, I can't tell the quality difference between cpu and gpu encoding on that because the output from direct premiere mp4 encoding is pretty crap size/quality ratio either way.

So I guess my revised advice is to look up benchmarks for cpus for the codec you plan to use, rather than the graphics card:
https://openbenchmarking.org/test/pts/x264

x265 Benchmark - OpenBenchmarking.org

openbenchmarking.org openbenchmarking.org
 
I'm not an expert on it, but I think the individual gpu cores are incredibly weak compared to a cpu. I think encoding is a largely linear process so needs to run in a single thread. Splitting up the process into separate threads may mean that one hand doesn't know what the other is doing, times a thousand. This could result in an image that is partitioned by nature so the motion vectors don't get efficiently tracked across the entire image? I'm spitballing here of course, based on what I do know, but I could have it all wrong. I am not familiar with Premier, does it have powerful encoding tech that other software doesn't?

Sorry I'm going a little off topic...
^ yes benchmarks is great advice.
 
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